The Incoming Biden Administration i thought we should begin with kind of the big picture that you lay out in the book when people hear the title they might say of course. I think many people may not fully understand. Taking the time to talk about this book and thank you to cspan for having me here to talk about it as well. That isnt a surprise for anyone but what has been happening over the last several decades is our economy has been highly concentrated and theres been consolidation on an ongoing basis in every sector of the economy so we hear a lot about but not only are we talking about food or agriculture in the industry you will have a monopoly problem and im also talking about the duopoly is there are harms that flow from this that i want to highlight to help them understand what it means for their everyday life and how it affects them. As you write about, it is the Cable Service and industries. Can you talk about how we got to this point you sort of explain in the book that there was this revolution in economic thinking. Can you explain how we got to this poi in the economy . Theyve been around for a ry long time a we had a pretty d concentrated economy for a lge part of our history after we overcame the first gilded age and it started to get world back around early 8. It was the rise of the chicago scho of economics whi is also known a neoliberalism and is the takeover of antitrust law to choose what its suppod to be focusing on. Its all abo making sure we dont have the concentrated power and that the are functiing really but in the school of economics it would say all we care about is making sure that they are efficientnd i they are efficient they will pass on these deficncies in the form of lower prices. Consumers will get the benefit and so that is going to be what we look at when decidg if a company is violating the antitrust law by acquiring a company that it shouldnt be giving in an anticompetitive manner. Will this be efficient or lead all tse years later we found the focus hasnt. What its done in the acquisition and they become a streamlined and efficnt machine by getting bigger and bigger but no one is really benefiting from ts. The only pele that are really benefiting from the sing of the corporatis are the executives and shareholders. Thats how we got where we are. The court adopted this thinking of the Chicago School of economics and rolled back the way the antitrust laws were beingnforced. So the Chicago School took over a lot of thinkg even during the democratic administrations certainly durg the republican administration. But right now what i think is interesting is that there is a bit of a cnter revolution going on that has taken over in the lastew years. In your book of course if you cod explain this pushback that has propped up because in the last probablyhree to four years there has been a pushback thats cated momentum in the other dection i give credit to the organizaon where i work now inhe institute and is been at this for aong time back in 2005 he wrote hi book called the end of the line where he was predicting we would have shortage because of the consolidation of the supply chains and first it was at the new America Foundation but then they were ousted from the new America Foundation that was partly funded and theyve been at it for the better part of decade and finally i has reached more people. They are able to see the probms we have been seeing for a long time. Ive been in the field a long time iuess 15 years now. I started seeing some of those challenges when i was at the new york ag but it was after was ab to join th movement showing the current stem isnt workinand our economy is becoming s highly consolidated that it isnt working for most people and the antitru enforcement had gone missing. But i do have toive credit to the open Market Institute and the movement that is getting bigger every day. But the writing on the wall is pretty clear. A. Of this is a issue thats being written about inopular books and certainly in the mainstream media. Can you explain a little bit about why you think this has sort of emerged . Because you cant ignore the problems anymore. Thats part of having a highly consolidated economy and people are struggling and wan to figure out how we fit the economy worki for the select few. They have more wealth in the bottom 80 and the ability t make a living is so much harder than it used to behen we have all other kinds of harms and how suspected the democratic process like the election and the cost of healthcare, so many harms that have come out of allowing corporations to become s giant and the markets to be no longer competitive that i think the pain and of thevidence you just cant ignore it at this point. To get the competion working again because you dont have a choice. The current rce isnt sustainable so i do think that its a matter of when and what im trying to do isake it happen sooner by getting people to understand how this affects their daily liv so they can rise up and start pressuring the government to do its job and other antimonopoly policies so we can have open and competitive markets again. This is an issue that certainly has been taken up by progressive activists and Elizabeth Warren when she was a candidate for president talked about the need to break up the Big Tech Companies and at the time that was pretty radical for a president ial candidate to be talking about antitrust and then advocating for Something Like the breakup of the company. Have