The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about)
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.
It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.
The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.
And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.
More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement savings, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):
By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):
Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.
That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in American in suing Facebook.
Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon – it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only three merger challenges, and won zero of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:
https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/c-59
In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies…and they did so under a succession of shambolic Conservative governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour") Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:
We've seen big, ambitious antitrust action all over the world: Germany, France, Spain, the EU, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China.
It goes without saying that there is no dark money org funneling billionaires' wealth into this project to destroy billionaires. This is a groundswell political phenomenon, it's global, and it's powerful. The fact that Starmer and Trump have gutted their wildly effective antitrust agencies is heartbreaking, but it's not the end. The reason the US and the UK pursued such an ambitious antitrust agenda is the public groundswell. Getting rid of the agencies doesn't kill that groundswell – if anything, it only makes people madder.
It's hard to overstate just how weird the antitrust surge is. We've been fighting for decades for even tiny concessions to the interests of working people – a modest, below-inflation rise in the minimum wage, say, or small-dollar efforts to improve public education, reduce student debt, or control the price of prescription drugs. These efforts have largely failed, and when they've succeeded, the victories were modest, or worse, merely symbolic.
But antitrust is the exception. Antitrust – again, a movement that is squarely aimed at neutralizing the power of the wealthy – is the most successful popular movement of the past decade. Companies worth trillions of dollars are facing breakup as a result of antitrust cases. Everyone from meat-packers to landlords to sea freighters to pharma companies have faced massive, multi-billion-dollar setbacks at the expense of the antitrust movement.
Like I said, the current antitrust surge kicked off under Trump. But of course, that doesn't mean the GOP power-brokers support it – rather, they were cornered into it by their own base. The same is true of the Democrats: Biden didn't appoint the most effective antitrust enforcers the US has seen since the 1970s because he opposed corporate monopolies. Remember, this is the guy who, on the campaign trail, told business audiences that "nothing would fundamentally change" under a Biden administration:
Nor does the Democratic Party power-structure support this stuff. Remember when Harris's billionaire surrogates Marc Cuban and Reid Hoffman demanded that Harris fire the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers?
The success of the antitrust movement happened in spite of the Democratic Party, in spite of the GOP. To the extent that either party embraced an antitrust agenda, it's because the people demanded it, so undeniably that the parties chose the public interest over the interest of the billionaires who call nearly every shot for them.
It's impossible to overstate what an anomaly this is. On today's episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast, hosts Matt Stoller and David Dayen reminisce with Jonathan Kanter, Biden's former DoJ antitrust boss, about a conference they attended together in 2017 where the after-dinner keynote speaker was Richard Posner, a judge who was hugely influential in the dismantling of antitrust in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Dayen, the substance of Posner's keynote was:
Antitrust. That's dead, isn't it? I don't know what you guys are even talking about. This is ridiculous. There is no such thing as antitrust law.
And Kanter, Dayen, Stoller and future FTC chair Lina Khan were all sitting around a table, listening to this in 2017. By 2021, Kanter and Khan were running the DoJ and FTC antitrust agenda, and they did more in the next three years than all their predecessors over the past 40 years, combined.
Khan, Kanter, and their colleagues (like Rohit Chopra at the CFPB) did incredible work during the Biden administration. There is no denying their skill, their competence, their commitment. But the reason they were able to bring all those virtues to bear in service to working Americans is the massive popular surge of rage at corporate dominance. In other words, the Biden administration's prodigious trustbusting accomplishments were the effect of the antitrust movement, not its cause.
The corollary is that just because Trump has dismantled the agencies that were buoyed up by the movement, it doesn't make the movement itself smaller or less powerful. If anything, the Trump regime's relentless pursuit of an agenda in service to the rich at working people's expense will only add fuel to the anti-corporate, anti-billionaire wildfire. Trump's tariff chaos might be bad for some parts of the ruling class, but as Van Jackson writes for Labor Notes, there's plenty of plutocrats who love the prospect of a deep recession sparked by global trade chaos:
[L]avish tax cuts, deregulation, and an environment friendly to union-busting are just as valuable to most CEOs as a growing economy. What they lose in the stock market, they will more than make up in surplus labor, a fire sale on distressed assets, and Trump’s promise to totally eliminate the capital gains tax.
