Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Fighting Monopoly Power w/ Zephyr Teachout / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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Fighting Monopoly Power w/ Zephyr Teachout / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born.
• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now is the time of monsters.
• 0:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: With those words from Gramski, I welcome you to the time of monsters podcast.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm G-T here with the Nation magazine, which is a sponsor of this podcast.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So today I want to tell you a little bit more about this podcast.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: So today I want to tell you a little bit more about this podcast.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So today I want to tell you a little bit more about this podcast.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So today I want to tell you a little bit more about this podcast.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So today I want to tell you a little bit more about this podcast.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So today I want to tell you a little bit more about this podcast.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: talk about a very old sort of monster that's been around for centuries and people fought back against on occasion and there are a lot of lessons we drawn.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm talking of course about the sort of power of Monopoly capital and which we're seeing right now under the trepid administration because I think this is like possibly the most monopoly friendly
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you would have to go back to the Republican Party of Calvin Coolidge, if on McKinley, to Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: One is a sort of for the special 250th anniversary of the magazine looking at the roots of anti-monopoly politics back to the founding fathers and the other deals with the ongoing media consolidation that one is seeing with this paramount deal, one could effectively see
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: very powerful family, which not coincidentally is very friendly towards Donald Trump.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, uh, visible as ever, thanks for being on the program.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: thank you so much for having me.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think you're right, you know, when you hear we are on the time of monsters thinking about the, you know, the octopus and Trump really, you know, embraces and is merging with the octopus, you know, with open arms embracing monopoly power and the power both the power it gives him and the power it gives to this, you know, extensively concentrated
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, we'll talk about this, but one of the things that I care a lot about, and I hope people really think about, is as we are fighting for democracy, we often think about the fight for democracy in the, or the legal fight for democracy, political fight in terms of election laws and voting laws and super PACs, things that I work on a lot
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's really important when we go back as you say thousands of years to understand that one of the most fundamental risks to democracy is when concentrated capital and governing power wrap themselves around each other as we're seeing right now.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no, that's right.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what reason I want to have you on?
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because I think you have a really broad surface stalker framing, because this is something that particularly in the United States has really been intertwined with the nation's history.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so before we talk about the current politics, I think it's good that we're grounding in the history.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in particular, I don't think it's officially understood that the American Revolution was
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: in a significant degree, sort of revolt against monopoly power.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, people, you know, are out about, you know, George's a third, and he goes a tyrant, and he imposes taxes that the American could have been like, but is actually like the actual sort of political economy of the British Empire, you know, went beyond this, you know, like one king who had unpleasant policies.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: We
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: the third of the old style 18 century empire really was involved corporate power to a great degree.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you want to like let's talk a little bit about that.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what we're talking about at this point are grants.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right now we're so used to the idea of corporate power being automatic.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You could go incorporate tomorrow.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you want to, you know, there's fees and there's a process but that we have what is called free incorporation basically that anybody can incorporate.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the corporation is is birth as individual grants of authority from the state.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the 18th century, you see these major grants of authority to companies like and and the most important for American history is the British East India tea company.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Parliament gives the British East India tea company a series of extraordinarily broad corporate grants and those grants include the power to infamously.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Command armies across the Indian subcontinent include the exclusive rights to trade all over the world, include the power to collect taxes, and in the 1770s, the company is facing a real reckoning.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of a too big to fail moment.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has incredible amounts of debt.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: has unsold tea.
