anti-trust too big to fail mono2

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oops see monopoly2

see dereg

see corruption

see lobbyist

see FANG

bIDEN ADMIN MUCH BETTER

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AN 12 24

Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the antitrust head at the Department of Justice who helped turbocharge the agency's efforts to rein in monopoly power, bid farewell to his post in a speech Tuesday during which he warned that "plutocracy is its own kind of dictatorship."

Kanter's deputy, Doha Mekki, will take over leading the Antitrust Division starting Friday. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Gail Slater, a tech and media policy advisor who worked for Vice President-elect JD Vance, to permanently replace Kanter.

In his speech, Kanter described how President Joe Biden's administration had a clear mandate from the public to break with the antitrust approach of previous decades: "When I took office in 2021, questions about monopoly power were no longer just a technocratic concern relegated to the narrow halls of white-shoe law firms and elite academic institutions. Our nation was experiencing a remarkable moment unlike any I had seen in my lifetime. Americans across the country had become acutely aware of the powerful forces that were suppressing their economic freedom."

To get himself ready for the role, he looked for inspiration from the "storied trustbusters of yesteryear"—particularly Assistant Attorney General Robert Jackson, who led antitrust enforcement at the Department of Justice under FDR. "In 2021, the similarities to 1936 were unmistakable. They say that history rhymes. Well, it sure does. And this time it had 'bars,' as the youth say."

Then, as now, antitrust enforcement is an engine for economic prosperity, Kanter said. It can lower prices by limiting the market power of large companies, increase growth and prosperity by curbing corporate-imposed private regulation that "sap entrepreneurs of opportunity," and provide greater mobility and higher wages for workers, he argued.

With that "why" in mind, the division "confronted the Herculean task of operationalizing our mandate to restore, revive, and reimagine antitrust enforcement for our nation."

In many respects, Kanter was successful in that mission. During his time with the Department of Justice, the agency notched a major legal victory over the company Google, which Kanter's team and states had argued held an illegal monopoly in the search engine and advertising market. In August, a federal judge ruled that Google was an illegal monopolist for spending tens of billions on default search deals, a decision that has been called the "biggest antitrust case of the 21st century."

The Antitrust Division has also filed ongoing cases against Visa, the rent-fixing software RealPage, Ticketmaster, and others. Cases brought by the division also successfully blocked a merger between publishing giants Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, as well as JetBlue's acquisition of Spirit.

In response to the news that Kanter is stepping down, Nidhi Hegde, interim executive director at the American Economic Liberties Project, said Tuesday that under Kanter's leadership "the DOJ Antitrust Division has become an enforcer fit for the modern economy—and a powerful ally of American consumers, workers, and small businesses."

Kanter offered advice to future enforcers, such as engaging people outside of the Beltway and "dispel[ling] the myth that less competition at home helps the U.S. compete more abroad."

The stakes of lax enforcement are high, he warned: "When companies larger, wealthier, and more powerful than most world governments threaten individual liberty with coercive private taxation and regulation, it threatens our way of life."

===

AN 10 24

alternet-NO LNX

Democracy dies in their wallets

Twitter employees respond to new owner Elon Musk’s annihilation of top execs — on Twitter

Thom Hartmann October 28, 2024

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.—Yale historian Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

I cancelled my Washington Post subscription Friday evening. Jeff Bezos, Mister “Democracy Dies In Darkness” (the Post’s slogan on their masthead), by blocking his editorial staff from endorsing Harris chose darkness over his nation’s future, and I can’t support that.

The big mistake John D. Rockefeller made back in the day — that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk appear committed to not repeating — was not buying a media outlet like a newspaper. Had John D. had that sort of a vehicle to mold public opinion, American history may be very different.

By 1880, Rockefeller’s Ohio-based company controlled over 90 percent of the nation’s oil, owned 4000 miles of pipelines, and employed over 100,000 people. As Rockefeller’s oil empire got larger and larger, eating alive hundreds of smaller operations, ruthlessly driving up prices, destroying his competitors, and throwing workers out of a job, public outrage grew.

In 1887, Ohio sued him, arguing that he was operating in ways that were detrimental to the state and its citizens and businesses; in 1892 the Ohio Supreme Court ordered his company dissolved. As I lay out in detail in Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People,” this led Rockefeller to move Standard Oil to New Jersey after that state changed its corporation laws to allow for his monopolistic behavior.

Which brought in the federal government; in 1890, Ohio Senator John Sherman introduced and saw passed into law the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which provided not just fines but jail sentences against people like Rockefeller who were committed to destroying competition and owning entire markets. The law was flawed with a few loopholes and ambiguities, so it was amended in 1914 with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.

Nonetheless, in 1906 progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt’s administration filed an antitrust action against Rockefeller that went to the Supreme Court in 1911 during the administration of progressive Republican President William Howard Taft. The behemoth was broken up into 34 separate companies, an action that, like the breakup of AT&T by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, led to an explosion of competition in the marketplace and a dramatic increase in shareholder value.

But back to Jeff Bezos and his 2013 purchase of The Washington Post.

It was reporters and editors for the hundreds of independent newspapers during the First Gilded Age (1880-1900) era that led the crusades against Rockefeller and his fellow monopolists. Investigative journalism was all the rage then, and it fed public demand for a return to competition and the de-throning of that age’s oligarchs.

The vast majority of workers were struggling and they worked for a very small 10 percent of the population who controlled most of the nation’s wealth (a situation we’re at again).

The result was constant strife, strikes, and the murder of labor leaders; entire towns were in arms (and sometimes ablaze) with labor conflict. The “problem of labor”was the number one issue of the day. As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

There was a broad consensus across American society that those “Robber Barons” were feathering their own nests at the expense of the American public, hurting both working class people and small businesses. The Supreme Court endorsed breaking up Standard Oil in 1911, and even broke up the Associated Press in 1944.

The law was so rigorously enforced — so the game of business could be played by all comers, not just the “big boys” — that in the 1960s the Supreme Court barred the merger of the Kinney and Buster Brown shoe companies because the new combined company would control a mere 5 percent of the shoe market.

Back in the ’60s every mall and downtown in America was filled with small, locally-owned businesses; there might be a Sears to anchor the shopping center or a retail part of town, but most shops, restaurants, and hotels were family-owned.

But then Reagan, in 1983, ordered the DOJ, SEC, and FTC to stop enforcing the Sherman Act, which is why today Nike, for example, controls about a fifth of the entire nation’s shoe market. It’s the same across industry after industry, from retail to grocery stores to railroads to computer software to social media to chip manufacturing to airlines to hotels…and on and on. In virtually every industry, a handful of massive companies control 80 percent or more of the market.

The Biden administration is the first to seriously try enforcement of the nation’s anti-trust laws since Carter broke up AT&T, going after Google and blocking mergers in multiple industries. It’s led a bunch of American billionaires to demand that the Federal Trade Commission’s head, Lina Kahn, be fired.

Kahn and her FTC went after Bezos last year, suing Amazon for running a monopoly that price-gouges customers and blocks out competition. The trial is scheduled for 2026 if Kahn keeps her job; a Trump administration would fire her immediately, and pressure from major corporate donors and billionaires is building on Harris to do the same.

Bezos also must remember well when he got on the wrong side of then-President Trump because of the Post’s coverage of the orange oligarch’s lies and crimes; Trump, in a fit of pique, awarded a $10 billion Pentagon contract for cloud computing to Microsoft, shocking analysts across the industry.

Bezos is also working for his Blue Origin spaceship company to get more billions in NASA and Pentagon contracts. He and his companies also own billions in Google and AirBNB stock as well as owning outright almost a hundred other companies.

Might be a good time to own one of the two most influential newspapers in America, eh?

Similarly, billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, in addition to apparently taking orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin, is fighting numerous government efforts to regulate his companies (which exist in large part because Obama bailed out Tesla in 2010 with $465 million, and NASA is now pouring hundreds of millions into SpaceX):

— Tesla is fighting the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over union-related issues, with Musk taking a lawsuit to the Supreme Court alleging government protections of unions are unconstitutional.

— SpaceX is battling the NLRB over employee firings.

— The SEC is investigating Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) and his “funding secured” tweets about taking Tesla private.

— The FTC is investigating X’s compliance with a $150 million privacy settlement.

— The Federal Communications Commission recently denied SpaceX’s Starlink a $886 million rural broadband award.

— The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Tesla over alleged racial harassment.

— The FAA is in conflict with SpaceX over launch licensing and environmental reviews.

— The EPA has fined SpaceX for water-related violations.

— The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened multiple investigations into Tesla’s vehicle safety and Autopilot system.

— SpaceX faces scrutiny over its environmental impact at its Texas launch site.

To avoid the Rockefeller mistake, Musk — with the apparent help of two Russian oligarchs and the leader of Saudi Arabia — purchased Twitter, the online digital equivalent of our nation’s largest newspaper.

And he’s now using it to try to get Trump and Republicans into office, presumably so they can gut the FTC, FCC, SEC, NLRB, and any other regulator that might take him on to protect workers, the public, and the national interest.

We took on the superrich with success during the First Gilded Age, and our enforcement of antitrust laws lasted all the way to 1983, when Reagan blocked them, leading to the “merger mania” of the 1980s and bringing us today’s oligarchic business empires across multiple industries.

Now that we’re in America’s Second Gilded Age — with today’s billionaires vastly richer than Rockefeller’s wildest dreams — we confront a similar crossroads to that of previous generations.

Is it okay, for example, for billionaires to own media properties they can use to manipulate politics and government agencies to amplify their other business interests? Or that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that our morbidly rich plutocrats can own judges and politicians? Most Americans would probably say “No” to both.

At some point, America is going to have to confront its oligarch problem. And the sooner the better, if we don’t want darkness to entirely subsume our democracy.

===

ny CNN 7 24

The Bay Area has long been, and remains, a hippie-dippie bastion of Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But there’s a small, powerful sect of Silicon Valley billionaires who are carving a path for the maybe-Trumpers and the MAGA-curious in the tech world.

Elon Musk explicitly endorsed Trump over the weekend and, according to The Wall Street Journal, inked a nine-figure donation promise to a new pro-Trump political action committee called America PAC. David Sacks, the billionaire tech investor, co-hosted a fundraiser last month at his San Francisco home and spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday. Other contributors to America PAC include the Winklevoss twins, Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

In the last election cycle, the few Trump backers who existed in the Valley largely kept their support under the radar. Their numbers are still small, but they’re no longer hiding, and their wallets are open.

So, what’s gotten into these guys?

For one, there might not be as many Trump supporters in the tech world as you might think.

“A mythology has been marketed by partisans suggesting a non-existent surge of tech titans abandoning the Democratic party support in a rush to support the Trump/Vance campaign. The truth is that most leading tech figures do not support Trump/Vance and those prominent ones who do, were there years ago as well,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, told CNN.