antitrust has a history of being political. It was very much i on the mind f a politician and that the net change became something that was very apolitical i think until maybe right now can you talk about that history and may be why it is the last few decades it disappeared from the political conversation . Sure. That is the main reason why involving the takeover of the Chicago School of economics instead of making sure we have fair competion and the antitrust l it became a battle of experts and it became so overly complex no average person could talk about it or be invoed in it. It wasbviously a deliberate compcation of antitrust law. It makes it much harder to prevail against any corporation. There wasust this analysis even for the antitrust enforcer to sue a big corporation, you are talking about a multiyear long, multimillion dollar effort so it served a a Corporate Powero make it so complicated an to prevail. I think that was a deliberate strategyn favor of Corporate Power to take awa his tool. Thats when senator sherman passed the act in 1898 and said as a political power for commerce and trade so it really is an issue o democracy and concentrated Corporate Power and it defted t first round that we had in this countrys the original gilded age. Was a Citizen Movement that did that. Thetandard oil was monopolyn the scale. It was a big bad monopoly that rolled the market and controlled the system and it may have seemed insurmountable and there was a journalist who did investigativeeporting and posed all this misconduct and published it in a Magazine Article that then turned into a book and called it the popular uprising. They were trying to show the monopoly powers in these images that would be successful to the average person to aer them and get them involved in the movement again the monopoly. And when the census rose up they broke up the standardil and the anticomtitive merger so i believe the citizens must be involved. We will not overcome theower unless we have an engaged citizenry because the reality i that the ccentrated economic power translates its tremendous political power and the only way to overcome this monopoly money is through the people, so yes. We he an American Dream that is alive and functioning and isnt being ruled by the corporations economically and politically. This would be a good time to explain how to make decisions about antitrust enforcement in this country because it is not a decision that is made very openly by congress. They talk about the antitrust enforcement regime in the United States and its just so people understand how that process works and what enforcement, what their job is in terms of enforcing the law. We have a few different types of ads. We have the federal trade commission and we have the states attorneys general with their own antitrust law and the power of the federal law like the act i mentioned before. The fcc and the doj get confused about the case. Its beginning to do enforcement antitrust law and then theres the merger context to notify the agencys. Then theres a certain amount of time that they have to look at the merger quickly and decide whether or not they are going to take a deeper look, which is called the second request and get more documents to investigate if they are going to let the deal go through. Then they asked for more documents and do the interviews and whatnot and then they will decide whether or not to block the deal. Fortunately they dont have the ability to say okay weve investigated this and determined its anticompetitiveness. They have to sue in court and win and the judges have bought into this ideology so strongly. We saw that recently with the lawsuits and the spread of the tmobile merger. That is something that should have been straightforward when we talk about the merger and can competitors when they showed there would be millions of dollars of increases to consumers and still the judge declined to block the deal. The second is antitrust enforcers are looking at anticompetitive behavior and they will find out about that either because some player in the market complaints to the or they read a story and investigate for example amazon and the mistreatment of the market dollars or Something Like that. And then they investigated and again they have to decide can they when in court because of the legal precedent that has come out in the last 30 years its hard to win those cases particularly the monopolization cases, so the enforcement tries to decide and often times the answer is no even when it is anticompetitive conduct so thats where weve seen the week enforcement. Increasingly the answer to that is no. They should be more willing to lose because even then you are showing congress these are not working and you need to step in. But yes that is the process and it is quite opaque. There isnt much for the average citizen. The investigations are confidential but then it becomes much more of a transparent process. So if you think its important for this process to be more political than it has been, how do you see Going Forward is there anything they can do to have a voice in the process because the investigation talking about the merger that can take a year essentially theres no pronouncement or progress announced by the agency when they do that and the same goes for the monopolization investigation. There doesnt seem to be much of a role for the citizens to have a voice. I think the citizens are the key and that is the whole reason i wrote the boo