The Antimonopoly Movement is the Best Chance We Have

Thank you. It’s incredible to be here.

I want to start with the paramount question of our times: How do we find the ability as a country to govern ourselves? To make decisions collectively. To solve our problems. To save ourselves before it’s too late.

Today, I want to suggest to you that the roots of this predicament can be traced to a decision made 40 years ago, when elected officials from both parties agreed to abandon our anti-monopoly laws — laws that, for generations, had checked the concentration of economic power. This decision was sold to us on the grounds that bigger corporations would increase the economy’s efficiency and lower prices. In other words, it was sold to us as having nothing at all to do with freedom and self-government.

Today, nearly everything we rely on — food, medicine, housing, credit, news, information — is controlled by a small number of corporations. We are, every day, subject to their arbitrary dictates and whims. We wait helplessly while the insurance company decides whether to approve a treatment. We watch helplessly as the tech giant robs our children of their self-worth. We submit to abusive employment conditions and pervasive surveillance.

Across the country, urban and rural communities alike find themselves at the mercy of distant boardrooms, their local businesses disappearing, their future not theirs to control. Is it any wonder that democratic institutions are seen by many as illegitimate? We all know that the actions of government more often reflect the priorities of corporate executives than the needs of citizens. Across this land, there is a pervasive sense of powerlessness, which leads people nowhere good — despair, withdrawal, longing for a strongman. Powerlessness is poison in the veins of a democracy.

But the reason I’m here today is not to talk about something you probably already know but to draw your attention to something you may not have noticed. There is a remarkable movement afoot that is making real headway in reviving our anti-monopoly policies. This movement stretches from the grassroots to the highest levels of government, where leaders of key agencies are dusting off long-dormant antitrust laws and using them to rein in corporate power and expand the freedom and agency of ordinary people. This movement is shaking up the political map. It’s fostering new alliances between labor and small businesses. It’s energizing people in both rural and urban, red, and blue places. It’s doing the crucial work of defining a common enemy, a shared culprit for what ails us, and thereby helping to steer us away from the politics of scapegoating and hate.

I want to be honest with you. I don’t know if this movement can outrun the forces of authoritarianism. But I think it’s the best chance we have. Which is why I’m here today. We need your help. We need you to join us.

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So, what happened 40 years ago? To understand that we need to understand the origins of our antitrust laws. Antitrust is essential to democracy’s basic design. Just as we have checks and balances that ensure that no part of government can wield too much power, our antitrust laws prevent the accumulation of economic power.

The notion that economic liberty is crucial to political liberty is an idea that originated on this continent. English colonists learned this concept from the Haudenosaunee people of the Northeast, whose ideas infused the American Revolution. When residents of Boston dumped 92,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, they were protesting the monopolization of the tea trade by the East India Company. It was understood that tyranny could arrive not only in the form of a king; it could also manifest as a dominant global corporation.

After the Revolution, restrictions on corporate power were embedded in state laws. But that approach broke down in the 19th century, when a group of men harnessed a disruptive new technology—the railroad. Control over the rails meant control over who could access markets; if you could monopolize the rails, you could monopolize other industries. John D. Rockefeller, for example, conspired with Cornelius Vanderbilt to ensure that Standard Oil’s product moved freely on the rails, while competing oil companies were sidelined. The railroad barons also exploited their power as gatekeepers to impose exorbitant shipping fees on farmers and small businesses.

These abuses sparked a grassroots anti-monopoly movement. It led, over the following decades, to the passage of the first federal antitrust laws. The central purpose of these laws was to protect everyday people from concentrated economic power, or what Franklin Roosevelt would later call, quote, “industrial dictatorship.”

Indeed, it’s FDR who gets credit for fully activating our antitrust laws. He campaigned on a promise of “economic freedom for the wage earner and the farmer and the small business.” He launched a period of aggressive antitrust enforcement that lasted for decades. The government blocked mergers, filed hundreds of lawsuits to stop anti-competitive behavior, and periodically broke up big companies.