And for the ones you might have heard of, most likely, it’s not a sudden fervor for the far right’s Christian extremism or a predilection for red baseball caps. Instead, they’re looking out for the bottom line.

The two biggest pain points for people in tech have been the Biden administration’s record on antitrust enforcement and its attitude toward crypto, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy group, told me.

“I don’t think it has as much to do with Trump per se,” he said. “I think they would have probably stayed with Biden if they felt more care and attention was being paid to the innovation economy.”

In other words: It’s not that the billionaires love Trump, it’s that they really don’t like Lina Khan, President Joe Biden’s top antitrust crusader; or Gary Gensler, the Wall Street cop who’s made no secret of his hostility toward digital assets.

Lina Khan, the FTC chair, has led an aggressive antitrust campaign, specifically targeting Big Tech.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

In recent years, Khan has spearheaded lawsuits against Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. In an interview with CNN last year, Khan described those efforts as part of a broader campaign to bring more of the government’s resources to bear on the daily economic problems of ordinary Americans.

But government regulation, however well intentioned, rarely sits well with the people who are getting rich off the status quo.

Two of the most famous venture capitalists in the Valley, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have committed to donating to America PAC, according to several news outlets.

The pair haven’t exactly been hiding their frustration with the Biden administration, either.

“The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be,” they wrote in a recent blog post, which cited regulatory agencies using “brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries.” They also lamented the Biden administration’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains, which they said would “absolutely kill” startups and the venture capital industry.

One person familiar with their plans told the Financial Times that their pivot to Trump was because “there is so much at stake on the crypto side” and the growth of artificial intelligence. “It doesn’t mean support for (Trump’s) views on immigration,” the person told the paper.

Historically, Trump hasn’t shown a lot of love for tech bros, whose social media companies he long accused of having anti-conservative bias, especially after several of them suspended his accounts in response to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the recent influx of tech money — facilitated in part by his 39-year-old venture-capitalist VP pick — appears to have softened some of Trump’s Luddite-ish views.

As recently as 2021, he called bitcoin a “scam against the dollar.” Lately, though, he’s positioning himself as the crypto-friendly candidate. While his campaign hasn’t laid out specific policy proposals around digital assets, it began accepting crypto donations this spring, and Trump is scheduled to speak at a national bitcoin conference next week.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is working to mend ties with industry leaders who say they’ve been stymied by the SEC and Gensler, generally agreed to be the crypto community’s Voldemort.

To be sure, plenty of Big Tech dollars are still flowing to Biden and down-ballot Democrats from tech-world donors, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt. But Trump’s gains from Silicon Valley have come just as some major Democratic donors have hit pause amid conversations about replacing the president on the ballot.

And, as Kovacevich notes, just because there are a few big names turning toward Trump, “they’re not speaking for everybody.”

“In fact, most of the big company CEOs aren’t terribly involved in partisan politics,” Kovacevich says. “They’re going to have to work with whoever wins the election.”

3 24

cory doc new bk tech monopoly

*The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

UpFront - March 7, 2024 | KPFA

text interview

MSN

Feb. 9, 2024,

Koch Industries’ Fertilizer Plant Purchase Sparks Antitrust Plea

Danielle Kaye

Reporter

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Koch’s $3.6 billion deal prompts lawmaker letter to DOJ, FTC
Iowa Democrats flag potential harm to workers, farmers

Iowa state lawmakers are highlighting potential harm to workers from Koch Industries Inc.‘s $3.6 billion acquisition of a fertilizer plant in the state.

All 36 Democratic state representatives this week called on the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird (R) to examine how the purchase could further entrench Koch’s market power, posing the risk of not only higher fertilizer prices but also job losses.

Their plea could be buoyed by the federal agencies’ new focus on labor markets when assessing deals. The federal government has scrutinized consolidation in the agricultural industry, and particularly probed how mergers and acquisitions affect labor markets.

“They’re definitely paying more attention to labor market effects of mergers and other types of business behavior that might be anticompetitive,” said Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who advised the DOJ’s Antitrust Division on labor issues last year. “If this is the type of merger that would reduce the number of employers in a labor market, like a city or rural area in which people commute, then it would definitely be a concern to the FTC and DOJ.”

This week, the FTC condemned Microsoft Corp.‘s plans to cut 1,900 jobs from its video game division following its acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc. The DOJ has also opened an investigation into the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center over alleged abuse of its labor market dominance, according to reporting from the Capitol Forum, following a complaint filed by unions last summer.

President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order to bolster competition specifically identifies concentrated market power in agricultural input industries—including fertilizer—as a threat to farmers’ livelihoods, suggesting the letter from state lawmakers could capture regulators’ attention.

Labor and Monopoly

Along with questions about short and long-term fertilizer costs for farmers, Iowa Democrats say Koch has yet to disclose whether the roughly 250 fertilizer plant workers could risk losing their jobs as a result of the acquisition.

Consolidation in agriculture is “squeezing farmers, it’s suppressing workers, and consumers are having to pay the most they ever have for groceries,” said Iowa State Rep. J.D. Scholten (D), who spearheaded a letter to the agencies on Feb. 5. “We as a society need to start judging some of these mergers.”

The labor movement “goes hand in hand with the anti-monopoly movement,” Scholten said. A federal probe would put a “huge spotlight” on the fertilizer deal, he added.

Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School focused on antitrust law, said federal antitrust enforcers are more aggressively scrutinizing mergers over labor impacts. But regulators must distinguish job losses resulting from violations of antitrust law from those that constitute lawful elimination of duplication in the wake of a merger or acquisition.

“When the government says it’s opening up an investigation, that doesn’t mean it’s made up its mind—it means it wants more information,” Hovenkamp said, referring to the potential for federal agencies to probe the Koch deal.

$3.6 Billion Purchase

Koch Industries subsidiary Koch Ag & Energy Solutions announced in December its purchase of the Iowa Fertilizer Company plant in the town of Wever from Dutch chemical company OCI Global. Koch, the second-largest private company in the US, is one of five companies that dominate the US fertilizer market, according to Mordor Intelligence.

Koch Fertilizer spokesperson Greg Lemon said the acquisition is “consistent with the significant investments we have made in our business to increase production, improve reliability, and expand our customers’ access to the products and services they need.”

The FTC and DOJ under the Biden administration have focused on labor market impacts, a departure from past decades of a narrower focus on consumer welfare. New merger guidelines finalized by the agencies in December include, for the first time, the effect of corporate mergers on workers. The FTC’s proposed updates to its merger review process also require standard disclosures from deal-making companies on how their workers will be affected.

Iowa State Rep. Megan Srinivas (D) said the antitrust agencies’ focus on investigating labor impacts “coincides nicely” with the potential harm to workers lawmakers have identified in connection with the Koch acquisition. A key motivation for the letter was to ensure job opportunities for the Iowa workforce, she said.

In their letter, the Iowa lawmakers argued workers, farmers, consumers, and taxpayers could all be harmed by concentration of market power resulting from Koch’s fertilizer acquisition.

DOJ and FTC spokespeople confirmed both agencies received the lawmakers’ letter but declined to comment on whether they intend to take action.

The Iowa Fertilizer Company plant Koch plans to acquire was built with more than $100 million in state tax subsidies and additional federal tax benefits, according to news reports and government announcements. When the project was announced in 2012, state officials said it would promote competition against companies like Koch and benefit local farmers. Srinivas linked lawmakers’ push for an antitrust investigation to the plant’s reliance on taxpayer dollars.

“We owe it to our constituents and Iowans that we decide whether the previous tax incentives will now unfortunately be undermined in their intent,” Srinivas said.

Agriculture and environmental groups also urged the FTC and DOJ to investigate the deal in a letter to the agencies in January.

To contact the reporter on this story: Danielle Kaye in Washington at dkaye@bloombergindustry.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anna Yukhananov at ayukhananov@bloombergindustry.com; Michael Smallberg at msmallberg@bloombergindustry.com

:===

dereliction of responsibilities': Elizabeth Warren calls out Janet Yellen for going easy on megabank mergers

https://www.alternet.org/janet-yellen-2661983964/

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-june-15-2022/

They are among the biggest companies in the world: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon have an outsized impact on the global economy and on our daily lives. Rob Larson examines the companies that have become synonymous with the glories and ills of contemporary capitalism. He makes the case for online socialism.

Resources:

Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley Haymarket Books, 2020

odd top 5 corps/monop in same sector, we rely utterly (even more than rr robber baron?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/corporate-lobbying/

no lnx twt

'Democracy for sale': Analysis ties corporate consolidation to increased lobbying

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams August 26, 2021

An analysis published Wednesday about corporate consolidation and political lobbying in the United States found that large mergers—particularly in Big Tech, the pharmaceutical industry, and the oil and gas sector—has increased corporate control of American democracy.

The new research paper from the American Economic Liberties—entitled Project Democracy for Sale: Examining the Effects of Concentration on Lobbying in the United States (pdf)—was authored by Reed Showalter, an attorney and a fellow at the anti-monopoly group.

"Concentrated markets are bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for innovation. But this research suggests that the concentration crisis in America is even more than a purely economic problem—it's also a democracy problem," Showalter said in a statement.

"We urgently need to understand and contain the power that monopolies have over the rest of us," he asserted. "Lawmakers, enforcers, and leaders cannot afford to ignore the widespread harms from concentration any longer."

The report emphasizes that "the bigger companies get, the more powerful they become. A large majority of Americans distrust concentrated economic power, and criticism of the world's largest companies is a regular part of discourse within America's political parties and around the world. Research has borne out the power of money in politics."

"Corporate lobbying works," the paper continues. "A number of studies show that the amount spent on lobbying positively impacts a firm's equity returns and market share. Firms that engage in lobbying also appear to have lower effective tax rates than those that do not."

Given those conditions, Showalter examined the U.S. internet, pharmaceutical, and fossil fuel sectors. The paper notes that the first case study "primarily includes digital platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix" and "does not extend, for example, to internet providers and other internet infrastructure companies."

The researcher found "a noteworthy relationship" between consolidation and political activity. Though the data is a bit limited—which the paper acknowledges, urging some degree of caution—it shows that "in all three industries, concentration appears to predict elevated lobbying spending."

According to Showalter:

In the oil and gas industry as well as among internet companies, the more market power a corporation acquires, the more it lobbies. In the pharmaceutical industry, the data is even more compelling. When pharmaceutical companies gained market power, they lobbied more, and when they lost market power, they lobbied less. One tentative conclusion from this analysis is that monopolies seek to acquire political power, whereas competitive businesses focus on competing with each other instead of dominating public rule-making bodies.