American wealth is more concentrated today than it was in France on the eve of the French Revolution. People are pissed. That anger is out there, waiting to be harnessed by smart political movements:
To grab that anger and mobilize it, we need to show people that their rage over specific issues is actually downstream of excessive corporate power. Furious that one company owns every brand of eggs and has used the excuse of bird flu to make record profits? You're not angry about eggs, you're angry about corporate power:
Worried that the EPA has been put in an induced coma and that means your kids will grow up with asthma and lead poisoning? You're actually angry about corporate power:
The Department of Education is in the hands of a woman who took over her rapey husband's professional wrestling monopoly, a corporation that misclassified performers as contractors, leaving them without health care so they have to beg for pennies on Gofundme so they can die with dignity of their workplace-related injuries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs
Trump's Secretary of Education is monumentally unqualified for her position. Not only is she is planning to fire teachers en masse and replace them with AI, she doesn't know what AI is and just gave a speech where she repeatedly referred to it as "A-1":
Angry about this? Worried that your kids' teachers are about to be replaced with steak-sauce thanks to the incompetence of this fucking muttonhead? Me too. But you're not just angry at Trump or Linda McMahon – you're angry at corporate power.
In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians?
https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf
The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers:
Something remarkable is happening, right under our noses. Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime. The world is terrifying, but this? This is exciting.
Smart political organizers have a once-in-a-century opportunity here. Trump's wildly unpopular destruction of the antitrust enforcement system opens up all kinds of opportunities for state enforcers (remember, states can also enforce antitrust law):
A massive political change that bubbles up from the bottom, aimed directly at the richest, most powerful people in the history of the human race, is an amazing thing. As bad as things are – and boy are they bad – this remains true, and important.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
david having to call in favors so river didn't get kicked out after stansted is so embarrassing, like it's basically the equivalent of your mom calling the teacher to try to get you an extension/redo on a project you forgot to do or fucked up except instead of being an anxious 11-year-old you're a grown man and it's your job
bumuhos ang ulan na sana’y masayang pinagtatampisawan ng mga bata, subalit sa kasakiman ng kontratista, bangungot ang bawat patak ng ulan sa bahang lumulunod sa sigaw ng mga mahihirap. ang pader na dapat depensa laban sa unos ay itinayo sa papel, ang haligi ng tulay na akala’y proteksyon ay gumuho bago pa man maramdaman ng bayan ang kaligtasan. sa bawat patak ng ulan, umaalingawngaw ang tanong: kaninong bulsa ba napadpad ang milyon at bilyong perang inilaan para sa kaginhawaan ng bayan?
umiikot ang kayamanan sa mga dokumentong walang laman, mga blankong papel na sinelyohan ng lagda. “ghost projects” na nagsilbing aninong kabaong ng bayan: binayaran. inilista. pinirmahan. ngunit kailanma’y hindi nasilayan ng mga matang nagbabayad ng buwis, ang bawat resibo’y naging punyal na itinusok sa dibdib ng taong bayan. hindi ba’t hindi lamang buwis kundi dugo’t pawis ang nilustay sa mga proyektong biglang nawala sa kamay ng mapanlinlang?
walang tigil ang pagnanasa ng mga kontratistang sakim humawak ng proyekto nang sa gayon bulsa’y hindi matuyo. ang bawat lagda ay sumpa, bawat tseke ay libingan ng isang pangarap ng mahihirap. habang sila’y nagbibilang ng pera, sasakyan, relo, at palasyo, may mga batang naglalakad na walang tsinelas sa putikan. hindi ba’t ang bawat kotse at alahas na ipinagyayabang na bunga kuno ng kanilang pagsusumikap ay siya sanang naging kanlungan ng mga batang palaboy sa kalsada?
ang apelyido ay hindi lamang basta ginawang pamana, kundi ginawang negosyo ng mga sakim sa kapangyarihan. “political dynasty,” dalawang salitang nakapulupot sa leeg ng bayan, sumasakal sa kaginhawaan. habang ang nakaupo’y nagpapasa ng trono sa anak, ang mga magsasaka nama’y nakayuko sa lupang halos ipagkait sa kanila. hindi ba’t tila naging alipin ang sambayanan ng mga apelyidong hinubog sa dugo’t pandaraya?
