Where Things Are Happening: Ron Knox on the State(s) of Antitrust

Danny Caine
If you ask the team here at ILSR, the state of the antimonopoly movement is, well, states. After years of significant progress at the federal level, antimonopoly and antitrust, like so much else, have been tossed into the chaos engulfing Washington. With so much uncertainty at the federal level, folks looking to curb corporate control have pivoted focus to what states can do and what they already have done. This is not a new approach.

Since the idea of using government levers to control corporate power was introduced, states have been battlegrounds for the fight against monopoly. Nobody knows this better than my colleague Ron Knox. Knox, a senior researcher on the Independent Business team at ILSR, has been writing about antitrust issues for a long time. In fact, I first encountered his work not as a colleague, but as a writer long before my time at ILSR.

Whether it was articles about monopolies in the music industry or in-depth reports on the harms caused by Amazon’s monopoly power, Ron’s work has long impacted my own work. So it’s a real thrill to have Ron as a guest on this week’s Building Local Power. Our lively conversation touched on so many important issues, from what it means to be an antimonopoly author to what state AGs can do to curb monopoly power. But the heart of the conversation is an investigation of a question key to all of us at ILSR and hopefully to you too. What is the state of the antimonopoly movement and why should people care? Further, how can we help? I hope you’re as galvanized as I was from listening to Ron share his thoughts and insights.

Ron Knox, thank you so much for appearing on Building Local Power. I’m really excited for this conversation. I’ve known you for some time now, a couple of years. I know you are, of course, a leading voice in the antimonopoly movement, someone I look to as an inspiration and role model long before I came to work at ILSR. But one thing I don’t know is how you got started with this work. So can you tell us your antimonopoly origin story?

Ron Knox
Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to. I mean, so my background is that I’m a reporter. It’s like what I went to school for. That’s luckily, very luckily, what I’ve had the chance to do for most of my career. And I basically caught on with a publication that covered antitrust and monopoly and corporate concentration, all those kinds of things, just as like a straight reporter, just writing about different investigations as they popped up in the US and around the world.

And I did that job for more than a decade. so I just kind of became, know, when you’re a reporter, you’re constantly learning about the thing that you cover. It’s really a pleasure. It’s part of the pleasure of the job is that it’s very much just like going to like, grad school, you know what I mean? And so after doing it for a decade, kind of, you know, two things happened. One, I learned a lot about it. So I I understood the law, understood why, why things happen and whatever. And then I learned a lot about corporate power and about the kind of the tricks and the things the corporations and their lawyers and their economists really did their power and defend lot of the things that the people would try to do to check that power. Like, obviously terrible. And at some point you just have an opinion about something that’s so strong you can no longer be reporter about it. So I had to get into the advocacy side.

Danny Caine
And so I imagine it must have been rewarding to like release the shackles of neutrality and begin to really join the fight.

Ron Knox 
my God, like so like super rewarding, like incredibly rewarding and like heartrending. I’ve, and I’ve, and and I felt so good with the transition. I still feel so incredibly good about the work I do. It’s so funny cause like you end up kind of running into people that used to know you in this former life. And now I am like this person with this, opinion, this viewpoint and this voice.

So it’s funny to kind of get their reaction, you know, they’re always, I’ll call someone up who knew me in former life and they’re like, you couldn’t take it anymore, huh? Had to get out. I yeah, I couldn’t take it anymore. Had to actually say how I felt. But yeah, super rewarding, of course.

Danny Caine 
Let’s get down to brass tacks now, you’re clearly so passionate about this. Obviously we both think it’s a really important issue, but like sometimes I’ll be giving a book talk about my Amazon book. And the second I say antitrust, I can feel the audience losing interest. It’s like, this is the technical part. we’re not talking about how evil Jeff Bezos is. We’re talking about solutions, which are often technical and policy-based.

So, specifically for the people who get alienated by terms like antimonopoly or antitrust, what’s the popular case for this movement and why should the average American care?

Ron Knox
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. And, you know, I am just as prone as anyone to get caught up in the jargon and to get caught up in the in the kind of technical stuff, because that’s my knowledge base. That’s where I come from. But, you know, at its core, I antitrust and antimonopoly is about two things. It’s about two things that are very real and I think ingrained in people, especially in Americans. first is fairness, right? Antimonopoly is all about fairness.