"In short, the results of this report suggest that not only is big business good at lobbying, but that bigger business leads to more lobbying," the paper says. "That means monopoly is a threat to representative democracy—and that protecting our democracy requires effective antitrust."

The report also addresses the political implications of Showalter's findings—specifically, the suggestion that the negative impacts of industry concentration "cannot be understood merely through the consumer welfare lens" and using that standard to govern antitrust "allows practitioners in the field to ignore non-price effects" of companies consolidating.

The new research "casts doubt on pure regulatory solutions that do not reduce concentration, since more lobbying can mitigate regulatory action or even turn regulatory choices into mechanisms to protect entrenched incumbents," the paper says. "If concentration begets political influence, then even a hypothetically economically efficient monopoly offering low consumer prices can still be an undemocratic usurper of political power."

In other words, according to the report, "stronger antitrust premised on reducing corporate concentration should be understood not just as a mechanism to address market power problems, but as an anti-corruption measure in itself."

Concluding that "corporate concentration and antidemocratic political influence go hand in hand," Showalter urges U.S. policymakers to recognize the limits of the consumer welfare standard when creating and implementing new regulations for major industries.

"The antitrust laws were a response to rising economic concentration, and the laws' framers recognized that concentrated economic power can poison our democracy," he writes. "This article is a starting point but hopefully also a reminder that antitrust is equipped and designed to grapple with the political ramifications of economic concentration. Those crafting and enforcing the doctrine should feel empowered to step into the shoes they were meant to fill."

The New York Times' "DealBook" newsletter noted Showalter's ties to President Joe Biden:

Showalter's report begins with an interesting acknowledgment, thanking Tim Wu, a former Columbia law professor who is now a technology and competition policy adviser at the White House. What's more, Showalter works at the law firm founded by Jonathan Kanter, whom President Biden recently nominated to lead the Justice Department's antitrust division. Showalter said that Kanter did not discuss the report with him and that his work as a fellow was separate from his day job. But he acknowledged more generally that the expansive approach to antitrust that his report advocated appeared to be ascendant in the halls of power.

The report comes as Congress is considering a package of antitrust bills advanced by the House Judiciary Committee in late June.Demand Progress executive director David Segal pointed out at the time that "many members are reciting Big Tech's talking points and pushing their amendments. This is why it is necessary that Congress act to break these companies up and diminish their power of speech, the economy, and our government."

"No matter what does or doesn't emerge from Congress in the coming weeks or months, it is vital that the Biden administration use existing tools to rein in the power of these monopolies," he added, calling Lina Khan, the president's pick to chair the Federal Trade Commission, "a tremendous step in this direction" and urging more similar actions that prioritize the public interest.

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All in the family

Dual-class voting structures have been around for decades.

When Ford Motor Co. went public in 1956, its founding family used the arrangement to maintain 40% of the voting rights. Newspaper companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post often use the arrangement to protect their journalistic independence from Wall Street's insatiable demands for profitability.

In a typical dual-class structure, the company will sell one class of shares to the public, usually called class A shares, while founders, executives and others retain class B shares with enough voting power to maintain majority voting control. This allows the class B shareholders to determine the outcome of matters that come up for a shareholder vote, such as who is on the company's board.

Advocates see a dual-class structure as a way to fend off short-term thinking. In principle, this insulation from investor pressure can allow the company to take a long-term perspective and make tough strategic changes even at the expense of short-term share price declines. Family-controlled businesses often view it as a way to preserve their legacy, which is why Ford remains a family company after more than a century.

It also makes a company effectively**immune from hostile takeovers** and the whims of activist investors.

Checks and balances

But this insulation comes at a cost for investors, who lose a crucial check on management.

Indeed, dual-class shares essentially short-circuit almost all the other means that limit executive power. The board of directors, elected by shareholder vote, is the ultimate authority within the corporation that oversees management. Voting for directors and proposals on the annual ballot are the main methods shareholders have to ensure management accountability, other than simply selling their shares.

Recent research shows that the value and stock returns of dual-class companies are lower than other businesses, and they're more likely to overpay their CEO and waste money on expensive acquisitions.

Companies with dual-class shares rarely made up more than 10% of public listings in a given year until the 2000s, when tech startups began using them more frequently, according to data collected by University of Florida business professor Jay Ritter. The dam began to break after Facebook went public in 2012 with a dual-class stock structure that kept founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control – he alone controls almost 60% of the company.

In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.

This has alarmed governance experts, some investors and legal scholars.

Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder

If the dual-class structure is bad for investors, then why are so many tech companies able to convince them to buy their shares when they go public?

I attribute it to Silicon Valley's mythology of the founder –- what I would dub an “Ayn Rand theory of corporate governance" that credits founders with superhuman vision and competence that merit deference from lesser mortals. Rand's novels, most notably “Atlas Shrugged," portray an America in which titans of business hold up the world by creating innovation and value but are beset by moochers and looters who want to take or regulate what they have created.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rand has a strong following among tech founders, whose creative genius may be “threatened" by any form of outside regulation. Elon Musk, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and even the late Steve Jobs all have recommended “Atlas Shrugged."

Her work is also celebrated by the venture capitalists who typically finance tech startups – many of whom were founders themselves.

The basic idea is simple: Only the founder has the vision, charisma and smarts to steer the company forward.

It begins with a powerful founding story. Michael Dell and Zuckerberg created their multibillion-dollar companies in their dorm rooms. Founding partner pairs Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their first computer companies in the garage – Apple and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. Often the stories are true, but sometimes, as in Apple's case, less so.

And from there, founders face a gantlet of rigorous testing: recruiting collaborators, gathering customers and, perhaps most importantly, attracting multiple rounds of funding from venture capitalists. Each round serves to further validate the founder's leadership competence.

The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed dozens of tech companies, including Airbnb, Palantir and Lyft, is one of the biggest proselytizers for this myth, as it makes clear in its “manifesto."

“The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place," it asserts. True to its stated belief, the fund says it has “never removed a single founder," which is why it has been a big supporter of dual-class share structures.

Another venture capitalist who seems to favor giving founders extra power is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. His venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is Coinbase's biggest investor. And most of the companies in its portfolio that have gone public also used a dual-class share structure, according to my own review of their securities filings.

Bad for companies, bad for democracy

Giving founders voting control disrupts the checks and balances needed to keep business accountable and can lead to big problems.

WeWork founder Adam Neumann, for example, demanded “unambiguous authority to fire or overrule any director or employee." As his behavior became increasingly erratic, the company hemorrhaged cash in the lead-up to its ultimately canceled initial public offering.

Investors forced out Uber's Travis Kalanick in 2017, but not before he's said to have created a workplace culture that allegedly allowed sexual harassment and discrimination to fester. When Uber finally went public in 2019, it shed its dual-class structure.

There is some evidence that founder-CEOs are less gifted at management than other kinds of leaders, and their companies' performance can suffer as a consequence.

But investors who buy shares in these companies know the risks going in. There's much more at stake than their money.

What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?

The tech sector is increasingly laying claim to central command posts of the U.S. economy. Americans' access to news and information, financial services, social networks and even groceries is mediated by a handful of companies controlled by a handful of people.

Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter were able to eject former President Donald Trump from his favorite means of communication – virtually silencing him overnight. And Apple, Google and Amazon cut off Parler, the right-wing social media platform used by some of the insurrectionists to plan their actions. Not all of these companies have dual-class shares, but this illustrates just how much power tech companies have over America's political discourse.

One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.

Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

The Pattern

The battle to break up Facebook is on. This week, the Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general filed antitrust suits against the company that could permanently alter the shape of the internet. They charge that Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, coupled with policies that excluded rivals from its platform, were a clear effort to monopolize “personal social networking.” And they are seeking to break up Facebook by forcing it to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, which have become massive platforms in their own right since Facebook bought them in 2012 and 2014, respectively....

an 1020

justice Department and 11 states sue Google in antitrust case: 'Long overdue'

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumpcare-doesnt-exist-but-that-doesnt-stop-nevertheless-facebook-and-google-cash-in-on-misleading-ads-for-garbage-health-insurance-h1/

Turns out letting ‘efficient’ monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea

Claire Kelloway / Washington Monthly

For many Americans, grocery shopping has become an intensely stressful experience. To maintain social distancing, people must queue before entering stores. Once inside, they must scramble to find increasingly scarce…

Tim Wu Curse of Bigness

new gilded age

audio interview: https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-january-1-2020/

ITT 400K$ to nixon to get doj to drop monop case trms 12/19

Attorneys General from 48 U.S. Territories Launch Antitrust Probe into Google

omg

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-entire-us-federal-government-is-becoming-trumps-glorified-fixer/

no lnx

The entire US federal government is becoming Trump’s glorified ‘fixer’

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 10, 2019

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department had opened an anti-trust investigation into four automakers. The issue wasn’t that the companies were colluding to fix prices or eliminate competition, it was that they had all agreed to abide by the fuel efficiency standards imposed by the state of California.

The Trump administration has been attempting to write a new rule to roll back the fuel efficiency standards adopted by Obama’s EPA. However, Coral Davenport and Hiroko Tabuchi reported that those efforts were running into problems.

In the Trump administration, three senior political officials working on the rollback, a complex legal and scientific process, have all left the administration recently. A senior career official with years of experience on vehicle pollution policy was transferred to another office.

That means the process is now being run by Francis Brooke, a 29-year-old White House aide with limited experience in climate change policy before moving over from Vice President Mike Pence’s office last year. Given the lack of experienced senior staff members, people working on the plan say it is unlikely to be completed before October.

They went on to write that, during White House meetings on the topic, Trump was prepared to drop the roll back of Obama’s fuel efficiency standards and had shifted his focus to coming up with ways to retaliate against both the automakers and the state of California.

According to a more recent report from Davenport, the rollback now appears to have been put on hold, but retaliation efforts are going full steam ahead. The anti-trust investigation appears to be the way the administration is taking on the automakers, which is why the editorial board of the New York Times issued this stinging rebuke.

President Trump’s Justice Department — for it is increasingly clear that the department has been reduced to an arm of the White House — has opened an antitrust investigation of four auto companies that had the temerity to defy the president by voluntarily agreeing to reduce auto emissions below the level required by current federal law.

The investigation is an act of bullying, plain and simple: a nakedly political abuse of authority…

The investigation is particularly striking because the department has shown little interest in preventing corporations from engaging in actual anticompetitive behavior. This summer, for example, the department blessed T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint, a deal likely to harm mobile phone consumers and workers, and to impede innovation.

If the Justice Department wants to get serious about antitrust enforcement, there are plenty of places to get started. This investigation is an embarrassment. It might as well wheel out the statue of Lady Justice and replace it with a bronze marionette.

According to the WSJ, the state of California also received a letter that threatened legal action.

