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FEATURED: Biden Should Embrace Economic Populism After Series of Anti-Monopoly Victories
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As the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly agenda continues to both produce wins across the economy and gain in popularity with the public, Economic Liberties remains at the forefront of shaping the media narrative. We’re urging the administration to tout the impact of their policies and enforcement actions, and pushing back and countering the spin emanating from corporate monopolies.
An excellent piece from The New Yorker [[link removed]] earlier this week makes all this crystal clear. It features Senior Advisor Bharat Ramamurti emphasizing that the administration should take significant pride in its corporate power agenda — an agenda that’s paying off for working families by lowering prices, and putting people above profits. At a time when consumer sentiment about the economy is in flux, leaning into the administration’s work to crack down on exploitative corporate monopolies is not just good policy, but popular too. As Senior Advisor Faiz Shakir noted in Politico [[link removed]] , “Biden is taking a lot of that populist fight and making it real — he’s doing it through policy and on a whole variety of scores.”
Wall Street and big business clearly understand the power of antimonopoly. Corporate America is attacking and pushing back hard on the administration’s efforts to ban junk fees, eliminate noncompetes, lower credit card fees, and reduce prescription drug costs — as we detail in our Corporations vs. The People [[link removed]] tracker. While conservative political leaders like Hawley, Vance, and Gaetz (a self-described Khanservative [[link removed]] ) are challenging corporate power, Trump is muting his critique. Research Director Matt Stoller recently wrote in BIG [[link removed]] that Trump has been shifting his tone away from 2016-era economic populism and listening to big business CEOs.
At the debate tonight, President Biden should lean into economic populism and champion the administration’s competition agenda. As Senior Fellow Elizabeth Wilkins aptly pointed out to the Guardian [[link removed]] , “This is stuff that people want, but … it’s also stuff that big corporations have been getting away with for a long time.”
Learn more about the extensive accomplishments of Chair Khan [[link removed]] and the Federal Trade Commission, AAG Kanter [[link removed]] and DOJ Antitrust, and Director Chopra [[link removed]] and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to deliver tangible results for Americans.
THE LATEST
State L egislative S essions C lose with S ignificant A nti- M onopoly W ins: With most state legislative sessions winding down for the year, we’re celebrating several anti-monopoly wins. They include: a new Minnesota law to ban anti-competitive junk fees [[link removed]] ; new laws to rein in Big Tech’s addiction and surveillance model [[link removed]] in New York; and groundbreaking cases against algorithmic price-fixing in the rental housing market [[link removed]] filed by the attorneys general of Washington, D.C. [[link removed]] , and Arizona [[link removed]] .
We’ve continued to cultivate and support new anti-monopoly state champions and we’re playing a key role to organize the state and local anti-monopoly movement from Virginia to Arizona. Major areas of work include our End Junk Fees [[link removed]] campaign which stretched across 13 states this year, bringing together diverse coalitions to combat deceptive pricing practices. Partnering with Local Progress, we crafted a memo [[link removed]] on the problem of algorithmic price fixing in rental housing markets and have been advising state leaders on how to combat it. We also released a new brief and model legislation [[link removed]] [[link removed]] for states to complement the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed ban on noncompete agreements, ensuring workers across the economy are protected from these abusive contracts. Read more from our own Pat Garofalo and labor expert Terri Gerstein on how states can protect workers from monopoly power in a recent op-ed in The Hill [[link removed]] .
Big Retail Ratchets Up Fight Against Decades-Old Price Discrimination Law: With reporting [[link removed]] that the FTC will soon resuscitate the century old Robinson-Patman Act (RPA) to launch a suit against the largest U.S. alcohol distributor, Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits, the biggest retail companies are getting nervous. As we explained in our 2022 report [[link removed]] , the RPA was passed to prevent big box companies from using their size to force suppliers into giving them discounts, while small businesses have to pay higher prices. While independent businesses have been cheering the anticipated suit, companies like Walmart have launched a lobbying campaign, passing around fact sheets [[link removed]] on Capitol Hill to misinform members of Congress. In response, we released our own myth-fact sheet [[link removed]] to set the record straight and have been engaging with policymakers to help them understand that reviving the Robinson-Patman Act is an essential part of reviving Main Streets across the country and lowering prices.
Embedding Anti-Monopoly in the AI Regulatory Framework: As artificial intelligence technology continues to quickly evolve, it’s crucial that governments champion a regulatory framework that doesn’t allow a handful of dominant tech companies to control this new technology. Rethink Trade Director Lori Wallach was invited to testify in Congress [[link removed]] at a U.S. House AI Taskforce meeting, where she emphasized the need to recognize the role international preemption via trade agreements play in creating fair and safe AI guidelines. And amid efforts in California to regulate AI, we weighed [[link removed]] in with the lead sponsor of SB 1027 with concrete suggestions to improve the bill and ensure it fosters fair market access and beneficial inventions—from adding a private right of action and whistleblower protections to prohibiting conflicts of interest. All this activity comes on the heels of the FTC and DOJ’s investigations [[link removed]] into Big Tech platform’s de-facto acquisition of AI startups, which we’ve been advocating for with vigor.

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