Nobody wants to experience a lack of fairness in their lives. Whether you’re a worker at a job, you expect that job to treat you fairly. You’re a small business owner and you’re trying to keep your doors open. You expect there to be fairness in the economy. You’re a shopper. You’re just trying to get a good price. You’re trying to get the best products. You’re trying to be rewarded with some innovation. want fairness there too. You don’t want to get ripped off. Nobody wants to get ripped off.

Antimonopoly is literally economic philosophy that tries to ingrain fairness in the economy in all of the little transactions, the way that we live our lives every single day. That’s one thing. The second thing is, I think at its core, antimonopoly is all about redistribution of power and of wealth. And that’s kind of technical way to say, it’s a tool that we have to ensure that no one company, no one person, no one group of companies or group of people have too much power, both economic power and political power in our country. And that is ingrained in the foundations of America from day one, right? From day one, we said, no, we’re not gonna do kings anymore. We’re not gonna do monopolies anymore, right? We’re throwing the tea into Boston harbors, what we’re doing instead of tolerating this monopoly power over our lives and our economy. So it’s so key, it’s such a our identities, I think, as Americans, this idea that no one should be a king, whether you’re one person sitting on a throne or whether you’re a company controlling an industry. You don’t get to be a king in America. So that’s what I think antimonopoly is about.

Danny Caine 
And you are soon to have many of your thoughts about this kind of codified into book form with the release of Resist Monopolies: How to Fight Corporate Control and Support an Economy that Matters, out soon from Microcosm Publishing. So like I talked about book talks with the previous question, and perhaps you’ll be joining me on the book talks circuit very soon, we can only hope. So as an effort to kind of reach that public that, is not plugged into the antimonopoly movement yet. Why write the zine and who are you aiming for with the project?

Ron Knox 
I mean, I’ll answer the second question first. I mean, I’m aiming at everybody. I really hope, man, my only real hope for this is that it is truly accessible to anybody, no matter what your knowledge base is or where you’re coming from in the world. You can pick up this book. It’s short, it’s succinct, it’s, I hope, light and fun to read, and that you can get into it. So that’s the first question.

I mean, look, there are a lot of books out there now about like monopoly. Like over the last five, six years, there have been like, I probably own a dozen books literally with the word monopoly in the title or in, or, or in the subtitle or whatever, on my shelf that have come out in the last few years. And they’re all in like, they’re all good. Like, don’t get me wrong. These are, these are, these are good books written by very skilled writers, smart people.

So many of them are a little bit technical. And so many of them are really focused on history, right? I think it’s so natural when you start talking about monopoly to start reaching back in time and talk about the Gilded Age and talk about Standard Oil, talk about all this stuff. Some people do care about that. I think what people often care more about is what’s happening right now. because you have to put yourself as a reader. You put yourself in the world of the thing that you’re reading about.

And I think it matters to tell the stories of antimonopolists out there today, like doing work in communities, doing work workplaces, in the places live and community in, and show them having successes so that readers can put themselves in those shoes and say, I can fight monopolies too. This is my fight, just the same as it is this other person’s fight just the same as it was this fight that happened maybe 100 years ago, you know what I mean? So my whole idea is A, to make it super, super accessible and to start to tell the stories of people out there in the world today who are fighting against corporate control and monopoly power and they’re winning. That was the whole goal. I hope I’m successful.

Danny Caine 
Can you give us a preview by quickly telling us about one of those stories that of someone who’s fighting monopolies and winning?

Ron Knox 
Wow, sure. The headline story in this book is a fight that happened in Newark, New Jersey. So we all know Amazon. We all know Amazon. And a few years back, kind of right around pandemic time, this kind of dawn of COVID, Amazon had struck this clandestine deal, this like secret deal with the Port Authority of Newark and New Jersey, to build this huge air cargo hub, right? It’s just like a big kind of addition to the airport where it’s just gonna be a bunch of planes and shipping containers with Amazon written on the side is gonna come in use that as its base of operations for all of that area in New England and so on.

If you know anything about air cargo hubs and that kind of thing, these are like pollution machines. You’re talking about airplanes, you’re talking about trucks, you’re talking about, and it was sited right next to Newark Airport, which is already right next to these communities in Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey, where people had all kinds of health problems already from the amount of industrial infrastructure that’s around that community. You know, kids dying in the schools from asthma, like nasty, nasty stuff.