On Friday, top lawyers at the Transportation Department and Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to California’s top air regulator, Mary Nichols. It urged her to dissociate the state from the four auto makers, saying the commitment may result in undefined legal consequences.

“The purpose of this letter is to put California on noticethat this framework agreement appears to be inconsistent with Federal law,” the letter states. “Congress has squarely vested the authority to set fuel economy standards for new motor vehicles, and nationwide standards for (greenhouse-gas) vehicle emissions, with the Federal government, not with California or any other State.”

That last sentence is the kicker, because it’s not true. Robinson Meyer provides some historical background.

When Congress amended the Clean Air Act in 1970, it empowered the EPA to set new national standards on air pollution from cars and factories. It was the federal government’s most aggressive attempt ever to address the dangers of smog and toxic air pollution.

But this was old hat for California, which had already been dealing with smog for two decades…When Congress began drafting the 1970 Clean Air Act, the state fought to maintain its ongoing regulatory scheme. It argued that its program should be left alone, since it was successful, and that its air problems were naturally worse than other states’…

California succeeded—and dramatically so. California is written into the Clean Air Act by name: At any time, it can ask the EPA administrator for a waiver to restrict tailpipe pollution more stringently than the federal government. If its proposed rules are “at least as protective of public health and welfare” as the EPA’s, then the administrator must grant the waiver…

Under the same provision, any other state can choose to adopt California’s more stringent standards. Fifteen states currently opt for the tougher rules, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and the entire New York metro area. This means that California’s rules actually cover 135 million people, more than 40 percent of the U.S. population.

So what the lawyers at the Transportation Department and the EPA should have said in that letter to Mary Nichols is that they are preparing a plan to revoke California’s authority to set its own vehicle greenhouse gas standards. But I suppose that wouldn’t have sounded as threatening.

What we are seeing in all of this is that the Justice Department, as well as the Transportation Department and the EPA, are being used to retaliate against institutions on behalf of the president. This is the same kind of corruption of the federal government we’ve seen recently on everything from the NOAA’s defense of “sharpie gate,” to the Air Force being used to prop up a failing Trump business, and the State Department withholding funds from Ukraine in order to pressure that country into investigating a potential Trump opponent.

As Jonathan Chait notes:

This is the story of 2019, as Trump has replaced institutionalists attempting to curtail his grossest instincts with loyalists happy to indulge them. It is playing out across multiple dimensions. This is the through-line between several seemingly disconnected episodes from the last several days…Trump’s stench is slowly seeping into every corner of government.

In other words, the entire federal government has been corralled into being nothing more than a glorified “fixer” for Donald Trump.

elizabeth Warren asks why the Justice Department went easy on big banks

Kevin Wack, Jesse Eisinger / ProPublicaAugust 20, 2019

After an article by ProPublica and American Banker examining how the DOJ softened settlements with RBS and Barclays, the presidential candidate blasts settlements that let banks “evade accountability.”

aha fang extracts from press

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/a-leading-democrat-has-a-plan-to-save-journalism-from-the-tech-giants/

no lnx

A leading Democrat has a plan to save journalism from the tech giants

Written by Grace Gedye / Washington Monthly August 9, 2019

This was a bad week for journalism, in a depressingly familiar way.

On Monday, the investment firm that controls the newspaper publisher GateHouse Media bought Gannett, another publishing giant, which runs the USA Today network. Both companies own hundreds of newspapers around the country, and had already instituted layoffs this year. Meanwhile, public filings indicate that cost cutting will continue to be a priority, according to the Washington Post.

Then, on Wednesday, Pacific Standard, an online magazine focusing on social and environmental justice, announced abruptly that it would be shutting down. The same day, Governing, which covers state and local policy, said in a statement that it would be closing because it had proven “unsustainable as a business in today’s media environment.”

It’s part of a much larger trend: with Facebook and Google sucking up ever-increasing shares of ad revenue, publications are finding it harder and harder to stay financially viable.

One member of Congress thinks he has a solution. This spring, Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline proposed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill that would allow news publishers to collectively bargain with giant tech companies and negotiate the terms under which their content is republished.

It’s part of Cicilline’s broader effort to counter the negative effects of market consolidation. As chair of the House’s antitrust subcommittee, he has emerged as one of the most prominent critics in Washington of tech giants and monopoly power. This year, he’s leading a congressional investigation into Big Tech, summoning executives to Capitol Hill and grilling them on whether they squash competitors. I spoke with him this week about local journalism, the increasing popularity of reviving antitrust, and whether he thinks President Trump will be an ally—or an obstacle—in the effort.

This conversation has been shortened and edited for clarity

GG: I’d like to start by talking about the topic of yourfirst hearing in the antitrust investigations, which was the impact on local journalism. Why did you choose to start with that subject?

DC: I think this is one of the areas where the market dominance of these large technology platforms is having a really serious and negative impact on our democracy. This is not just about their market dominance resulting in some impact on the sale of widgets, but this is really about the ability of citizens of this country to access trustworthy, reliable, local news, and a free and diverse press—particularly a local press—is really essential to the proper functioning of our democracy.[ANOTHER KIND OF DE FACTO PRESS SUPPRESSION?!]

GG: You proposed a bill in the spring that would allow news publications to collectively bargain with online platforms like Facebook and Google that republish their content. What motivated you to write that bill?

DC: When you look at what’s happening in the marketplace, you see that the vast majority of American people access their news through two large platforms, Facebook and Google. And Facebook and Google have amassed enormous revenue from online advertising—$60 billion last year, the majority of all online revenue. At the very same time, despite [publications’] record levels of online readership, there’s been a steep decline in revenues as a result of the rise of these two large technology giants. And you’re seeing all across the country the impact on newsrooms where people are being laid off, newspapers are closing, and in a lot of ways, local journalism is on life support. So, the legislation I’ve proposed, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, provides an interim step to stabilize the marketplace by allowing producers of content online and small newspapers to collectively negotiate with the two large technology platforms.

GG: So, were this bill to pass, what are some specific measures that you could see news organizations pushing for in their negotiations?

DC: Well, I’ll leave it up to them to negotiate, but I think there’s no doubt they will attempt to negotiate terms that ensure that the branding and attribution—that is, when a newspaper has invested significantly in their brand because of high-quality and accurate journalism, then I think they want to be sure that that brand is protected. So, my guess is they would negotiate about attribution and branding, that they would negotiate about making certain that these platforms are not engaged in discriminatory conduct which favors their own publications.

GG: Antitrust seems to be having a resurgence of popularity in the past year or couple of years. It’s now a much more frequent topic of debate in national politics, but we obviously had huge companies before these past couple of years. Why do you think this subject is gaining traction now?

DC: I think we’re beginning to see the consequences of this enormous market concentration: in significant data breaches, in the widespread use of false information on the internet, the consequences of the interference in the American presidential election, the work by Cambridge Analytica. At least in the Democratic Party, we’ve very much focused on developing an economic agenda that really speaks to the anxieties of the American people, the economic anxieties, and focuses on getting the economy to work for everyone, raising family incomes, and being sure that we’re reducing the cost of people’s lives. The kind of mega-mergers and market concentration that we’re seeing is part of the reason that the economy isn’t working for everyone. I think people have just really begun to understand that our failure to be aggressive in antitrust enforcement has contributed to very substantial market concentration and some of the worst income inequality in our country’s history.

GG: For about the past 40 years, much of the discussion about why monopolies are bad—including antitrust legal decisions—has focused on consumer prices, the logic being that monopoly power is bad because it results in higher prices for consumers. But during the antitrust committee hearing that you had a couple of weeks ago, with lawyers from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, I noticed that very few of your questions had to do with impact on consumer prices. Is that a deliberate pivot?

DC: In the age in which attention is a commodity, and where your attention is monetized for ad revenue, the idea that focusing on, “Well, Facebook and Google are free”—but they’re not actually free. You’re giving them your attention, which is really the coin of the realm. Even in the context where it feels like the service is free, antitrust principles are important. In some ways even more important, because it may feel like “Oh, what’s the big deal, this is all free,” but if in fact they are crushing competitors by excluding them or acquiring them so that there’s no real competition, that has a very adverse impact on innovation. We want to make sure that the next Facebook, or the next Amazon, or the next Google has the ability to be successful.

So, this idea of really seriously impacting innovation is significant. If they are favoring their own products and services while giving you the impression that the search is done in some kind of neutral way, that’s also harmful to the consumer. I think the reason that you probably didn’t hear a lot about consumer prices is that there’s a recognition that that factor alone is insufficient to appreciate the dangers of monopolies and a lack of competition in the 21st century.

GG: Do you think your Republican colleagues agree that we have a monopoly problem?

DC: Yes. I don’t know if they’ll agree with every solution, but I think this is a bipartisan investigation, and I think my Republican colleagues have at least expressed a willingness to be part of the investigation, and help identify some solutions.

GG: So, two weeks or so ago, President Trump said that the government “should be suing Google and Facebook” and then said, “perhaps we will.” The Justice Department also recently opened an antitrust review of tech companies. Do you think President Trump will be an ally in the committee’s work?

DC: Unclear. You know, I don’t take the President at his word, to be very honest. I think this administration has not been effective at all in taking on the question of the technology giants and the deep concentration of market power in the technology platforms, or in monopolies generally. It’s an administration that seems to favor the very wealthy and big corporate interests, so I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that the president is going to be on the side of consumers and workers in the antitrust work and the work for our committee, but we’ll see.

GG: Have you at all been in touch with the president about the committee’s work?

DC: No.

https://truthout.org/video/as-amazon-continues-undercutting-rivals-workers-demand-fair-pay-and-conditions/

[over simple econ 101 invis hand?

... GOODMAN: On Tuesday, Democratic Congressmember David Cicilline of Rhode Island questioned the associate general counsel at Amazon, Nate Sutton.

REP. DAVID CICILLINE: I just want to give you an example of an entrepreneur in Rhode Island who creates a better set of headphones. She sells her product on Amazon, on the Marketplace. Sales soar, which is great for her, great for Amazon, because more people will become Amazon Prime customers to buy this great Rhode Island product.

But instead of seeing the fruits of her success, the next thing that happens is that this hard-working Rhode Islander discovers that Amazon has rolled out a direct replica of her product. And because Amazon controls the platform, Amazon gives itself top billing and demotes the entrepreneur to page three results, which most people will never see.

So, how would anyone — in light of that kind of sequence of events, how would any entrepreneur invest in this kind of environment where that can happen, where there’s no assurance it won’t?

NATE SUTTON: Our incentive is to help the seller succeed, because we rely on them. If we did that, we know they’d go elsewhere. They have many options. So we apply the same criteria to both, and we do not use their individual data when we’re making decisions to launch private brands.

AMY GOODMAN: Nate Sutton, the associate general counsel at Amazon, answering the questions of the Rhode Island Congressmember David Cicilline. Stacy Mitchell, your response?