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's this sort of grotesque vision of unused goods and debt and the parliament decides to bail it out and it effectively bails it out with arguments that that are very familiar to those of us who live through 2010 that this is sort of too entangled at this point
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this point, like, by the 1770s, a lot of the wealthiest families in England, the so-called Naibobbs, are like, you know, made their money in India, and so therefore they have like an enormous political sway in England, you know, they've become those sort of like large landowners and are, you know, effectively dictating government policy.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so they claim they have a personal stake, and then they claim that the country has a stake, and it's highly contested, but they do choose to basically remove competition from colonial team merchants.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so when we look at the reality of the Tea Party, the Tea Party is really an anti-monopoly protest against the bailing out that gives the British East India Tea Company these exclusive rights and shuts out the local merchants.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's other things, but that's sort of this essential moment.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The historian Gordon Wood, who just recently passed,
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: when he describes summarizing this era described the revolt as a revolt against what people called the spirit of monopoly that they saw as having infused British culture and you know a lot of the revolutionaries of course held up the ideals of of
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: England as I think Patrick Henry said is the finest fabric that history has ever woven or something to that effect but saw it deeply corrupted by monopoly capital and and I think again importantly for both for understanding history but also for understanding this moment is that there is a blending of private and public power.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that spirit of monopoly and the fear of monopoly corporations persisted 10 years later, 11 years later, when the framers of the Constitution were drafting the Constitution in the same letter that
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Jefferson suggested that we needed a bill of rights, including a first amendment.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He suggested including a protection against monopolies as a constitutional prohibition.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, it wasn't included and the dominant understanding of why it wasn't included.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: is that it seemed obvious that any protection of the liberties and privileges is sort of the essential human liberties and privileges included the liberty and privilege of being free from monopoly power.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: the idea of the sort of freedom to pursue one's own trade.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there's this explicit a patent section in the constitution that provides like how patents and patents are, if you think of a government grant of exclusive right,
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the sort of the core monopoly vision, the patent section of the Constitution is where we'll deal with monopolies and otherwise we're free.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're not going to have, you know, we're not going to have this monopoly power.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's deeply embedded this idea that state grants of its own authority to private actors.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're so embedded in a current way of thinking about corporations, but it's important to remember that a corporation is actually
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: a the state giving a little of its own power to a private entity, we're seeing as fundamentally and constitutionally constrained so that we would not become like Britain.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I think that makes sense.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think on the patent point, it's perhaps worth emphasizing that, you know, like one reason why like patents are temporary is that it's seen like, you know, it might be in the public interest to, I grabbed a brief,
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh, uh, monopoly, but that it's, it's not never meant to be like a permanent thing and uh, it's important because I think we think of patents as a solely IP intellectual property, like a wholly different category.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they were really worried about patents as ways in which you could exercise governing power.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So to your point, that you have to limit it, so it doesn't
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you kind of have a private doctor have this government power indefinitely, by the way.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there might be like, for dental grounds, for granting a brief, briefly giving it a power as a reward for technological innovation or cultural innovation.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's never meant to be like a permanent thing.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and I mean, you know, like in terms of the sort of broader history, like like obviously like throughout the 19th century, you know, I think a lot of this revolve around issues around banks and, you know, the various debates about that.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, I think for like our purposes in terms of like corporate power to be like the next big moment is like after the Civil War.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... uh... when you had for uh... constitutional reasons uh... real expansion of corporate power and then uh... real pushback against that so so do you want to like just briefly address that moment yes sure so um... one key thing to keep in mind as we tell this story is that there's a big difference between anti-monopoly and anti-trust and uh... the anti-trust movement
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: as a way to constrain monopoly power, but monopoly power is this broad thing we're talking about.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's all these different methods of constraining it.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what happens in the middle of the 19th century is the shift, the anti-monopoly anxiety.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: shifts from these one-off grants of corporate power like the British East India T company to a general fear of what we now think of as wholly private companies because of the move towards free incorporation.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So basically there is actually anti-corruption reformers pushed free incorporation because they didn't want only friends of basically friends of senators to get corporations.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they pushed for free incorporation, but once you have free incorporation, you have the constant threat of a corporation, a glomerating power.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: what we would think of as anti-monopoly provisions within the corporate charter there'd be like you can only make shoes, not shoe laces, not, not bridges, you can't tone a telegraph company and a shoe company and I was actually embedded in the grant of power.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: as the corporate charter loosens, it becomes more important for other sources of law than and other sources of politics to prohibit the agglomeration of power.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you have an unlimited grant of corporate authority with an entity that has infinite life and limited liability, there's going to be a natural tendency towards sort of a grotesque growth.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So after the Civil War, although you do see real seeds of it, in the Civil War, a lot of the abolitionists were also a serious anti-monopolis, seeing a fear of arbitrary power in different forms in both monopoli power and in the violent slave owning.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you see that in.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Douglas, and you see that in the Sumner, you know, some of the recognition of a connection between me, sorry, I'm full, I know, but I do think all these connections shed light on this current moment.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: You see a series of people's movements, the Knights of Labor, the populist movement, the
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: who take on monopolies as a fundamental corrupting and illegitimate force.