To get a feel for what this meant in practice, consider the case the government filed in the late 40s against the supermarket giant A&P, at the time the 5^th largest corporation in the US. A&P was using a set of predatory tactics to knock competing grocery stores out of the market. And the more powerful it grew, the more abusive it became toward its workers. The government won the case, putting an end to the chain’s monopolistic tactics and forcing a spin-off of part of the company. A&P didn’t disappear. It continued to operate for decades, but it could no longer bully and dominate. With A&P back on its heels, grocery store workers were finally able to form unions. Farmers gained leverage and won better prices. And independent grocery stores flourished.

Many people know that membership in unions rose sharply in the 1950s and 60s. But many don’t realize that small businesses rose right alongside labor. New Deal policies were built on two forms of economic agency: the ability to bargain collectively and the ability to strike out on your own.

Now, this was also a period of systematic discrimination and exclusion — of Black Americans, gay Americans, women. But it’s notable that the Black-white income gap narrowed considerably in these years. Black workers poured into the labor movement. Black-owned businesses multiplied. By 1969 there were more Black-owned grocery stores than there are today. These businesses played a pivotal financial and organizing role in the Civil Rights movement. Economic power helped build political power.

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The turn came in the 1970s. Amid the confusion of oil shocks and inflation, a new faction rose within the Democratic Party. It cozied up to Wall Street and distanced itself from farmers and small business. Then, in 1978, Robert Bork — yes, that Robert Bork. You may know him as Nixon’s solicitor general and later failed Supreme Court nominee. But by far the biggest shadow he cast over our lives was writing this highly influential book in which he insisted that the antitrust laws had nothing to do with questions of power and liberty; their sole purpose, he said, was to increase consumer welfare. Big business saw an opening. In 1981, Bork’s followers swept into power with Ronald Reagan.

What followed was something akin to a coup. There wasn’t enough support to repeal the antitrust laws. All of the laws are still on the books. Instead, Bork’s followers worked within the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to write new interpretations of the law. Ignoring the plain language of the statutes and the clearly expressed intentions of Congress, they declared that antitrust had one goal, which was to lower prices. They also insisted that big companies were inherently more efficient. Therefore, we should welcome consolidation. They turned antitrust on its head.

All of this might have been undone after Reagan, except that Clinton and later Obama embraced broadly similar thinking.

I came to this issue in the late 1990s, when I took a job at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the organization that I now co-lead. One of my first assignments was to figure out why local retail businesses were closing in droves. The answer I found was that Walmart was using a set of underhanded tactics to corner the market. The same tactics A&P had used. It would come into a town and sell goods below cost, and then raise prices after local competitors disappeared. As the company grew, it also began to strongarm suppliers, insisting that they give it better terms while charging the local grocer down the street much higher prices.

I remember thinking, don’t we have laws against this? And so, I started looking into antitrust. And sure enough, in 1936 Congress passed a law that prohibits big retailers from exploiting their control over suppliers to unfairly undermine their small competitors. I found that in 1950, having witnessed how monopoly control of industry fueled the rise of fascism in Germany, Congress passed the Antimerger Act, a measure designed to stop corporate mergers. Reading these laws was like entering an alternate universe. The word “efficiency” doesn’t appear anywhere in the statutes. Instead, the concept you see over and over again is fairness.

Today Walmart captures 1 of every 4 dollars that Americans spend on food. Walmart and the other big supermarket chains, together with food conglomerates like Conagra and Tyson, have created a chokepoint in our food system. They’ve been bullying and squeezing farmers while sending grocery prices soaring.

It’s the same story in nearly every industry. Over the last 20 years, big hospital chains have bought and closed one-quarter of the nation’s hospitals, with dire consequences in rural Black and indigenous communities. Meanwhile, If you live in a metro area where the hospitals have merged, not only do prices rises, but patients face significantly higher mortality rates.

Electric utilities have been on their own merger spree and are now using their enhanced market power to thwart the spread of distributed solar. We have planes falling apart in midair — which is a direct result of allowing Boeing to buy its only domestic competitor in 1996.

Bork’s consumer welfare ideology was a con job all along.

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Extreme inequality was one spark that led to today’s anti-monopoly movement. The other was the dawning realization that concentrated corporate power is a form of tyranny. All those years we worried about Big Government, Big Business was taking over. The realization finally came with the rise of Big Tech.