STACY MITCHELL: Yeah, well, it’s simply not true that merchants have other options. Amazon’s one out of every two dollars spent online and a huge amount of shopping search. You know, the next biggest one is eBay, at about 6%. So it really drops off from there. You know, I interview, for our research, lots of sellers, and they consistently tell me Amazon is the main deal. There is really nowhere else. And increasingly, more and more over time, particularly as Prime memberships grow, as Alexa becomes the voice interface for a lot of homes, people are more and more defaulting to Amazon.

...

https://www.wired.com/story/house-antitrust-hearing-amazon-facebook/

TODAY’S YOUNGER, MORE tech-savvy breed of House Democrats may spend a lot of their time online, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy with the tech companies they rely on. In fact, it seems the more testimony they hear from top Silicon Valley executives, the louder their calls to regulate these behemoth technology firms become.

This was starkly on display Tuesday, as senior officials fromAmazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google testifiedin front of a powerfulHouse Judiciary subcommittee as a part of an ongoing investigation into potential antitrust violations from the nation’s tech giants.

All the executives maintained that their companies face fierce competition at every turn, especially now with Chinese competitors like WeChat and TikTok eating into their global market share. But whenever Democrats pressed them about the details that are the foundation of those claims and their business practices, they rebuffed the questions and said they’d have to report back later.

“It is frustrating. It definitely is frustrating, which definitely means that we’re asking the right kinds of questions and that we recognize that this is an ongoing issue,” freshman representative Lucy McBath (D–Georgia) told WIRED as she was exiting the committee room. “We need to always make sure there’s always healthy competition, you know, more choices for consumers.”

While tech companies like Google have been investigated and fined overseas for anticompetitive practices (in fact, the European Union just opened a new investigation into Amazon this week), US lawmakers and regulators have traditionally been more laissez-faire on antitrust. That’s changed over the past few years, however, amid a wider reckoning with the size and power of these companies and their impacts on everything from consumer privacy to American democracy. Congress is watching Silicon Valley closely—three separate tech hearings took place across Capitol Hill on Tuesday alone. Some lawmakers, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have even proposed breaking up some of the companies.

At the antitrust hearing, Amazon and Facebook executives faced the brunt of lawmakers’ increasing annoyance with what many feel is Silicon Valley titans’ dismissive treatment of the political class in Washington.

“Is Facebook, in your view, a monopoly?” freshman representative Joe Neguse (D–Colorado) asked Matt Perault, Facebook's public policy director.

“No, congressman, it is not,” Perault replied.

That answer didn’t sit well with Neguse, who went on to press Perault about the scope of a company that also includes Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger—giving Facebook four of the top slots in today’s social media landscape.

“When a company owns four of the largest six entities measured by active users in the world in that industry, we have a word for that,” Neguse said. “And that’s monopoly.”

Still, Perault ended the hearing where he began, claiming Facebook has a number of business rivals in today’s marketplace. “Many of our competitors are sitting at this table with me,” he argued.

The tech firms did find some sympathetic ears on the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, including the top Republican on the panel. “Just because a business is big doesn’t mean it is bad,” representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R–Wisconsin) told his colleagues and the executives at one point.

Democrats weren’t arguing big is bad. They were arguing too big, too powerful, and too unregulated is bad for consumers, which is why a couple of lawmakers pressed Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel for competition, about its acquisition policies.

“When people sell products on your site, do you track which products are most successful and then do you sometimes create a product to compete with that product?” representative Pramila Jayapal (D–Washington) asked, a line of questioning she returned to again.

Throughout the hearing. Sutton maintained the company line: “We do not use individual seller data in order to compete with them.”

The chair of the antitrust subcommittee seemed to view that claim with skepticism, reminding Sutton twice that he was under oath. "You do collect enormous data about what products are popular, what’s selling, where they’re selling," representative David Cicilline (D–Rhode Island) told the witness. “You’re saying you don’t use that in any way to promote Amazon products? And I’d remind you, you’re under oath.”

“We use data to serve our customers,” Sutton replied.

That answer isn’t what Jayapal wanted to hear. She has been exploring setting up a board of experts to oversee and regulate these Silicon Valley firms.

“The argument they’re trying to make is: They don’t acquire competition; they acquire businesses that make their business better, and oh, if they happen to be competitors, well oops, that’s not why they acquired them,” she told WIRED after asking her questions. “I think that’s disingenuous.”

####

After the executives were dismissed, Cicilline vented to reporters outside the hearing room.

“I think we’re going to have to test some of the representations that were at this hearing to facts that we collect during the course of the investigation,” Cicilline said. “I don’t think there’s any question that we cannot expect them to regulate themselves. We’ve seen the total absence of any ability to regulate themselves, so I think it will absolutely require some action by Congress.”

Cicillinesays that action could come in the form of new laws, working with the relevant federal agencies to tighten regulations on their own, or through Congress providing more resources to antitrust agencies with the express purpose of keeping these companies on the perpetual hot seat—or even a combination of all three.

“The notion that they all see themselves in fierce competition I think strains credulity,” he said.

This was the antitrust subcommittee’s second hearing into what many call the monopolistic practices of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, and they’re not done.

“This was an important hearing to have, but we have a lot of work to do to continue to understand and collect evidence about the anti-competitive behavior or the absence of competition, about the practices of favoring their own services and products,” Cicilline said. “We have a lot more to do.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/19/big_techs_war_for_your_wallet

In a move that could reshape the world’s financial system, Facebook has unveiled plans to launch a new global digital currency called Libra. Facebook announced its plans on Tuesday after secretly working on the cryptocurrency for more than a year. It will launch Libra next year in partnership with other large companies including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber. Facebook said it wants to create “a simple global currency and infrastructure that empowers billions of people.” The plan has already come under fierce criticism from financial regulators and lawmakers. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown tweeted, “Facebook is already too big and too powerful, and it has used that power to exploit users’ data without protecting their privacy. We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.” We speak with David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect. He recently wrote a piece for The New Republic headlined “The Final Battle in Big Tech’s War to Dominate Your World.”

BAK no lnx

monopoly619

619 see anti-trust too big to fail

bak

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Bayer apologizes for Monsanto PR firm's media list | The Japan Times ›

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/how-a-failing-capitalist-system-is-allowing-amazon-to-cripple-america/

Capitalism is failing in America, and Amazon is both the cause and beneficiary of much of the breakdown.

Jeff Bezos said, “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” He might have added three capitalist practices familiar to his company: (1) Pay no taxes; (2) Drive competitors out of business; and (3) Exploit workers.

Anarcho-Capitalism: The Sordid Details of Amazon’s Tax Avoidance

In 2018, according to its own SEC filings, Amazon claimed a refund on its $11 billion in U.S. profits. It did the same on nearly $6 billion in profits in 2017. The company has reportedly positioned itself to avoid even more future taxes with unspecified tax credits.

In the most extreme form of capitalism taxes do not exist. This is called “anarcho-capitalism.” Among all corporations, Amazon may be the leading advocate of this philosophy. They haven’t paid federal income tax for the past two years. They set up headquarters in Luxembourg for tax breaks that are now being challenged. They claim minimal profits on hundreds of billions in revenue, resulting in one of the lowest profit margins among major corporations, and thus much less tax. Of course, Amazon claims to be using tax credits from past losses that stemmed from investment in research and development (R&D). But the company appears to overstate and obfuscate the R&D numbers. Its only ‘explanation’ of R&D in its annual report comes in an ambiguously all-encompassing section called “Technology and Content.” Plus, that’s no excuse to dodge taxes. Walmart and Google each spent nearly $12 billion on technology in 2018, almost as much as Amazon, but Walmart paid 28 percent in federal taxes, and Google 14 percent.

We learn much more at the state level. Amazon has played one state against another for tax breaks over the years, most recently negotiating an estimated $3 billion tax credit from the state of New York before residents rebelled — as well they should have. The Economic Policy Institute found that employment levels don’t significantly change in communities with new Amazon warehouses, and a recent study by The Economist concluded that the opening of a fulfillment center in a given community actually depresses warehouse wages. Furthermore, as an indication of the folly of wooing corporations with state subsidies, Upjohn research found that in the great majority of cases incentives are not even a part of a company’s decision to locate in a given area.

Most insidiously, Amazon’s seemingly fair-minded acceptance of state sales taxes likely has a dark side. For years the company fought the state tax as it built a competitive advantage over smaller firms. Now that it’s firmly established, online variety and convenience have replaced price as the primary incentives for most consumers, and so Amazon now supports a sales tax, very likely to discourage competition. Evidence comes from one study that found Walmart 34 percent cheaper than Amazon in four of five product categories.

Monopoly: Amazon and the Killing of Competition

Kiplinger compiled a remarkable list of 49 companies, many of them familiar to almost all Americans, that are in danger of being driven out of business by Amazon. One of them, Toys ‘r’ Us, has already succumbed. Sears is nearly gone. Others include Barnes & Noble, Kroger, Rite Aid, Best Buy, Etsy, Yelp, Pandora, and even stalwarts like Target and Trader Joe’s and UPS and Fedex and Office Depot and Staples. Investopedia agrees, adding Macy’s and even Walgreen’s and CVS and Costco.

In a summary of “The Myth of Capitalism,” by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn, it is argued that “an increase in market concentration across the United States has resulted in a system that is not true capitalism, since freedom is being restricted…Amazon is crushing retailers…It can determine what products can and cannot sell on its platform, and it competes with any customer that encounters success.” Columbia University and UN economist Howard Steven Friedman adds, “Monopolies are one example of capitalism failing. Monopolies have virtually no competition and can dictate prices to their customers unless they are restricted by regulators.”

Of course, along the way Amazon has destroyed or dismantled or discouraged many smaller businesses. Like the jewelry store in New Mexico owned by Candelora Versace, who said her customers have started buying gems online, in part to avoid state taxes, and then visiting her store just for the settings. She considers the far-reaching effects of Amazon’s tax avoidance: “The roads don’t pay themselves. The schools don’t fund themselves…When they don’t want to pay the tax, it cheats us.”

Labor in Decline: The Economic and Physical Abuse of Amazon’s Workers

Amazon warehouse workers make about $13 per hour. That’s not a living wage for a U.S. family of four, and not even for a single person in many areas of the country. So the employees of this super-rich company turn to food stamps, letting U.S. taxpayers take care of them. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, one in ten Amazon workers were recently on SNAP. In Arizona, one in three. Along with the low pay comes intolerable working conditions, with overheated warehouses and employees using water bottles to avoid bathroom breaks in order to meet their schedules. And worse, employees have suffered workplace injuries that leave them homeless, disabled, or unable to earn an income. Employees are also forced to deal with constant surveillance, anti-union pressure, and the threat of losing their jobs. Much of Amazon’s over-hyped R&D spending is focused on the development of robots to replace human workers.

