The Rising Anti-Monopoly Movement: Overcoming Economic Tyranny | Stacy Mitchell

Control up to 80% of almost every industry and marketplace. These monopolies raise costs, lower quality and services, depress wages, exploit workers, and stifle innovation. They decimate small businesses, marginalized communities, and democracy. Today, nearly everything we rely on—food, medicine, housing, credit, news, information—is controlled by a small number of corporations. We are every day subject to their arbitrary dictates and whims. We wait helplessly while the insurance company decides whether to approve a treatment. We submit to abusive employment conditions and pervasive surveillance. Across the country, urban... as illegitimate. We all know that the actions of government more often reflect the priorities of corporate executives than the needs of citizens. Across this land, there is a pervasive sense of powerlessness, and powerlessness leads to terrible places. It leads to apathy and despair and withdrawal. It leads to a longing for a strong man. Powerlessness is poison in the veins of a democracy.

Antitrust is essential to democracy's basic design. Just as we have checks and balances to prevent any one branch of government from wielding too much power, anti-monopoly laws prevent the accumulation of economic power. The notion that economic liberty is crucial to political liberty is an idea that originated on this continent. English... Corporation. The British East India Company was the first modern corporation, chartered in 1601 by the British monarchy. By the 1770s, it had monopolized the lion's share of the world's trade with Europe. One of the corporation's monopolies was tea, the popular beverage of choice along with alcohol. Because smugglers supplied half the tea to the colonies and sold it cheaper, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act, enabling it to undersell the smugglers while also paying pirates to destroy their ships. Once the British East India Company eliminated its competition, it locked in predatory pricing until that is in... would soon trigger the American Revolution. In many ways, the story of the United States ever since has been the ongoing battle between democracy and corporate economic tyranny.

After the Revolution, restrictions on corporate power were embedded in state laws, but that approach broke down in the 19th century when a group of men harnessed a disruptive new technology: the railroad. Control over the rails meant control over who could access markets. If you could monopolize the rails, you could monopolize every other industry. The railroad giants also used their power as gatekeepers to impose exorbitant fees on farmers and small businesses, effectively taxing the entire economy, a form of... kind of... protect everyday people from concentrated economic power, or what Franklin Roosevelt would later call 'industrial dictatorship.' Indeed, it's FDR who gets credit for fully activating our antitrust laws. He campaigned on a promise of economic freedom for the wage earner and the small business and the farmer. He launched a period of aggressive antitrust enforcement that lasted for decades. The government blocked mergers, they filed monopolization cases, and they periodically broke up companies. For several decades following World War II, strong federal antitrust enforcement remained center stage, epitomized by the epic breakup of the nation's biggest... increasingly abusive towards its workers and to the farmers that supplied it. The government filed suit and it ultimately won that case, putting an end to its predatory tactics and forcing the company to spin off parts of its operation. It didn't disappear; it continued to operate for decades, but it could no longer bully and dominate. And the results were striking. With it back on its heels, its workers were finally able to form unions. Farmers had more leverage and were able to negotiate better prices. And crucially, independent grocery stores flourished, accounting for more than half the market in the '50s and '60s. The prosperous post-war period from... discrimination and exclusion. The income gap between Black and white citizens narrowed significantly. Record numbers of Black Americans joined unions, while Black-owned businesses multiplied. There were more Black-owned businesses in 1969 than there are today. Those businesses played a pivotal financial and organizing role in the Civil Rights Movement, part of the historic surge at the time of movements for justice, democracy, and human rights. And because economic power helps build political power, inevitably it was bound to provoke a plutocratic backlash.

The turn came in the 1970s, amid the confusion of oil shocks... Bork, who you might know as Nixon's solicitor general and later failed Supreme Court nominee, but whose shadow over our lives was cast much more profoundly by this incredibly influential book that he wrote, in which he declared that the antitrust laws had nothing at all to do with questions of power and liberty. Their sole purpose was to maximize efficiency and to lower prices. Big business saw an opening, and Bork's followers swept into power with Ronald Reagan. What followed was something akin to a coup. There wasn't enough support to repeal the antitrust laws—all of the laws are still on the books today. Instead, Bork's followers worked inside the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to write new... companies were naturally more efficient, and therefore we should welcome consolidation. They turned antitrust on its head.

I came to this issue in the late 1990s when I took a job at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the organization that I now co-lead. One of my first assignments was to look at why local retail businesses were closing in droves. And the answer I found was that Walmart was using a set of underhanded... would say, 'You're going to give us lower prices, better terms, more access, while you charge higher prices to the local grocer down the street.' I remember thinking, 'Don't we have laws against this?' And so I started looking into antitrust, and sure enough, in 1936 Congress passed a law that prohibits big retailers from exploiting their control over suppliers to undermine their smaller competitors. I found that in 1950, having witnessed how monopoly control of industry fed the rise of fascism in Germany, Congress passed the Anti-Merger Act, a law designed to stop mergers. Reading these laws was like entering into an alternate universe. The word 'efficiency' does not appear anywhere in the statutes. Instead... ConAgra and Tyson have created a choke point in our food system. They are driving down the incomes of farmers and food workers while jacking up prices to consumers. It's the same story everywhere.

The tech companies have followed the exact same playbook as the railroad barons: gain control of the underlying infrastructure of commerce, use your power as a gatekeeper to privilege your own interest, crush your rivals, and siphon off the revenue rightfully earned by others. We have half as many local newspaper reporters in this country as... shopping traffic. That means virtually every business that makes or sells any consumer product has two choices, and both are usually fatal. You can either decide not to sell on the online market, or you can sell on Amazon's platform. To sell on Amazon is to be subject to the tech giant's bullying, its tendency to copy your bestselling products, its arbitrary algorithm changes that can tank your business. Ten years ago, small businesses selling on Amazon paid Amazon fees equal to 14% of their sales. Today, Amazon is pocketing half of every dollar sellers earn. Amazon generated $140 billion in seller fees last year. That's more revenue than Meta. It's more... them have it. Amazon is extending its tentacles in every direction. Its package delivery operation is now bigger than that of the U.S. Postal Service and threatens to supplant it. Its cloud division powers much of the internet. It's advancing into health care and finance. It's selling surveillance and AI technologies to police and military outfits around the world.

As encouraging as these gains are, inevitable changes in the political world assure their tenuous. But clearly... take and are taking. Local communities as well as national groups across the country have now joined forces in a coalition called Athena that Stacy Mitchell co-founded. It's designed to oppose Amazon from the ground up while creating economic democracy, addressing the climate crisis, safeguarding communities from surveillance, and expanding democracy. This movement is shaking up the political map. It's fostering new alliances between labor and small businesses. It's doing the crucial work of defining a common enemy, a shared culprit for what ails us, and thereby helping to steer us away from the politics of scapegoating and hate.

I want to be honest with you. I... off the neck of rural America. Imagine if we fixed the Internet. This is what democracy looks like. It looks like government taking seriously its obligation to check economic power. It looks like all of us building the country, the economy, the future we want. We can win this, but we need you. We need you to tell your friends. We need you to join this fight. Thank you.