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they use all these different tactics.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, I think with some of the more inspiring ones, are there were 40,000 lectures.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who traveled around the country, you know, this is one more social media showing up with their basically with their PowerPoint saying hey look at this what railroads are doing look at what grain elevators are doing look at how they are treating different farmers differently look at the economic cost and the political cost so these 40,000 lecturers and they they build different platforms that include
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: what we think of today is the classic anti-corruption elements like direct election of senators and what they thought of then as anti-corruption and pro-democracy and a pro-equality efforts like making sure that everybody has equal access to railroads and grain elevators.
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And breaking up the biggest corporations and we're talking about and they don't use the same language, but we're talking about the whiskey trust the the sewing machine trust the sugar trust the paper bag trust, you know, think how important paper bags are.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this movement ends up being successful first.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the other reasons for the movement is that states were because these trusts this capital clungal operations were successful at the transcending state borders.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was important to have federal, not just state laws, that prohibited this kind of a glomeration of a glomeration of governing power through capital.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the first federal law is the Interstate Commerce Act, which requires us the first great federal anti-monopoly victory, which requires railroads to have fair, reasonable, posted, and equal rates for all.
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the second is the Sherman Antitrust Act, which then requires breakups.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of other tools, but when we think about the modern tool set, it's a combination of the non-discrimination principle requiring big companies not to discriminate between counter-parties and breakup the breakup principle.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now they also fail, you know, look, they succeed on some and they fail on others.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they have this very conservative Supreme Court that narrowly interprets the Sherman Act.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, in the early 1900s, when standard oil is broken up, we might look back at that and say, oh, what a success, but people were so irritated.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: because in the breakup, they interpreted the Sherman Act so narrowly that it led to 1912, 1914, and a reiteration of key anti-monopoly principles, the right of labor to organize without being afraid of being attacked as violating anti-trust laws, and saying basically,
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: conservative courts narrowly interpret these provisions and their new efforts to say, no, we actually meant it when we said we didn't want monopolies.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I, you know, if I were to say, perhaps too general, but a general gloss is that,
• 18:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: courts have almost always been the conservative engine here and in the last 40 years when the Chicago school took over the sort of neoliberal movement that said anti-monopoly is only about cheap.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: cheap goods in the short term and should not be used to address questions of power.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was a movement that tried to gain some traction in Congress and failed.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was only successful by persuading enforcers not to enforce the law and persuading judges to wrongly interpret the law, not in going to the public, which always has been, you know, opposed to the idea of
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, if I were to put it up maybe a name on it, I mean, I think Robert Bork was certainly like, you know, like a very well-known jurist.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't make it to the Supreme Court, but you know, he's like a very important figure on the right.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think like one of his most important books was the Antichrist paradox, where he's
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, you know, argued for an extremely limited view of these laws and what they could actually do.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then basically, actually, I also, I think, you know, using that first Chicago, a school of economics, basically, I agree that monopoly isn't really a problem.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Isn't a problem, right?