The tech companies have followed the same playbook as the railroad barons. Gain control of the underlying infrastructure that commerce depends on. Use your power as a gatekeeper to crush rivals, privilege your own interests, and siphon off the revenue rightfully earned others. We have half as many local news reporters as we did 15 years ago. It’s not that people aren’t reading news. It’s not that advertisers aren’t buying ads next to that content. It’s that most of those dollars go into the pockets of Meta and Google.

Amazon controls two-thirds of online shopping traffic. That means virtually every business that sells a consumer product has two choices. Both are usually fatal. It can either forego the online market or it can sell on Amazon’s marketplace. But to sell on Amazon is to be subject to the tech giant’s bullying, it’s tendency to copy your best products, its arbitrary algorithm changes that can tank your business.

Ten years ago, small businesses selling on Amazon paid fees equal to 14 percent of their sales. Today, Amazon is pocketing half of every dollar sellers earn. Amazon generated $140 billion in fees from sellers last year, more revenue than either Meta or Bank of America. When businesses push back, Amazon routinely punishes them by burying them in the search results.

Amazon is extending its tentacles in every direction. Its package delivery operation is now bigger than that of the U.S. Postal Service. Its cloud division powers much of the Internet, handling the computing needs of a vast array companies and governments. It’s advancing into healthcare and finance. It’s selling surveillance and A.I. tools to police and military outfits around the world.

You may recall that in 2017 Amazon launched a sweepstakes in which cities offered billions of dollars in subsidies to win the company’s second headquarters. Mayors across the country created videos in which they bowed before Bezos. When the company accepted a multi-billion offer to locate in New York City, people rose up and, against the odds, managed to stop the deal. If you were paying attention to the protest signs and the city council meetings, there was a curious word that kept showing up, a long-lost word. That word was monopoly.

It was one of the first green shoots of a budding anti-monopoly movement that began gathering converts: labor leaders, small business groups, community activists, academics, members of Congress. To the surprise of many, one of those converts was Joe Biden. A few months into his presidency, he gave a pivotal speech. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed,” he declared.

He appointed some of the movement’s key leaders to top positions — Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission, Jonathan Kanter at the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, and Tim Wu at the National Economic Council.

They have now blocked dozens of mega-mergers — putting a stop to the tide of runaway consolidation in book publishing, airlines, hospitals, supermarkets. They’ve filed monopolization cases against Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. These cases are not about small fixes on the margins. They aim to restructure dangerous business models and restore our digital markets.

Under Khan and Kanter, the antitrust agencies are taking seriously their directive from Congress to ensure fairness in our markets. The FTC is now reinvigorating a long-lost responsibility it has under the law to ban, quote, “unfair methods of competition.” It’s first move is a rule that would ban noncompete clauses, which ensnare 1 in 5 US workers, mostly low-wage workers, blocking them switching jobs and costing them an estimated $250 billion in lost wages.

What these leaders are doing is incredibly popular. Three-quarters of both Democrats and Republicans believe that large corporations are having a negative impact. More than that, anti-monopoly has a real live political base. Ranchers and slaughterhouse workers are urging action against big meatpackers. Small business groups have joined warehouse workers to demand a breakup of Amazon. Local grocers are pushing for a level playing field. Musicians and concertgoers are campaigning for action against Live Nation. Nurses and patients are fighting healthcare monopolies.

With roots in both blue and red America, these voices are one reason that the US Chamber of Commerce hasn’t been able to get any traction in Congress to stop what we’re doing.

Here’s where I want to leave you. For 14 long years, the northside of Tulsa Oklahoma had no grocery store. Then AJ Johnson here on the right opened Oasis Fresh Market. It’s beloved by the community. But Oasis faces an uphill fight to survive because it can’t get the same prices from suppliers that the Walmart in the suburbs or the Dollar General down the street can get.

Imagine if we leveled the playing field. Imagine if grocery stores like this opened across the country. Imagine if we took our health care system out of the hands of monopolists. Imagine if we took the corporate boot off the neck of rural America. Imagine if we fixed the Internet.

This is what democracy looks like. It looks like government taking seriously its obligation to check private power. It looks like all of us building the country, the economy, the future that we want.

We can win this. But we need you. We need you to tell your friends. We need you to join us… Thank you.