this is what it means when you are struggling every day and you cant pay your bills and you have a conflict what does the monopoly have to do about it. I wanted to help people understand and i firmly believe the citizens are the key but it may not be at the agency level. It may be in terms of pestering congress and the representatives. What we do not normally do is have the Congress Passed the law and let the judges completely destroyed. What we normally do is if the judge shows that its democratically fast then the Congress Needs to rein in the judges saying thats not what we meant. For them to be involved in supporting the antimonopoly reform supporting those candidates that are willing to be aggressive its a great move for those in the house and the judiciary subcommittee and house judiciary to endeavor to do an indepth investigation and propose all kinds of reform that takes a lot of bravery and we need to have his back and support those lawmakers because there is tens of millions of dollars that encourage them not to do that so if Congress Changes these decisions and makes it clear with simple rules that do not take ten years to bring a case and that dont require millions of dollars of economic fees then we can start to see real change. I want to talk about some of the recent developments because as youve explained youve been critical of enforcers not doing enough. But just last month in october the Justice Department in the monopolization case, that was the first major monopolization case in a long time so it seems that ma maybe the answers are changing and becoming aggressive, do you agree with that or not . You ask whether it is a good deal. Some are narrow in scope and its the tip of the iceberg in terms of the anticompetitive conduct. They have a product to distort the competition so the first complaint is getting at a fraction of that behavior but its still critically important that we have an antitrust case against the provision. Thats in the introduction for the antitrust law. So, you know, its been a long time. Its a big deal but we finally turned that corner and its only the beginning of what we are going to see coming and then we also have the fcc expected in the next month or two with the states attorneys general adding to the case with their investigation and the anticompetitive behavior so it is a huge deal. Why is it that it took 20 years to make it a huge Successful Company and facebook is newer of course. How do you explain if they are such a problem in the economy why would we go 20 years without a case against the big compa . The judges have made it difficult and those are thenes that go after the monopolization and theres another part of the act whe you have more than one company agreng to restrain trade to charge the same amount to consumers when i was working on an antitrust enforcer most of the effortsent to those cas because they were easy to win in court. Once you prove that theres been angreement to fix t prizes then most of them do have limited resourcesnd theres enough goingn so its the monopolization and the other thing is we also had the merger nia after the last several decades so they were basically drinking from fire hose. Its reviewing millions and bringing the cases it just got lower priority because they are harder to win in court andhey havent really reined in or narrowed it so thats one of the main reaso whe we were operatin under the consumer welfare standard becomes more consistent and that was the whole ideology behind ito the standards of the court apply is this csumer welfare standard and with a company like google it was much easier to fly under the radar than to say there was a company gouging the prices. It didnt fitn well with the standards after because thats how they got away with it for so longhen in reality as i explained in the book we are paying in so many other ways but its really the data we had some economists even say that if you have a competitive marketplace online its for the highly valuable data but thats another reason why they went so long without seeing the enforcement is because of this kind of myth that they were Offering Free Services and optimizing the consumer welfare to such an extent. But i do want to make the point that it wasnt about the price increase. But at the same time, people will say google is a Great Service and just a great Search Engine and it gives me what i need but the doj lays out some actual things google did that hurt the market and i think theres been an example of how big tech can harm the competition and explain its not just about the data, its about actual conduct. The clone of microsoft so i will go into this quickly microsoft had a monopoly there was a 95 of market share and so it told the computer makers if you want to sell a computer with the microsoft operating system then you have to install our app Dash Software and browser so it basically made it to that competing browser with no shot at competing. To make sure they dont even have a shot at competing so it wasnt saying we will have better features and therefore we are going to win. It was make sure they dont even have a chance. Were just going to make sure that they do not even have a shot at competing because they didnt have a choice they saw Internet Explorer as the default browser and not the netscape navigator there was nothing to stop them from doing the same thing when it came to the Search Engines. Everyone got the browser and if it were not for microsoft we