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, one thing I just want to put a finger on is that work, who is
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: rightly infamous or famous, depending on who you are, for basic, you know, rewriting history, taking existing statutes and, and I mean, he's a good writer as often very effective dangerous people are.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: but he also and not coincidentally argued that we should not pass the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that it was a matter of business freedom to be able to discriminate.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so when you look at these 100-year apart moments, the 1860s and the 1960s, again, I don't think it's as easy as
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The dominant economic thinking wouldn't have you think to separate questions of race and power and dominance and I don't think it's a surprise that work and Epstein and other sort of key legal figures.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is Richard Epstein.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: key legal figures who really pushed this radical vision that monopolies are not a problem that the only thing that anti-trust laws are for is short-term cheap prices.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're also pushing against the government asserting its power to protect against discrimination.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I think the broader connection is about democracy, like, like, Yes, exactly.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you believe in democracy, going back to the American Revolution and took me with that abolition, you believe that the people have a right to set up their economic system and decide who has economic power and set the rules for economic activity.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And whereas, the contrary view is that, you know, like economics is a kind of natural law.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, like, you know, famously in this early 19th century, there's the idea, you know, that I forget the exact phrase, but it was like, you know, that the Constitution was really enacting, you know, Spencer's sort of Darwinism.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when we're now under work, you have the idea, you know, but the basic idea was that the Constitution is really enacting built in Friedrems.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, political and economic vision, right?
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And just think as you're listening, think yourself, how much do you, and I really resist it, but I would ask you to at least be alert to it.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: How much do you naturalize any kind of economic phenomenon?
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a tendency to use biological metaphors, you know, as opposed to thinking of it as a machine with that we build.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: and can be built to serve certain ends and can be built to serve other ends and it's an area where I do have and maybe this would be on this conversation but I do have some real disagreements with Marxist arrived thinking who also sometimes have some naturalist ways of thinking right that there is a natural and a natural arc which can lead to disempowerment then
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: that if there are markets, they will necessarily become monopolies as opposed to recognizing that there are going to be tendencies that we actually have enormous amounts of power to disrupt.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know, I think this sort of fundamental question which your work often does, like a foregrounding democracy is key because whether or not economics has a subset of natural laws or not, it's also the case that democracy people have the right to set the rule.
• 23:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: and, you know, even like, one could argue, if something will have an economic cost and the economists might not like it, but if the people want it, like they don't want it, we can do it.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, that's what democracy means, like it is.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in any case, I think that this basis, this is our current moment, obviously, like, you know, here's like Bork and the, yeah.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: who didn't make his room court but certainly his type of thinking, you know, especially aided by the Federalist's ID, really sort of populated large parts of the court, including up to the Supreme Court.
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the courts have been a major sort of venue for, you know, pushing back against the anti-monopoly law.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think Trump is very interesting in this respect because he's also brought the presidency to bear.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that would be the real sort of innovation from this sort of broader right-wing politics of the last 50 years.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have not just the court's limiting what democracy can do, but also a president who
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: have sort of a system of like consolidated economic control.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So do you have to do something like this might be a good moment to talk about like what Trump has been doing, you know, I think in a paramount case is a really good example.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Paramount is so important, but I do want to back up one second because I want to, I think before 2020, I had sort of stopped where I just stopped earlier, which is a sense that the courts had really undermined the existing laws.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and as the state started bringing more cases, it became much more clear that a lot of what the Supreme Court had done is dicta.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was just sort of expressing a working view.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that serious law enforcers still had the law and couldn't force the law.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I say that because it's relevant to this.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is relevant to this political moment because if you have a story where the courts have eviscerated anti-trust law and then you have a corrupt president then there's nothing left but as we'll talk about the story is actually that
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: much of the law, the law from the 1950s on is still on the box.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you have a president who's trying to eviscerate the law, but state attorney generals actually have a responsibility.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the power to stop it.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what we have now is- I think that's sort of a Biden moment.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you're right that it sort of gets deleted a little bit.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's actually really important for understanding the degree of corruption we're seeing now, because I think in some ways, it's exactly the moment where, like, you know, thanks to real political movements.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Especially I think Senator Elizabeth Warren deserves a lot of credit for that.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: sort of foregrounding these issues.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also raising the powers that she existed.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, at the end of Biden, you saw a really serious ramping up anti-monopoly, the use of anti-monopoly powers.
• 26:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that this also explains why so many people in Silicon Valley suddenly became attracted to Trump.
