One of the most effective agencies during those years was the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Under the direction of Rohit Chopra, the CFPB finally used its long-dormant powers to rein in the most egregious and abusive conduct of America's most predatory corporations, like banks, fintech, and repeat corporate offenders, with a 7-2 Supreme Court mandate to go *hard*:

pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/get…

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As impressive as the whole CFPB agenda was, the standout for me was its attack on America's data brokerage industry. Data brokers are effectively *totally* unregulated, and they buy and sell every intimate fact of your life. The reason every device in your life - smart speaker, car, toothbrush, thermostate - spies on you all the time is because data brokers will buy any data from anyone and sell it to anyone, too.

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Data brokerages put "surveillance capitalist" companies like Google and Meta to shame (indeed, Big Tech buys a *lot* of data from brokerages, as do agencies like the DEA, ICE and the FBI, who treat the brokerages as a warrant-free, off-the-books mass surveillance system). Data brokerages combine data about your movements, purchases, friends, medical problems, education, love life, and more, and bucket you into categories that marketers (or scammers) can buy access to.

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There are over 650,000 of these categories, including "seniors with dementia," "depressed teenagers" and "US military personnel with gambling problems":

themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/…

Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act. The last technological privacy issue your legislature considered important enough to address was the scourge of video-store clerks telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home:

pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/pri…

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From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You – The Markup

A spreadsheet on ad platform Xandr’s website revealed a massive collection of “audience segments” used to target consumers based on highly specific, sometimes intimate information and inferences

^{themarkup.org}

Congress's massive failure created equally massive risks for us. From phishing and ransomware attacks to identity theft to stalking and SWATting, America's privacy nihilism enabled mass-scale predation upon all of us, rich and poor, old and young, rural and urban, men and women, racialized and white.

That's the void that the CFPB stepped into last summer, when they passed a new rule that would effectively shut down the entire data brokerage industry:

pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the…

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Yesterday, Trump's CFPB boss, Russell Vought, killed that rule, stating that it was "no longer necessary or appropriate":

wired.com/story/cfpb-quietly-k…

Here's the thing: Trumpism relies on the fusion of two groups of people: a tiny number of oligarchs, and millions of everyday people who are constantly victimized by those oligarchs. To get this latter group of Christmas-voting turkeys to stay in the coalition, Trump needs to delivery *something* that keeps them happy.

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Mostly, Trump delivers *negative* things to keep them happy - the spectacle of public cruelty to immigrants, women, trans people, academics, etc. There is a certain libidinal satisfaction that comes from watching your enemies suffer - but you can't eat schadenfreude. You can't make rent or put braces on your kids' teeth or pay your medical bills with the sadistic happiness you feel when you hear the sobs of people you've been taught to despise.

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For Trump to keep the turkeys voting for Christmas, he needs to do something *for* them. He can't just do things *to* scapegoats. But America's eminently guillotineable oligarchs have found *so many* ways to turn working peoples' torment into riches, and they are *so* greedy and unwilling to give up *any* of those grifts, that Trump can't manage to deliver *anything* positive to his base.

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Last week, his FTC killed the "click to cancel" rule that required companies that tricked you into buying subscriptions to make it easy for you to cancel them:

pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/gre…

There isn't a single person in the Trump base who isn't harmed by data brokers. Every red-hat-wearing MAGA footsoldier has been swindled with a recurring-payment scam by clicking a deceptive link.

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The material conditions of the lives of Trump's base - already in severe jeopardy thanks to the massive inflation the tariffs will cause, and the plummeting wages that the ensuing mass business-closures will bring about - cannot be improved in *any* way.

I don't think anyone knows for sure how much support Trump can win solely by torturing the people his supporters hate, even as those supporters' lives get worse and worse.

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