Community groups, there in Newark got word about this deal. They organize themselves. This great group called Make the Road New Jersey helped to kind of spearhead this organization along with Teamsters unions, like neighborhood groups, all kinds of people, old folks who lived in, who lived in these communities who were willing to stand up and talk at meetings and knock doors and talk to their neighbors. And they built power.

And then they use that power in a political way to help push back against this air hub. They got elected officials on their side. They convinced them that this is the right fight to fight basically. At the end of the day, after more than a year basically of fighting this air hub, Amazon packed up and left town, never struck the deal, never built this air hub. And it was like literally just people power fighting against the monopolist, right?

The greatest example of a corporate monopolist of our time, and they won, the people won. And it’s just the embodiment of this idea that if we fight, we win. And that’s exactly what happened there, and that’s the spirit that I’m trying to capture in this book and the stories that I tell in the book.

Danny Caine 
I find myself saying this from time to time on this podcast, but if that’s not building local power, I don’t know what is. It’s quite a literal example of building local power.

Ron Knox 
Very literal, exactly.

Danny Caine
Thanks for telling us about the zine and the inspiration behind it and your hopes for it, but that’s just one piece of all the work you’re doing to fight monopoly and build local power in that way. It seems like from my seat at ILSR and the things we’re collaborating on and working on, a lot of focus on fighting monopoly and antitrust work at the state level. I want to ask you a couple of questions about that. The first one, pretty simply, is why is now the moment to talk about states and antimonopoly?

Ron Knox 
Well, I mean, it’s the moment to talk about it because like very organically, this is the moment where things are happening. And it’s a little bit, you know, I think the antimonopoly like movement, we like to talk about it as a movement, but I think it’s really taken root and grown and gained strength and momentum over the last five, six, seven years or so. There’s been a lot of focus on what’s been happening at the federal level. We had strong enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice. We thought that Congress was going to take some big actions and they tried, we had some momentum there. But as all of this is happening, these ideas, this philosophy of antimonopoly is being seeded in the states. And the states are looking and they’re saying, okay, we can do this on behalf of our citizens too, and we can go further. We can be innovators, we can do interesting stuff, which is a role that the states have always had since the founding of the Republic.

So it’s been happening. New cool laws have been drafted and proposed and have been debated. Attorneys general in states have been really taking up the mantle of trust buster and fighting against increase in corporate concentration, trying to roll that back. So really, we’re just looking at what’s happening out there. saying this is real, this is a movement and it’s a movement at the state level. It’s important.

I like to think about what’s the shortest path from A to B, And sometimes at the federal level, it’s a very long path from A to B. I think at the state level, there are two things that happen. One, states are just closer to what’s actually happening to their residents. They’re closer to the problem. They’re also closer to the solution in that same way, where that path from A to B, the path from the attorney’s general’s office to the courthouse, for example. The path from the state house to the governor’s desk, right? These are shorter paths than they are on the federal level. These things are often a little more straightforward to do. They can be bolder, they can be more important, they can really shape economies. So that’s what’s happening at the states and we’re just trying to tell the stories and do good advocacy around what’s going on out there.

Danny Caine 
And speaking of that storytelling and good advocacy, you’ve had a hand in creating some really great new resources for ILSR for helping in the state level fight against monopoly power. So tell us about this new suite of, I don’t really want to call it products because I don’t love to put it in the kind of capitalist context, resources, tools. There we go. Tell us about the resources that you’ve helped ILSR create for the antimonopoly fight in the states.

Ron Knox 
I love that, that’s very good. Resources. They literally are tools. So I’ll just really quickly hit on three, that I think are kind of key to this whole package that are really aimed at lawmakers and electeds and their staff advocates out there in the states. One is a policy brief, it’s just a policy paper, seven, eight pages, kind of laying out like, the importance of states basically in this fight, why states need to get involved, how the economy has tilted away from fairness, and towards this model of corporate bigness and this idea that bigger is better. And then what states can do and what states are doing actually out there in the world to try to turn that around and reinstitute some fairness within their own economy. So that’s one thing.

The second thing is an interactive map basically that’s based on a handcrafted artisan database that we’ve been working on in-house of all the state antitrust laws out there, all 50 states and the District of Columbia, we gathered all that data about what laws are already on the books and then what laws could possibly be on the books, could strengthen state laws in different places. Put all that in a map, it’s interactive. You kind of hover over the states and you can learn about it. And so that’s really cool.