• 27:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: that this only became like they really became threatened by the idea that the Democrats in power were going to use this law and so the society like explains a sort of political realignment that one saw like under the Biden administration where suddenly all these people you know who had been either supported both parties or sometimes even had supported the Democrats you know
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think I mean, it's often dressed like that.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really, it's actually critically important.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It changes everything about this moment.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if I think of 2016 as a moment where a lot of Democrats said, ran to Silicon Valley, the Washington Post Jeff Bezos, democracy dies in darkness.
• 27:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: stood up embracing Bezos against Trump in 2016, embraced Google as the CEO Google marches against the Muslim ban, embraces any corporation that stands up against Trump.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now today is standing at Trump side and enforcing censorship.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: on his behalf.
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a really important lesson.
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the moment of shift, I think you're exactly right, is that Silicon Valley, and I don't think you disagree with me, but to put a fine point, I don't think it's a lot of people.
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a very small number of oligarchs.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, but but let me give you the economic structure that we have, I would actually it's like if I had to guess I would think of the average like voter like, you know, Silicon Valley employee like probably more like the vote for Democrats or not.
• 28:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: As you know, like if this had a kind of a basic, it revealed that they were not serious about democracy, but we're serious about just being with anybody who would support, would let them be.
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the moment this really showed up, so what the FTC did and the DOJ did was really basic.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They just treated their job as enforcing the law.
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had a band with Jonathan Cantor at my law school, and I asked him,
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: How would you describe the revolution?
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would say, it wasn't a revolution.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just enforced the law and the degree to which big business, and I'm not talking medium-big business.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm talking these truly grotesque monopolies, started to see antitrust as not law.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: but as a little procedural hurdle to be negotiated around among friends was, it's just so deep that when they engaged in wage suppression around 2010,
• 29:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Basically nothing happened.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They got a slap on the wrist and moved forward.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is a well-known Silicon Valley deal that the big oligarchs decided not to poke each other's workers from each other.
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, secretly decided that there were gay people's wages down.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing happened.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what you see towards during Kamala Harris's campaign is this extraordinary moment where there's
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rear four of the biggest donors to the Democratic Party, to go on TV and say if Kamala Harris is elected, she should replace the chairman of the federal trade commission, Lena Khan.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and by the way, I'm giving $5 million to the Democratic Party, like really open, you know, in the public.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good pro pro pro.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, I actually, as grotesque as that moment was, I loved it as a mask's off moment.
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: because I think they really showed their hand and had had had not realized how grotesque their hand was.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the most people actually want to have a trust enforcement.
• 31:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: They want the lot to apply, you know, as we always say, to everybody regardless of wealth or power.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And but you see it openly with Mark and Driesen saying, you chased me away, you know, from the Democratic Party.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he's basically saying, you chased me away because you said you were going to be serious about enforcing the law in tech, which had had been treated as sort of different in kind, like this alien land where we shouldn't, we shouldn't touch it, less to we somehow slow
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, while we've had, you know, the same incumbents dominant for 20 years now in Silicon Valley.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, so that's a really important moment and it's also important for this moment because if we hadn't had that interlude, that really key moment of enforcement.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: then Trump moving to today who who's federal trade commission approved the and approved doesn't mean it's going to happen said it would not suit a block.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 32:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The paramount Warner Brothers attempted merger.
• 32:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: If we were in
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: 2019.
• 32:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that the states would have done anything.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would have said, you know, they started to in a few cases, but this time that now we're used to actually enforcing the law.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the, I think one of the most important moments that leaving up to this is when the federal government, when Donald Trump's FTC,
• 32:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: said we aren't right on the eve of trial said we are going to take a really weak deal and and not sue a ticket master not take ticket master to trial for monopolization.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everybody knows what a problem ticket master was.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not a hard one.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now there's this
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: 48 hours, or we didn't know what was going to happen.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think of it as a critical 48 hours.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the states said, no, we're going forward with the trial.
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They put on a brilliant trial.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They won easily.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The jury said, yeah, check it, master's breaking the law.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it gave states both in their own minds, I think, and in the public mind, a new sense of authority
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a sense that they can actually enforce the law as they, as they have the obligation to do under the federal statutes and not just sort of turn to whatever Trump does.
