The Corporate Wishcasting Attack on Lina Khan

President Biden's enormously successful FTC with Lina Khan is under attack by the usual suspects, big business. They assume VP Harris will bend their way. IMO, they are in for a big and unhappy surprise.

Billionaires are hopeful that Kamala Harris will break from the FTC chair. But she’s part of an entire network of policymakers who are actually governing in Washington.

BY DAVID DAYEN JULY 26, 2024

The billionaires have come for Lina Khan.

On three occasions in the past two days, donors have taken to the media to either call for Khan to be fired from the Federal Trade Commission if Kamala Harris is elected president, or suggest that Harris differs from Khan on her approach to corporate power. Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn who also funds the centrist polling outfit Blueprint, told CNN that Khan is “waging war on American business” and that Harris should replace her. A bunch of anonymous donors told the Financial Times that Harris would in fact dump Khan, and another unnamed donor said in The New York Times that Harris “has expressed skepticism of Ms. Khan’s expansive view of antitrust powers.”

All of this is based on wishes and hopes, and nobody would put their names to it except Hoffman, who pointedly was not on camera when CNN read out his views. However, it is nakedly transactional, an example of the ham-fisted way that the donor class tries to rule Washington. Hoffman has given $8.6 million to super PACs that are now supporting Harris; one of those super PACs is already on the air with a Harris biographical ad. He helped convince Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings to give $7 million to the main Harris super PAC just this week, and he’s going on a fundraising swing with Harris that’s part of an effort to raise $100 million from tech interests.
https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/