And then the last thing is I like to call a policy playbook. It’s essentially a list of things that states and attorneys general can do right now to both enforce their own laws that are already on the books and also to improve the laws and to strengthen them, sharpen them and broaden them in ways that make sense, that capture a more kind of realistic view of our concentrated economy today and can make a difference for people’s lives. So I hope people enjoy it. I hope people use it. a cool resource. We’ve gotten great feedback on it so far. So I’m happy it’s out there.

Danny Caine 
You know, listeners, you can really literally go to this map and click on your own state and see what’s working, where things could expand and get better. Of course we’ll link to all three of those resources in the show notes so you can explore good products.

Tell us about one state that’s doing good work. Like who’s a leader in the state level antimonopoly movement? Where’s the good work kind of happening right now?

Ron Knox
Okay, that’s a great question. I’ll talk about Arizona. I think Arizona is cool. Ariszone is like, I think one of the only, one of the very few true purple states out there in the country, right? Where it’s like elections kind of go one way or the other. And a lot of folks have this, middle ground viewpoint about politics and the economy and so on.

And in Arizona, they have an attorney general named Kris Mayes. She has really become and has really been this great champion of the people in her state against abuses of corporate power and against the accumulation that power that’s been happening in our economy for many, many years. A few examples of that.

She sued Amazon. She did this before the Federal Trade Commission filed their big suit against Amazon. And she did it using her own state’s antitrust laws that she likes. She thinks they’re very strong. And she’s really taken the fight to, again, like one of the most powerful kind of corporate entities on the planet right a great piece of and of action against some real corporate power on behalf of small businesses and consumers in her state. It’s really great.

Another incredibly important thing she has done is she’s sued bunch of landlords a software company essentially for conspiring to fix price of rental housing throughout her state. couldn’t go out there and find a better example of an elected official going out and really fighting for people, fighting for the ability to make ends meet and to make a living and live comfortably in a place. Because people are out there getting gouged, paying way too much in rent because of this kind of conspiracy. And she’s really gone after it and has been a leader, I think, for every other AG and every other elected official around the country. So Arizona is a cool example.

Kris Mayes, I consider her a trustbuster and I think she would probably take up that mantle as well. So that’s a cool example. But again, not limited at all to Arizona, incredible action happening. Washington, Minnesota, all over the country, like very cool stuff happening out there.

Danny Caine 
I feel like being called a trustbuster by Ron Knox is one of the highest compliments you would give.

Ron Knox
Brother, you are not wrong about that. You are not wrong. If I say if you’re a trustbuster, you are like, you’re on the correct side of my ledger. I’ll tell you that for sure.

Danny Caine
Kris Mayes was a part of an ILSR virtual event not too long ago talking in fact in detail about that lawsuit with the landlords and the software. We’ll put a link to that in the comments. It’s certainly worth a watch. You mentioned other states like Washington and Minnesota. You know, during state legislative sessions like the one we’re in right now, certain types of bills get a lot of attention like book bans or other kinds of things. But there’s actually a lot of really interesting antitrust work happening in state legislatures right now with bills that are being proposed. So can you tell us a little bit about what’s in the works in some of these state legislative sessions?

Ron Knox 
Sure, I’ll touch on two kind of different but related pieces of legislation that we see popping up in a few states. So in places like New York and Massachusetts, there are bills have been proposed and are before lawmakers right now that would really sharpen and improve the standards that states use to go after monopolies, go after big corporate power when they’re being abusive, when they’re abusing consumers, they’re abusing small businesses and workers and so on. This is like big stuff, it’s big like market shaping stuff. like I mentioned earlier, this is the kind of bill that is a much more realistic reflection of the economy that we are stuck with right now and that takes real concrete steps to actually change it and address some of the problems out there. So it’s really, really exciting. The New York bill is called the 21st Century Antitrust Act. We’ve written about it before. I’m sure we can we can drop some links that and you can learn more about that.