Capitalism has failed workers, and it has caused a surge in inequality that gets worse with each passing year. In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty showed that for 40 years, from 1970 to 2010, labor’s share of national income (wages and salaries) has declined. Stanford research reveals that “the declining labor share at the economy level is driven by the growth of large firms.” Like Amazon.

A Good Reason for Democratic Socialism

There may be no better argument for democratic socialism in America than the way individual state leaders have been falling over each other trying to lure corporations to their states with tax subsidies. We Americans have never been able to cooperate in ending this pointless waste of tax money that should be going to education and jobs and infrastructure.

Does Jeff Bezos have any sense of social responsibility for all the societal benefits heaped upon his company? Amazon has arguably benefited more than any other company from what The Economist calls the “game-changing breakthroughs” of the Internet, which was built with our tax money through the National Science Foundation since the 1980s, and before that by the taxpayer-funded Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Fortune refers to Amazon’s actions as “extracting public money for its own enrichment.”

But perhaps the Amazon boss doesn’t care. According to The Atlantic, “Bezos has argued that there is not enough philanthropic need on earth for him to spend his billions on.” If that truly reflects the man’s attitude, it shows an incomprehensible ignorance or disdain on his part. Bezos himself said, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel…I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.”

Good work, Jeff. Benefit from seventy years of public inventiveness and productivity and funding, and then fly off to the skies before you have to pay for it.

verizon merger? saudis buy whole floors?

Needing Trump's backing, telecom giant books rooms at his hotel ...

www.msnbc.com/.../needing-trumps-backing-telecom-giant-books-rooms-his-hotel

4 days ago - 21, 2106, the Trump International Hotel in Washington. ... a $26 billion merger with rival Sprint, which would more than double T-Mobile's value ...

Missing: verizon ?| ?Must include: ?

verizon

NB aha less diversity on marketplace and species

What Would a Monsanto-Bayer Merger Really Grow?

By Courtney Lindwall

A megamerger between two of the world's biggest agricultural corporations looms on the horizon. The seed and pesticide giant Monsanto is inching closer to uniting with the German pharmaceutical and chemical company Bayer—a consolidation that could spell disaster for farmers, pollinators, and affordable, healthy food.

Here's why the Monsanto-Bayer merger is a toxic relationship:

One-Stop Shopping for Increased Pesticide Use

When the same people who sell seeds for pesticide-resistant crops also make the pesticides, there's a huge incentive for that company to encourage chemical-heavy growing practices, cashing in twice on farmers who become ever more dependent on its products. And when pests and weeds inevitably develop a resistance to those chemicals? More seeds. More pesticides.

If the merger gets the green light, the result is a megacorporation, not a recipe for competition and innovation. In the past, such monopolies have cost small farmers big-time. Take corn, for example. As the likes of Monsanto and other big ag companies gobbled up smaller seed sellers in recent decades, the cost of corn seed nearly quadrupled while corn prices are roughly the same as they were in 1996.

Bad News for Bees and Butterflies

As you likely know, pollinators are in trouble. Bees are dying off in record numbers (without them, our crops would take a serious hit) and monarch butterfly numbers have dropped nearly 90 percent in just the past two decades. While climate change and habitat loss are contributing to these declines, we can also point a finger at neonics and glyphosate—two types of pesticides commonly found in Bayer and Monsanto products. Americans are spraying more and more of these toxins on crops and lawns—we used 3.5 million pounds of neonics in 2011 alone (double the amount used just five years earlier)—and pollinators are paying the price.

Our Wallets Could Also Be Taking a Hit, Along With Our Health

As farmers pay more for seeds and Monsanto-Bayer rakes in more cash, American families could be forking over more money at the grocery store. One in eight families in the U.S. already struggle to put dinner on the table, and climate change threatens to disrupt food production worldwide. Further, the World Health Organization classifies glyphosate, the widely used herbicide found in Monsanto's Roundup, as a probable carcinogen, and increasing its use would only put more fieldworkers, consumers, and those living near farms at risk.

In these challenging times, we need a more diverse marketplace—one that values public health, the environment, and the rights of farmers—to spur innovation and encourage resilient food supplies. What we don't need is a megacorporation with the power (and the financial incentive) to lock in a food system that douses our food and soils with toxic chemicals.

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/1/a_threat_to_global_democracy_how

nyu biz school The Four

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-july-2-2018/ alexa agent AI

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/

I've benefited enormously from big tech. Prophet, the consulting firm I cofounded in 1992, helped companies navigate a new landscape being reshaped by Google. Red Envelope, the upscale e-commerce company I cofounded in 1997, never would have made it out of the crib if Amazon hadn’t ignited the market’s interest in e-commerce. More recently, L2, which I founded in 2010, was born from the mobile and social waves as companies needed a way to benchmark their performance on new platforms.

Over the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—or, as I call them, “the Four”—have aggregated more economic value and influence than nearly any other commercial entity in history. Together, they have a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion (the GDP of France), a staggering 24 percent share of the S&P 500 Top 50, close to the value of every stock traded on the Nasdaq in 2001.The benefits of big tech have accrued for me on another level as well. In my investment portfolio, the appreciation of Amazon and Apple stock restored economic security to my household after being run over in the Great Recession. Finally, Amazon is now the largest recruiter of students from the brand-strategy and digital-marketing courses I teach at NYU Stern School of Business. These firms have been great partners, clients, investments, and recruiters. And the sum of two decades of experience with, and study of, these companies leads me to a singular conclusion: It’s time to break up big tech.

How big are they? Consider that Amazon, with a market cap of $591 billion, is worth more to the stock market than Walmart, Costco, T. J. Maxx, Target, Ross, Best Buy, Ulta, Kohl’s, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Saks/Lord & Taylor, Dillard’s, JCPenney, and Sears combined.

[graph only foe few]

...

Meanwhile, Facebook and Google (now known as Alphabet) are together worth $1.3 trillion. You could merge the world’s top five advertising agencies (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, and Dentsu) with five major media companies (Disney, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, CBS, and Viacom) and still need to add five major communications companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and Dish) to get only 90 percent of what Google and Facebook are worth together.

And what of Apple? With a market cap of nearly $900 billion, Apple is the most valuable public company. Even more remarkable is that the company registers profit margins of 32 percent, closer to luxury brands Hermès (35 percent) and Ferrari (29 percent) than peers in electronics. In 2016, Apple brought in $46 billion in profits, a haul larger than that of any other American company, including JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, and Wells Fargo. What’s more, Apple’s profits were greater than the revenues of either Coca- Cola or Facebook. This quarter, it will clock nearly twice the profits that Amazon has produced in its history.

The Four’s wealth and influence are staggering. How did we get here?

As I wrote in my book, The Four, the only way to build a company with the dominance and mass influence of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple is to appeal to a core human organ that makes adoption of the platform instinctive.

GOOGLE: MIND-ALTERING....

booktv saul bellow kid adam

zephyr teachout

1981 RR stopped enforcing anti-trust, no one has since.

3/18

https://www.ecowatch.com/bayer-monsanto-merger-2550813842.html

EU Approves Controversial Bayer-Monsanto Merger

The European Union approved Bayer's takeover of Monsanto, a major hurdle in the $66 billion merger that would create the world's largest integrated seed and pesticide conglomerate.

The European Commission said the German chemical-maker's takeover of the St. Louis-based agribusiness giant is "conditional on an extensive remedy package, which addresses the parties' overlaps in seeds, pesticides and digital agriculture."

see chart

Report: Global Food Chain Increasingly Threatened by Corporate Consolidation

https://www.ecowatch.com/corporations-global-food-2504858599.html

Report: Global Food Chain Increasingly Threatened by Corporate Consolidation 11/17.

As the European Commission considers a proposed mega-merger between Bayer and Monsanto, new research published Tuesday illustrates how corporations are monopolizing the global food system—jeopardizing consumer choice, labor conditions and efforts to eradicate world hunger.

The Agrifood Atlas (pdf), which was jointly published by two German foundations and Friends of the Earth Europe, found that "two trends coincide in the agrifood sector: ever-fewer corporations are taking control of an ever-bigger market share and are gaining influence in many parts of the world. At the same time, the opportunities for civil society and social movements to oppose such developments are being restricted."

"The fight for market share is achieved at the expense of the weakest links in the chain: farmers, and workers," the report explains. "The price pressure exerted by supermarkets and food firms is a major cause of poor working conditions and poverty further back in the chain. It also promotes the onward march of industrial agriculture and its associated effects on the environment and climate."

The atlas warns that further corporate consolidation throughout the global food chain will exacerbate issues that have already been perpetuated, in whole or in part, by past mergers among major companies in the agrifood sector. Those issues include:

Less consumer choice;

A risk to future food production;

Job cuts and low wages;

Price pressure through buyers' cartels; and

A situation where the poorest stay hungry despite an oversupply of food.

"The increasing size and power of agrifood corporations threatens the quality of our food, the working conditions of the people producing it, and our ability to feed future generations," said Mute Schimpf, a food campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe. Schimpf urged the European Union to "play a leading role in rejecting these consolidations," while commending "local food producers and citizens across Europe" who are "creating safe jobs and greener farms."

...

https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than-thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers

If THE GOVERNMENT ENDS UP approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger,

credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.

A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal.Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.

Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.

Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers. But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose. Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.

American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon’s experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.

Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.

While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.

In addition, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

During the campaign, Trump didn’t signal what his broader approach to mergers would be.But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. He selected Joshua Wright, an economist and professor atGeorge Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. “Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers,” he wrote in The New York Times this week.

...

populism traditional foe:

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaug-2016/populism-with-a-brain/

National Review recently described Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as “two populist peas in a pod.” This was not a compliment. Across the political spectrum, people stick the “populist” label on politicians they see as exploiting the worst resentments and envies of some tribe or another. The segregationist George Wallace, by this reckoning, was a populist. So, too, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Yet there is a richer tradition of populism in the United States that has new relevancy today. The term itself dates to the early 1890s, when, as the historian Michael Kazin notes, journalists used it to describe members of the newly formed People’s Party. These Populists with a capital P were men and women who, like us, faced an America in which monopolists were fast tightening their grip on all realms of the economy and concentrating immense wealth and political power.

These first Populists drew upon a political philosophy with roots back to the American Revolution. Part of this tradition is familiar—a belief that government must be run by the people. Populists called for direct election of senators and led the push for referendums and initiatives to bypass corrupt legislatures. But another part is largely forgotten—that the people are sovereign over the economy and have a responsibility to structure marketsto promote the common good.