yumayabong ang mga binabansagang “nepo babies,” mga anak na walang inintindi kundi ang karangyaan at kasaganaan ng buhay na galing sa kaban ng bayan. ang bawat “luxury bag” na hawak ay ospital at paaralan na hindi naipatayo. ang bawat “luxury car” na minaneho ay daang hindi naisagawa. at ang bawat gintong nakapulupot sa katawan at mansyon ay sikmura na dapat sana’y napakain at buhay na nailigtas. hindi ba’t ginto at buhay ng bayan ang isinugal kapalit ng kanilang luhong pinagmamalaking galing sa pagsusumikap?
ang buwis ng mamamayan ay hindi lamang numero na mandatoryang kinakaltas sa sahod ng mga manggagawa. ito’y numerong pinagtrabahuan ng marangal hindi para kurakutin ng mga magnanakaw. ang kaban ng bayan na siyang dapat gamitin upang ilawan ang madidilim na iskinita ay naging abo sa mga kamay ng mga buwaya. hanggang kailan magbabayad ng buwis-buhay ang mga manggagawang patas na lumalaban at naghihingalo sa hirap, habang nalulunod sa yaman ang mga bulok na magnanakaw?
...
gumising, pilipinas. huwag hayaang tabunan ng baha ang sariling tinig. hatulan ang dapat hatulan. parusahan ang mga buwayang umuubos sa kaban ng bayan. hindi tayo pipikit. hindi tayo tatahimik. atin ng pagbayarin at itarak ang punyal ng galit sa mga buwayang kanser sa lipunan.
Ya know what I don’t like about the chatter about “nepo babies” in Hollywood?
The fact that everyone doesn’t already assume that most famous people are them.
Because y’all. We should be assuming it’s the default in Hollywood. Because it is.
After 20 years in the extremely indie micro budget filmmaking community in both Indiana and Texas, I can tell ya, all over the country there are extremely talented folks creating, writing, acting, etc. who should be recognized but they’re not. Whose work should get more eyes but it doesn’t. And it’s pretty much exclusively because they don’t know the right people to open the right doors and they don’t have the ability (for a variety of very different reasons) to leave their entire lives and communities behind to move to LA and spending years taking abuse at low wage PA gigs, working 3-4 jobs to make rent, pounding the pavement with endless auditions, withstanding constant rejection, etc. waiting to see if they “make it big.”
Power perpetuates power. Hollywood insiders will always give advantages to their kids in ways big and small. Even if someone’s famous parents don’t ask for favors or overtly hire them, those kids’ social lives and networks are linked with the right people to open the right doors. Plus getting the education a mega celebrity can afford for their kids? The private lessons? The exposure to the industry from day one? Knowing the right way to socially comport yourself in Hollywood spaces from day one?
Advantage on advantage on advantage.
I’m not saying that there aren’t very massively talented nepo babies in their own right. But I am saying that for a nepo baby we can never REALLY know if they would have made it on their own. We simply can’t know if they grew up in a trailer park in Kansas if we’d ever know their names.
I think we should talk about that all the time and never stop letting them know we’re aware of it honestly 😂 I think that given all the advantages and given how gatekept Hollywood is, the literal least nepo babies can do is just own the truth that we can never ever ever know if without daddy they would have ever broken out.
y'know sometimes I think about that scene in First Wives Club where Hawn as an experienced actress is debasing herself to play the mother of her husband's new shiny bouncy woman.
She sits down with her talking about character, and Elizabeth Berkley playing her vapid replacement says, "I'm thinking, streaks."
Hawn is silent for a moment, and you can see she was trying to think in terms of story and narrative. Then Berkley cuts in with a brilliantly performed, "Just around my face."
That moment crystalizes how I feel about this fanfic nonsense Fennel has produced and hung the Wuthering name on. It feels like someone made Wuth3ring H3ights using refrigerator magnets and they're looking at me like they want me to confirm it is high art.
If you don't want to adapt a story, write your own. But writing your own and then claiming Bronte's name on top of it? That's gross and plagiaristic in its own way. You're backwriting over a classic and calling it any kind of adaptation is just historical revisionism, not to mention the stark whitewashing of a lead character.
Write something of your own. Tell stories we'd get excited about. Now you've made the worst of both worlds - fans of Wuthering Heights are pissed and rejecting it, and the other percentage of people who would rather light themselves on fire than sit down to read it won't go because they never had an interest in the first place. What was the point?