• 33:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Trump is clearly
• 33:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: reporting suggests the staff attorneys that people who know the law were bypassed and the decision to allow paramount was decided politically.
• 34:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not the first time this has happened.
• 34:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are a serious concerns, actually there's a federal law that requires that settlements be approved by a federal judge because of concerns around corruption.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: in antitrust.
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in this particular case, the Ellison Trump connection is well established.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he's not only has a huge personal connection, but clearly desires to control the content of media.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the states using these newfound tools is really important for democracy.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think they're going to do it.
• 34:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense that there's a kind of, you know, Federalist solution, if you will, do sort of Trump's corruption.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I want to just step back and resist or point to end on.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I also think the state's taking it up and Trump's relationship with the Ellison family being so corrupt.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's something that we've covered quite a bit in the, you know, the nation with like, you know,
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: basically like CBS and possibly now CNN rolling over and giving Trump in so many words basically saying, you know, you now expect favorable coverage from these outlets because by his relationship with the Nelson family.
• 35:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: This all makes it like, not just a legal matter, but again, it's her democratic political matter.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in addition to the sort of remedy of the states that you mentioned, there's also an election issue, and this is also an issue of like, if the Democrats win the Senate, they could be a lot of hearings, I mean, if they win Congress more broadly, but I think particularly the Senate, the people of opportunity.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: They should hold hearings and they should push to roll back the corrupt mergers.
• 36:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 36:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then the...
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: the language of the horses out of the barn or the train is left the station will be everything that the Wall Street Journal editorial board will will and business commentators will say it's too late it's too late it's too late in every single way they can because they know that in fact it is not too late and we have democratic power over
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Corporate consolidation.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to investigate these mergers.
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to find out exactly what happened.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to find out what conversations happened.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to find out who was skipped over.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to find out, I mean, in the paramount mergers just to remind your listeners, Donald Trump, the deep, not so deep, but the last two years history, Donald Trump sued saying that the editing
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: of a Kamala Harris interview in answers to questions about Gaza, the editing of it caused him mental anguish, that the fact that they used a different clip to tease the interview
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and in the context of the interview that aired caused him mental anguish.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't include that in the article, or the essay that I wrote for the nation, but I want to say that just to say that, you don't have to go to a legal expert to know that as a ridiculous lawsuit.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, almost it seems like a ridiculous offer first, like it's like just like I need an excuse to shake you down right and so then drops the lawsuit
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these are that drops the lawsuit in exchange for deals with Ellison.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, these are blatant just shakedowns.
• 38:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fact that they say canceling Colbert is required financially.
• 38:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Scott Pellie speaking up to say that he is that this is an absolutely corrupted media environment that they do not have the basic freedoms to do journalism and reporting.
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's it would be funny if it weren't horrifying yeah yeah I don't know absolutely absolutely yeah and as I said again I think it's been a real sort of throughlining our conversation yeah yeah yeah like this is a sort of like a matter of democracy and like a matter of politics and like there's I mean there are these like legal tools but they don't exist in the abstract you actually have to have
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: as well as a political movement to be pushing for it, but actual remedies do exist.
• 38:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've played the game with her.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you have what I want to say?
• 38:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're going to a new King's protest, great.
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: OK?
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But make sure your state is suing to block this merger.
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
• 39:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like we have a weird split brain that we went away, which we've adopted the Chicago school.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you actually have power.
• 39:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know, you live in New York, Connecticut, you live in Texas, say that your attorney general should block this loss.
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a direct way to demand political accountability and they can block it and when they block it, if CNN is not owned by CBS,
• 39:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're far from the diverse media environment we need for democracy, but we have a fighting chance to learn about what is happening in the world and locally when it is not all controlled by you know, a handful of oligarchs.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, absolutely absolutely.
• 39:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think that's a great turn of take away, both from this conversation and in these are pieces that you wrote for the nation, which I'll link to, but they're actual like real world political action that people could be taking now to fight back.
• 40:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that it's not the case that the bad guys have won.
• 40:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, I don't know, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do,