This was the “democratic republicanism” of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It holds that, just like political power, economic power must be distributed as widely as possible. Thus, the Populists focused much of their energy on combating efforts to monopolize commerce and natural resources, especially land. They also closely studied how to govern large corporations, and strongly supported unionization of workers and farmers to counter the power of concentrated capital.

In almost every key respect, the Populists succeeded in their revolution. In 1896 they captured the Democratic Party and ran William Jennings Bryan for president. He lost the election, but over the next sixteen years, even as the plutocrats tightened their grip, Bryan helped keep the fires of rebellion burning.

The turning point came in 1913 when Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, guided closely by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, enacted key parts of the Populist agenda, modernizing anti-monopoly law, creating the Federal Reserve System, and reforming trade policy. It was these years that teed up the achievements of the 1930s, when the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and Populist members of Congress like Wright Patman carried anti-monopoly principles back into almost every realm of American life.

By the 1960s, the anti-monopoly movement championed by the Populists existed no more, but largely because it had become thoroughly institutionalized. In 1962, the Supreme Court upheld an antitrust case, brought by the Eisenhower administration, that prevented the merger of two shoe companies because it would have given a single distributor a 2 percent share of the national market.

It is important to understand what the Populists were not. In 1892 they did call for public ownership of railroads, but the movement generally looked askance at “socialistic” actions that might undermine wide-scale ownership of private property. Populists also parted company with those who, like Teddy Roosevelt, argued that the way to control Big Business was to regulate it with Big Government. Populists did favor using the federal government, but mainly to break up monopolies so as to make them small enough to be regulated by competition in open markets.

Some historians have judged all Populists by the actions of a racist minority. It is true that one early Populist leader, Tom Watson, later became one of the most virulent segregationists and anti-Semites in American history. And Woodrow Wilson himself segregated the U.S. government and U.S. military. But most Populists kept their focus on restructuring the economy to better promote equality and democracy. In many regions, Populists pioneered inter-racial organizing, often drawing the ire of established political groups. In one county in Texas, Democrats formed a “White Man’s Union” specifically to combat the alliance of whites and blacks in the local People’s Party.In the late 1970s, policymakers in both parties, under the banner of “free markets” and “deregulation,” began dismantling the economic regime put in place by the Populists and their followers. The concentration of wealth that resulted is now so extreme that even the Economist has chided Americans for failing to stand up to monopoly.

The Populists would certainly have supported Sanders’s call for public financing of campaigns and his embrace of “Break Up the Banks.” But the men and women who rose against America’s oligarchs of a century ago would have been deeply dismayed that no candidate in 2016 has taken a strong stand against monopoly.

And so we ask: If a candidate for office in 2016 were truly guided by traditional American Populist principles, what would he or she aim to do?

PROTECT DEMOCRACY BY RESTORING MARKET COMPETITION

In the campaign of 1912, Woodrow Wilson made one of the most powerful attacks on monopoly in American history. Wilson condemned monopolists for harming not only the economy but also democracy. “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government,” Wilson said. “[W]hat we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.”

Here is the Populist philosophy of competition at its purest. To ensure the liberty of the individual and protect democracy, citizens must force the powerful to compete. Adam Smith’s economics plays a role. But it is the stark realism of Jefferson and Madison, with their intense distrust of concentrated power, that governs. The fundamental aim of government is to extend the system of checks and balances to the political economy, and to break or neutralize all big concentrations of private power.

As Senator John Sherman, author of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, put it, “It is the right of every man to work, labor, and produce in any lawful vocation and to transport his production on equal terms and conditions and under like circumstances. This is industrial liberty, and lies at the foundation of the equality of all rights and privileges.”

In this tradition, breaking up monopoly has little to do with promoting efficiency or better deals for consumers, and everything to do with protecting political equality, self-government, and democratic institutions. As Brandeis explained, “The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted . . . not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” The way to “save the people from autocracy,” he said, is precisely by building “friction” into the system.

Over the following decades, these principles guided how Americans distributed economic power and protected industrial liberty. Despite wave after wave of technological change, concentration declined in almost every realm of the economy.

But in the 1970s, a small group of intellectuals—some, like Alfred Kahn, with roots in mainstream liberalism; and others, like Robert Bork, with roots in conservative Chicago school economics—systematically targeted the achievements of the Populist tradition. While anti-monopoly laws remained on the books, they were reinterpreted in ways that defeated their historical purpose. No longer would the aim be to promote economic and political liberty. Instead, according to guidelines enacted in 1982 by Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, big corporations would be allowed to get bigger so long as they did not immediately hike prices to the “consumer.”

In retrospect, the evidence is close to irrefutable that adoption of this philosophy of “efficiency” unleashed a process of concentration that over the last generation has remade almost the entire U.S. economy, and is now disrupting our democracy.

What would a True Populist do today? Immediately restore America’s traditional anti-monopoly philosophy, most importantly in the guidelines that determine how enforcers view the purpose of these laws, and start breaking uptoday’s monopolies.

USE TRADE POWER TO RESTORE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

The Boston Tea Party, every schoolchild knows, struck a blow for America’s independence from Britain. Less well known is that the Tea Partiers were specifically protesting domination by corporations.

As Samuel Adams and John Hancock put it in a 1773 letter, the Tea Act was dangerous precisely because, in giving a huge tax break to the British East India Company, it was “introductive of Monopolies which, besides the trains of evil that attend them in a commercial view, are forever dangerous to public liberty.”...

see populism

Amidst the imminent merger between chemical giants Monsanto and Bayer, we’re facing a consolidated seed and food supply controlled by just a few corporations. Right now, Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta alone own more than 50% of the global commercial seed supply, and just 10 corporations own 73% altogether. Corporate ownership of our seed supply means that these companies can limit the seed varieties available to farmers and gardeners, limit the availability of non-GMO seed, and control the cost of these seeds.

In response, CFS is launching a peer-to-peer online network for sharing seeds with the ultimate goal of creating an independent seed supply to bypass the corporations altogether and empower farmers and home gardeners.

the midst of three pending mega-mergers between agrichemical corporations, Donald Trump's recent pick of Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris to head the American Manufacturing Council signals yet more serious potential conflicts of interest in top government posts that could damage American farmers, the health of the public and the environment. The council serves as a liaison between the U.S. manufacturing industry and the federal government.

Tuesday, shareholders of agrichemical giant Monsanto approved a proposed takeover of the company by Bayer. Meanwhile, Liveris' company, Dow Chemical, is in the midst of negotiating a merger with DuPont.

"Andrew Liveris should be disqualified for the position due to his likely conflicts of interests. Serving as head of the American Manufacturing Council could allow Liveris to use a government post to benefit Dow Chemical and to line his own pockets," said Friends of the Earth Food Futures campaigner Tiffany Finck-Haynes.

The final decision on the mergers will fall to the Department of Justice, where Trump named Jeff Sessions as potential Attorney General. Sessions, who has received campaign contributions from Monsanto and Bayer, will head the agency investigating the economic impact and antitrust implications of the proposed mergers.

"Donald Trump's picks demonstrates that he is willing to allow corporate interests to control the food that's grown in our country and determine what's on our plates," said Finck-Haynes. "Despite his promise to 'drain the swamp,' his actions prove he is more concerned with advancing corporate interests than protecting the American people, workers and farmers."

The top six agrichemical and seed companies are currently negotiating mergers, which could result in just three powerful multinational corporations controlling this industry. If Monsanto and Bayer, Dow and DuPont and Syngenta and ChemChina form their proposed partnerships, they will control nearly 70 percent of the world's pesticide market, 80 percent of the U.S. corn-seed market and more than 61 percent of commercial seed sales.

The day before Trump's announcement, DuPont's Chief Executive Ed Breen, said a Trump administration won't impact the proposed Dow-DuPont merger. Edward Liveris and Breen, chief executive officers of Dow and DuPont, are expected to earn $80 million from the merger. Meanwhile, Dow already plans to eliminate 2,500 jobs and 8 percent of its Michigan workforce due to its takeover of the smaller company Dow Corning and DuPont is implementing a cost-cutting plan by planning to cut1,700 workers in Delaware, in preparation for the merger.

"Trump's appointment signals that he will rubber stamp these mega-mergers, limiting farming and food options and increasing prices for farmers and consumers," said Finck-Haynes. "The mergers would also further tilt the balance of power away from independent science and the health and safety of the American people towards the influence of chemical corporations."

June 1, 2016

The Pepco-Exelon merger was hotly debated because of concerns over competition, potential rate hikes and questions over commitments to green energy goals from opponents. Advocates for the deal argued Pepco needed a parent company with significant resources to improve the District's aging power grid. Pepco spent large amounts on lobbying and ads in an effort to shape public opinion, outflank opponents and give their shareholders big returns.

Full Investigation

http://www.alternet.org/environment/dangers-monsantobayer-merger

SYNGENTA CHINA?

43billion $

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/senators-try-to-scuttle-syngentachemchina-merger-in-a-harbinger-for-u-s-posture-toward-chinese-investment.html

agriz biz 5/16

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bayer-monsanto-20160519-snap-story.html

Bayer's potential acquisition of Monsanto Co. would create a giant seed and farm chemical company with a strong footprint in the U.S., Europe and Asia, combining two businesses with complementary geographical focus.

But Bayer might have to shed part of its business because of antitrust concerns. And the price tag on any deal would be huge: Monsanto's market value is around $42 billion.

Germany-based Bayer said Thursday in a short statement that its executives had met recently with their Monsanto counterparts “to privately discuss a negotiated acquisition” of the specialist in genetically modified crop seeds.

The news of a potentially costly deal sent Bayer shares tumbling 8.2%. Monsanto shares climbed 3.5%.

Both companies are familiar brands on farms around the globe. Bayer, whose farm business produces seeds as well as compounds to kill weeds, bugs and fungus, said the proposed acquisition would help it “create a leading integrated agriculture business.”

Monsanto, based in St. Louis, said it was reviewing Bayer's proposal. Neither company gave other details.

The possible deal had been rumored for a week, but these were the first comments from either company.

“A combination of both companies would create $67 billion of annual sales and the world's largest seed and crop-chemical company,” analyst Ulrich Huwald at Warburg Research wrote in a research note to investors. “However, the question is if Monsanto would be interested in a deal.”

Huwald said that “the businesses are geographically complementary, with Monsanto having a strong presence in North America and Bayer in Europe and Asia.”

A combination of the two would have 28% of the global market for pesticides and a strong presence in the U.S. corn and soybean seed business.

Huwald said that the two companies do overlap in their vegetable and cotton seed business, which could require divestments due to antitrust issues. Bayer might also have to sell parts of its weed killer business.

See the most-read stories this hour >>

Antitrust regulators scrutinize mergers and takeovers and have the authority to block them if they hinder free-market competition. If companies get too much control over a market, they can charge higher prices and have fewer incentives to innovate.