The other bills that I’m really excited about are a number of bills. Let’s see. Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and potentially elsewhere that would that would create some new and expanded rules around what we call price discrimination. We call it predatory buying. That’s when a really powerful retailer like a Walmart, for example, uses its power to bully its suppliers and to get a better price and more perks basically from those suppliers than those suppliers can offer the smaller stores and the smaller guys out there. It is the absolute definition of unfairness. And these bills out there, like in these different states, are trying to recreate some fairness to ban those kinds of deals and to close some loopholes that these companies have used for a long time to get around a federal prohibition on the books about this, companies, but it hasn’t been enforced in a long time. And then companies have found ways around it. So again, is like key to what I think antimonopoly is, right? Instituting fairness in the economy for everyone. This one’s about the grocery industry, but it’s very, very cool. think it would actually lower grocery prices for consumers time by creating more competition, which is really good. And it would set an incredible example for the rest of the economy. know, saying loud and clear that fairness is important, it’s key, states are gonna try to really create that in their

Danny Caine
You can keep track of the progress of all those state bills. ILSR is watching them very closely. One great place to keep track of all that is through our Hometown Advantage newsletter. We’ll put a link to subscribe to that on the bottom of this page and every other page on the independent business section of ILSR’s website. All right, one more question for you, Ron, and I think I want to ask you to dream big. You can write the future of the antimonopoly What do you want to see next? What are your hopes and dreams for where this thing can go?

Ron Knox
That is an incredible question, Danny Caine. Look, I think if I had one short term, relatively, think short term goal, like what’s possible, what’s real out there, I want people to understand and I want the movement to understand that antimonopoly is more than just this kind of technical stuff.

Even the things we’ve been talking about, right? We’re talking about like, okay, what do these bills do? And you’re talking about like technical or talking about price discrimination. You’re talking about monopoly standards and all this kind of stuff. That is antimonopoly, but it’s not all. That’s not it. Antimonopoly is not this little narrow world of these like, you know, technical legislation and these lawsuits at the AG’s office. Anything that people do that puts weight on the scale on the opposite side of corporate power is antimonopoly.

Every single thing. So if you’re out there, if you’re in a union or you want to be in a union and you’re working to organize your shop, you’re working to organize all your coworkers to have some, to have some more power over the company that you work for, that’s antimonopoly, right? If you’re out there and you’re fighting for environmental justice or you care about this stuff, right? having clean water and safe air to breathe and all that kind of good stuff, is important and you’re willing to take on like all the companies that that are polluting our environment and are making climate change worse, you’re an antimonopolist too. Right? If you shop local and you’re dedicated to shopping local and you do it because you want to support all the stores that are the cornerstone of your neighborhood, the cornerstone of your community, you are you are an antimonopolist, right? So that that that vision, like becoming more widely understood by, you know, by both the policymakers, yes, but really just by people, just by folks who shop and who work and who run businesses to increase that understanding that so much of what we do is actually antimonopoly because nobody wants these corporations to have control over our lives, way we make a living, the way we go about, you know, building our communities and setting up our neighborhoods.

The more people understand that all of those pieces are antimonopoly, the better the movement’s going to be, the more power we’re going to have, and the more change we can actually create in our economy and our politics and our lives. That’s really what my vision is. And I don’t think we’re far off from that. Like that’s not long, long term. Like long, long term maybe looks different. This is a short term thing. don’t know. I that’s, that’s what I’m dedicating myself to here, in the near term. And, and, and I think we can get there.

Danny Caine 
Thank you so much, Ron. This is really galvanizing conversation it’s been a real pleasure. So thanks so much.

Ron Knox 
I mean, thank you. The pleasure’s all mine. Always great to talk to you and always fun to talk about this stuff. I appreciate the time.

Danny Caine
As Ron and I both mentioned, ILSR has just a ton of resources about what states can do and have done to fight monopoly power. Perhaps the most notable of these resources is our brand new State Antitrust Resource Hub, which includes the map, policy brief, and playbook that Ron mentioned. Find links to those and plenty of other resources in the show notes. Also, find a link to sign up to our Hometown Advantage newsletter so you can keep tabs on all those state antitrust bills as they hopefully move through their legislatures.

Here at Building Local Power, we’d love to invite you, our listeners, into the conversation. If you have thoughts about this or other episodes, ideas for future guests, or if you just want to get in touch, send me a note at [email protected]. And as always, if you like what you hear, please like, subscribe, review, and share with your friends. This episode of Building Local Power was produced by me, Danny Caine, with the help of Reggie Rucker. I did the editing with help from Téa Noelle, who also composed the music. Thank you so much for listening, and see you in two weeks.

ILSR’s State Antitrust Resource Hub

Preorder Resist Monopolies! from Microcosm Publishing

ILSR’s State Antitrust Event featuring Arizona AG Kris Mayes

Issue Brief: Why the 21st Century Antitrust Act is Critical for New York Small Businesses