might not even have google today so that is the irony of the fall. Google learned that works pretty well and acquired that android operating system and told them you want the operating system theres no other option out there. So it could have been a competitor but couldnt even get to be the default in android phones there would be a tremendous market share worldwide so it did the exact same thing to make sure that it was the default Search Engine for all kinds of devices. But also the apple devices and to make sure they couldnt have the opportunity to compete than just going into the store and downloading it as a competitor. They just choose us. They could choose others. I think that it was 12 biion that gave the default. So its just everyone is choosing google. Its kind of a loser argument in my opinion so they are competing and making sure nody else had a chance to compete. You touched on this briefly but while the Justice Department andhe ftc seemed to be waking up from their slumber just very recently from the antitrust subcommittee inhe house and by the representative you mentioned briefly but that also is significant in that i dont even know when the last Time Congress took up antitrust in that way so they could possibly be doing in the next congress. There was the antitrust subcommittee in the house should lead by the representative its truly an amazing phenomena and historic in exactly the kind of thing that congress should be doing all the time but hasnt done in a very long time. To me it restored that our elected officials were going to take on Corporate Power in this way for the corporate money on politics. Its just such a rare sight so it was a wonderful thing to see. I was honored that they invited me to testify in the first hearing that spoke to the influence of google and facebook monopoly power the advertising on the journalism industry. Then again i got to look at the proposing solutions from moving forward so there were many hearings and hours and hours of interviews and they created a 460 page report so for anyone who doubts that the companies have been used in an anticompetitive way tha theres0 pages and then of course i talk about in the book its not just that these companies are on top because they are the best. They have taken their muscle and made sure others do not get the chance to compete and that isnt legal. Its illegal under the antitrust law so im optimistic that the proposal put forth in the report and it will start being included in the legislation and im hopeful we will be able to make some real reforms in terms of the antitrust law. The nondiscrimination rules are somewhat of what we had in the Net Neutrality and near every Major Business its a historic turning point right now in our democracy for apple, facebook and they basically describe them as the gatekeepers in the economy each company in its own way is choking off competition whether it is through the mergers or other conduct. Another recommendation would go beyond tech. We talked earlier in the conversation about the focus on prices and the reports recommendation and consider the enforcement decisions in a much broader set of considerations like the effects on workers and the businesses and that sort of thing. Im not sure if that will go anywhere but do you see that as something that could change enforcement significantly more than just tech . Now we have every other sector of the economy. But you know, some of those changes could certainly impact every sector of the economy. Theres kind of a difference between saying we are going to consider all these other factors in our analysis or the way i look at it is as intended to promote competition and we will get all these other benefits. I have a little chapter in the book about how the wages have been dressed and employees of allind have taken a sller share of the productity and value they create as the economy has gotten more and more bargaining power. Its so much less when there are few competitors in each sector. You have these oppornitieso compete because they block out so many markets or you challenge the dominant company so all of these benefits to be concentrating speech, to me they all flow from and ensurg that the rkets are competitive. They dont have to say we were more focusedn speech,ust make america competive and there will be less concentrated control. We areble to reform across the board and we wilsee benefits and agriculturend pharmaceuticals, we will see the benefits across the board to promote competition. I did want to ask about another industrybout healthcare and other examples. I thought just as an example we would be able to tala little bitbout t maker of the product epipen. To sort of keep their hold on that market. Its an importantxample for a couple of different reasons. When we are being gouged on prices for the pharmaceuticals d essential treatment the average person thinks okay we do have a lot of problems in the Healthcare System but iwe bring in the actual antitrust law i can guarantee that it would get billions of dollars back and it would really trim out the healthcare cost. I spent most of my time focused on healthcare because it was like playing wha a mole. It makes sense in the antitrust law because the findings that they pay are not as much as the games that they made. If a Company Makes billions of dollars breaking the law then its just okay, cool. The other imrtant thing is how when you allow the markets to become concerated, you get a shortage