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[…] This rethinking of antitrust policy and the actions it has spawned couldn’t come at a more critical time. As the pandemic consolidates markets, new mergers—from regional banks to big pharmaceutical firms to the world’s largest cannabis company—are being announced every day. The level of mergers and acquisitions is “extraordinary,” says Goldman Sachs’s top M&A banker Stephan Feldgoise, and he expects those mergers to come with job loss, as is typical with concentration.
The lawsuits against Google and Facebook will last for years. Big Tech’s defenders and lobbyists will defame them and bargain for a settlement of the anti-monopoly strife. The cases might even fail. It doesn’t matter. The policy center of America has now been convinced that the situation in corporate America has grown out of control. Public opinion supports that perspective. The network of anti-monopoly thinkers and scholars and activists has grown. The arguments for enabling monopoly power have been revealed as weak. Nothing is going to stop this evolution away from the laissez-faire of the Chicago school and toward the preservation of liberty and democracy.
Barry Lynn, an intellectual godfather of the new anti-monopoly movement, wrote this week that Joe Biden must make a choice to wield the laws at his disposal to fight corporate power, and must break with the failed consensus of his Obama-era confidants, who didn’t break corporate power when they had every opportunity to do that. I agree that it’s important, but I don’t totally agree that it’s Biden’s choice to make. The genie is out of the bottle. The nation has already made its decision. Biden can lead, follow, or get out of the way.
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES
QUOTATION
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
~~Andrew Wyeth
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Disgrace: NY Times Knew Before the Election:
The LA Times is reporting this morning that the NY Times had the domestic surveillance story prior to the 2004 presidential election.
The New York Times first debated publishing a story about secret eavesdropping on Americans as early as last fall, before the 2004 presidential election.
But the newspaper held the story for more than a year and only revealed the secret wiretaps last Friday, when it became apparent a book by one of its reporters was about to break the news, according to journalists familiar with the paper’s internal discussions.
The NY Times was sitting on the biggest story of the year. The NY Times was sitting on the information that the President of the United States was illegally spying on citizens of this country. The NY Times knew that the administration was carrying on illegal surveillance of the American people before those very Americans were going to the polls to elect a president. Hmmmm…. It would have been kind of handy to have had that information on November 2, 2004, wouldn’t it? As for why they held it? Care to explain, Bill Keller?
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