News of the talks follows a wave of consolidation in the chemical industry: DuPont and Dow Chemical agreed to combine last year, and ChemChina agreed to buy Syngenta of Switzerland in March after Monsanto's own bid for its Basel-based rival failed.

Monsanto has some 20,000 employees and produces seeds for fruits, vegetables and other crops including corn, soybeans and cotton, as well as the popular weed killer Roundup.

Its sales have suffered recently as falling crop prices have reduced farmers' spending on its genetically enhanced seeds. And the strong U.S. dollar has meant its products are more expensive overseas.

Bayer, headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany, specializes in healthcare and agriculture. It employs about 117,000 people worldwide and had sales last year of $52.22 billion

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/23/headlines/march_against_monsanto_brings_protesters_to_streets_in_400_cities

china bought pork and now http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/03/syngenta-merger

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2015/06/monsantos-latest-bid-could-test-its-lobbying-might

BIG TOBACCO MERGER UNITES POWERFUL NC POLITICAL DONORS:The deal joining North Carolina-based tobacco giants Reynolds American and Lorillard also unites two of the state's biggest corporate political contributors. Besides donating directly to candidates and committees, the companies have also been funneling money into outside spending groups active in the state's politics. (7/25/2014)

AlterNet [1] / By Alex Henderson [2]

10 Corporate Behemoths Stifling Competition and Delivering Awful Service to You

April 24, 2014 |

One of the fundamentals of free-market capitalism is that consumers benefit when competition is plentiful. If a business is selling a weak or inferior product, consumers can turn to the competition for a better deal. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that, which is why a key element of his New Deal was the anti-trust, anti-monopoly legislation of the 1930s. Roosevelt firmly believed that large companies should be forced into a competitive environment whether they liked it or not, and that belief served the U.S. well for many years. But in recent decades, a variety of corporate lobbyists, far-right Republicans and neoliberal Democrats have shredded the New Deal and undermined anti-trust laws—thus encouraging corporations to grow larger and larger and engage in monopolistic practices.

Here are 10 mammoth corporations that detest free-market competition and do everything they can to stamp it out or greatly reduce it.

Comcast

When Comcast acquired Greater Media’s cable TV operations in Philadelphia in 1999 and gained over 250,000 new cable television customers in the East Coast’s second largest city (thus expanding its Mid-Atlantic customer base to more than 2 million at that point), consumer rights advocates feared that the company was growing too large. But Comcast is a much larger company than it was 15 years ago: it has since acquired major companies ranging from NBC Universal to AT&T Broadband, and if the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger [3] goes through, Comcast will have at least 30 million cable customers and an estimated 38% of the U.S.’ broadband customers. Despite being infamous for its poor customer service, Comcast keeps growing bigger and bigger, which is a reflection of its mammoth lobbying budget. Comcast spent $18.8 million on lobbying in 2013, and many politicians (both Republicans and Democrats) are afraid to challenge its monopolistic practices and force the company into genuine free-market competition.

Harming net neutrality will only add to the already-unfair advantage that telecom giants like Comcast and Verizon enjoy. Tom Wheeler, the new head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is a former lobbyist for the telecom industry—which, arguably, is a conflict of interest—and now, the FCC itself is undermining net neutrality [4] by accepting the idea that ISPs can ask content providers to pay for preferential treatment.

Monsanto

Founded in 1901, the Monsanto Corporation has been in business for 113 years. Monsanto’s size has increased considerably along the way, and these days, it is a corporate bully that doesn’t hesitate to throw its weight around. Now the world’s dominant provider of controversial GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds, Monsanto has been quite aggressive about suing farmers for unauthorized use of its seeds—even if the farmer never intended to become a Monsanto customer. Percy Schmeiser (a canola farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada) was sued by Monsanto [5] for a patent violation after GMO seeds from a neighbor’s canola plants drifted onto his land. Schmeiser has complained that Monsanto made it impossible for him to continue with his canola strain because he can’t prove his canola plants are Monsanto-free. Meanwhile, organic farmers have complained that because Monsanto’s GMO seeds are so ubiquitous in the U.S., it has become much harder for them to maintain organic standards. Monsanto hates competition, and its strong-arm tactics with Schmeiser and other farmers bear that out.

Blue Cross

During the healthcare reform debate of 2009 and 2010, Blue Cross and other health insurance giants used their lobbying muscle to make certain that the outcome—whether it was one favored by Democrats, Republicans or the Tea Party—would be more favorable to corporate profits than to consumers. Republicans and the Tea Party wanted to maintain the status quo, while some of the more liberal/progressive Democrats favored a public option that health insurance companies would have to compete with (a single-payer system was never on the table). Terrified at the thought of real competition, the health insurance industry spent a fortune lobbying against the establishment of a public option—and the law Democrats in Congress ended up passing in 2010, the Affordable Care Act, was greatly influenced by Republican ideas of the past (including those of the Heritage Foundation and 2006 GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole). The ACA does contain some positive reforms and has brought health insurance to millions of Americans who were unable to obtain it before, but it would have a lot more teeth had the health insurance industry not been unwilling to face real competition in the form of a public option [6].

Bank of America

The “too big to fail” status that Bank of America now enjoys is ironic in light of its humble beginnings. Founded as Bank of Italy by Amadeo Gianni in San Francisco in 1904, BofA originally found its niche by catering to Italian immigrants who faced discrimination from other banks. But today’s BofA has very little in common with the operation Gianni started 110 years ago. In recent decades, the megabank (which received $45 million in bailout money after the crash of September 2008 and now controls almost one in five home mortgages in the U.S.) has demonstrated its anti-competition philosophy by gobbling up one bank after another—and the more competition BofA eliminates, the worse it becomes for consumers. BofA apologists argue that if customers don’t like its abundance of fees and poor customer service, they can simply take their money elsewhere. But that’s a flawed argument because thanks to BofA’s aggressive lobbying and anti-competition practices, there are fewer and fewer alternatives to BofA in many parts of the United States.

Verizon

When the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE in 2000, Verizon Communications became the largest provider of phone service in the United States. Since then, its practices have often been both anti-competition and anti-regulation. One of the biggest complaints consumers have about mobile/wireless providers is being forced to sign long-term contracts [7]. Verizon Wireless has often demonstrated its aversion to competition by chaining customers to such contracts and hitting them with stiff termination fees should they become dissatisfied and cancel. On the landline side, Verizon has been aggressively pushing many of its customers to give up copper wiring and go with its fiber-optics program FiOS—that is, if Verizon even offers landlines in a particular area. After Hurricane Sandy damaged copper lines on Fire Island, NY (where Verizon had a monopoly) in 2012, Verizon wanted to discontinue copper line support, but wasn’t offering FiOS there and tried to force the area’s landline customers onto the wireless program Voice Link. Problem: Voice Link didn’t support broadband, and many Fire Island residents liked having both a cell phone and a landline. Verizon later reconsidered and announced it would be installing FiOS on Fire Island [8], but the debacle underscored the problems that can occur when a behemoth like Verizon becomes a monopoly in a particular area.

American Airlines

Like banking and telecommunications, air travel is an industry that has been plagued by more and more consolidation. In 2013, American Airlines became the world’s largest airline when it merged with U.S. Airways (which had merged with America West in 2005). Other big airline mergers of the last five years have included the Delta/Northwest and United/Continental mergers—and now, 85% of the U.S. air travel market is dominated by only four airlines [9]: American, United, Delta and Southwest (widely regarded as the most consumer-friendly of the four). To understand how bad all these mergers are for consumers, one need only look at a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that from 2007-2012, airlines in the United States cut the number of domestic flights by 14% [10]. The more companies like American are allowed to reduce competition, the worse it will be for consumers in terms of price, convenience and customer service [11].

Wells Fargo

Like BofA, Wells Fargo had a reputation for being a West Coast bank throughout much of its history. But when the New Deal was greatly undermined in the 1980s and 1990s and the Glass-Steagall Act was overturned in 1999, Wells Fargo expanded considerably. Wells Fargo now has a strong presence all over the U.S. and has been allowed to acquire one bank after another (including Wachovia in 2009). Wells Fargo, whose assets increased from $609 billion before 2008 to $1.4 trillion [12] in 2013, needn’t worry about having a lot of competition because it has devoured so many of the local and regional banks it once competed with.

Koch Industries

Billionaires brothers Charles and David Koch like to paint themselves as masters of free-market competition. But in reality, Koch Industries is the essence of crony capitalism—and the tens of millions of dollars the Koch brothers have donated to politicians (especially Republicans and Tea Party candidates, but some Democrats as well) are designed to ensure that politicians never challenge Koch Industries in a meaningful way. The Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions encourage the Koch brothers to make sure that any politicians they help elect are as submissive to Koch Industries [13] as possible. And the Koch brothers’ desire to build a pro-Koch media empire that doesn’t challenge them in any meaningful way will only further their corporatist agenda.

Goldman Sachs

Matt Taibbi, who wrote about problems in the banking industry extensively during his years with Rolling Stone, has often said that in a true free-market environment, a behemoth like Goldman Sachs would not exist—especially in light of all the damage banking giants have done to the economies of the U.S. and other countries. But thanks to the too-big-to-fail doctrine, Goldman Sachs has not only been propped up by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve, but has been allowed to continue growing in size: according to Bloomberg Businessweek, the U.S. five largest banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs) went from comprising 43% of American GDP in 2006 to 56% in 2011. Ideally, Goldman Sachs should have been broken up and divided into an abundance of smaller banks after the crash of September 2008—a move that would have mandated competition—but instead, commercial and investment banking were allowed to become even more concentrated. Beholden to banking lobbyists, U.S. politicians have sheltered Goldman Sachs execs [14] from the thing they need the most: competition.

JPMorgan Chase

Far-right critics of FDR's New Deal like to characterize Roosevelt as a Marxist, which is downright absurd to actual Marxists. But FDR understood how vital competition was to free-market capitalism when he signed the Glass-Steagall Act into law in 1933. Mandating a strict separation of commercial and investment banking, Glass-Steagall was meant to discourage monopolies—and its repeal in 1999 encouraged JPMorgan Chase to become the unwieldy giant it is today. Formed when J.P. Morgan & Co. merged with Chase Manhattan Bank in 2000, JPMorgan Chase is now the U.S.’ largest financial institution. A company that has $2.4 trillion in assets has enormous lobbying power, and according to the Center for Responsive Politics, it spent $8 million on lobbying in 2012 [15]. CEO Jamie Dimon claims that JPMorgan Chase (which faced hundreds of millions of dollars of fines last year) is overregulated when, in reality, it is woefully underregulated and would not have become so bloated if it operated in a true free-market economy and hadn’t received so much corporate welfare (including $25 billion in bailout money in October 2008).

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