is andeople need to understand how much it made us a sitting duck because we didnt have enough of anything tha isnt a monopol problem the pens that every child with allergies need to have constantly are often just not available. Theres shortages and parents could diend i cant get the medicineecause it isnt available how could they possibly have srtages . Theres so much to make sure there would beo other epinephrine injector on the market so not only can it charge 600 in the. S. , b it also can make sure there is no other available when it rs out. This was all i could say to that and these are all allegations and i havent personally seen the documents but they are in the complaint coming out with a competing injector. If you want the discounted prices then we cannot stock any other type of injector. Obviously they have no choice but to say no to that situation when it is the dominant injector out there that people know how to use and they have to make sure that they stock that so it took steps to make sure they didnt have the alternative available to them this is when they had the state level than any other corporation it creat creates. We get shortages and we get overpriced drugs. The other main way that we see it is paid to delay. Its literally paying the Generic Drug Companies not to introduce their generic drugs. Talk about a great job. There are many other examples in the book we wont have timee to get into it, but hospital consolidation is another issue that forces prettyctive around but at the same time, people watching this will know that in many communities theres generally one or two hoitals typically controld by Large Companies and that means higher prices when we get sick because theres only one choice. It also means bedhortages and huge prices because of the reductions in the last decades and a tremendousumber but also the oer side of that it leads to depressed wes for the healthethcare workers. Economts estimated they should get paid far more and the reason that they are not is because ey have monopoly employees and they are not competing to hire them sohere wages have been depressed b the monopolization in the Hospital System so as a worker and a patient it affects you as these are some of the ways it affects you on a daily basis and it causes a lot ofhe pain we have in our daily lives. In the few mines we have left, i did want t ask about we are abou to change administtions and i wanted to get your prediction on how you think that the issue should be handled by the Biden Administration and next congress. I think it is a little hard to tell. Oncee get the appointment and we see who is in charge we will have a better sense of that that makes big dference. I think there will not be any kind of rolling back of what theyve done so far it isnt a case that i expect to be curbed in any way by the Biden Administration. I do think that there is an increasing pressure on the actions and the experience of the ccentrated control and we sawvery little decision facebook made leading up to the election that had a huge impact on the campaign breach and this disinformaon and often benefiting the trump campaign. There was a stu by the markup showing actually paid less than the Biden Campaign and that is because it is outperformed beer which means its more likely to cause people to make a reaction on the facebook Business Model program and get people to react so it causes fear, anger and is the content by t Business Model in this disinformation and misinfmation. I would expect that they wou have an appetite to encourage or ensure the martplace is robust, again, instead of having each person get their own targeted individualized strm of content that we dont even see the same speech. There uld still be a lot o evidence coming out in the next few months showing how much it influences the election. That problem is going to continue to g attention. We wil continue to have robust movement. Im very optimistic but like i said i would like to see this to know for sure. What do you foresee in the next congress if anything . At this point we dont know if they will be controlled by democrats. If republicans hold control, do you see any movement there . Its one of the vy few birtisan issues in the country right now so i actually think that antimonopo is one way we can try to unitemerica. Folks on both sides of the aisle realize that this is a problem and agree that they are on the right so its not necessarily the case that they contr influences directly and havehe monopoly policy. In fact its kind of like wha kind of democrat, what kind of republican. So, i am optimistic that the reformsill start to get more ataction and other lawmakers obviously like sator warren, setor klobuchar, senator blumenthal, hawley, booker. We have a l of folks thatre focused on this issue right now so there will be the legislative reform. En when the report came out, it was put out in aemo with arly all of those findings and then we disagreed with some of the remedies, some of the proposed remedies, so i think that it will be change its just a question of how aggressive it will be depending on i havent had time to figure out if they are antimonopoly or not quite yet. With that, we are out of time. Thank you, author of monopolies suck seven ways big corporations rule your life and how to take back control. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. This program is available as a podcast. All aftewords programs can be viewed on the website at booktv. Org