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John,
The Biden-Harris administration is putting teeth in its antitrust enforcement under the leadership of FTC chair Lina Khan, and DOJ Antitrust Division head, Jonathan Kanter. Now this enforcement team has won an historic decision against Google as an illegal monopoly.
Khan criticizes the standard “play it safe” stance of prior antitrust officials, such as former head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Christine Varney, who said “In America, we reward success, and I applaud the companies that have been very successful” -- just prior to taking on a cushy private sector job with a tony Manhattan law firm protecting those very same corporations.
Instead, Khan is taking on industry after industry, with an ambitious agenda that includes Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Tech, corporate landlords, credit card companies, grocery mega-mergers, private equity firms, the military industrial complex, and more.
Between the FTC and DOJ, legal actions have been brought against Ticketmaster, Apple, and UnitedHealth, as well as against junk fees, non-compete agreements, and the proposed Kroger-Albertsons grocery megamerger.
Khan has bipartisan support from lawmakers from JD Vance to Bernie Sanders, because instead of seeking partisan battles, she wages battles against multinational corporations based on an analysis of who has too much power and who doesn’t have enough. But billionaires and CEOs want the next president to fire Khan and Kanter, hoping to avoid such scrutiny.
Tell FTC chair Lina Khan and Asst. Attorney General Jonathan Kanter thank you for their efforts, and urge them to keep fighting for working people against corporate monopolies! Send a message to the next president to protect and defend these antitrust enforcers!
In one recent victory, Khan went after pharmaceutical companies that were charging patients hundreds of dollars for each life-saving inhaler. The FTC found these excessive expenses were based on bogus patents for small inhaler parts that should not have received separate patents. Under pressure from Khan, the companies agreed to cap the cost of all inhalers at $35.
Khan is watching ChatGPT, to see that the opportunity for a vibrant market in Artificial Intelligence for consumer use is not undermined by the risks of consolidation.
The costs of unfair business practices to consumers are substantial. Junk fees are estimated to cost consumers over $90 billion a year. And non-compete agreements, included in hiring contracts to prevent employees from taking positions at competing companies for months or years after leaving, are estimated to cost job seekers as much as $300 billion every year.
One of the arguments against the Kroger-Albertsons merger is that unionized employees of each of the two companies are able to get bargaining leverage in negotiating for wages and working conditions. Losing this competition would put workers at an unfair disadvantage to the resulting giant grocery corporation.
The pattern is clear: as Khan has said, “Government is supposed to be on the side of the people and enforce the laws to protect them.” An active FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division functions not only to enforce the laws after they are broken, but also to deter companies from breaking the laws in the first place.
Click here to combat the efforts of billionaires and CEOs to get Khan and Kanter fired, and show your support for the Biden-Harris antitrust agenda!
And thank you for standing up against the power of illegal monopolies!
-DFA AF Team
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