We live in a remarkable moment historically. The government’s antitrust authorities have decided to renew skepticism of corporate power after 40 years in the wilderness, returning to a position held in America since the Boston Tea Party that big corporations threaten economic liberties. This small band inside the Biden administration is challenging mergers and winning monopolization cases to break up big companies. Just last week, the Justice Department laid down its initial thoughts in the ongoing monopolization trial against Google, arguing that it could recommend separating the search giant from its cellphone operating system (Android), browser (Chrome), and app store (Google Play) businesses. Around 43 percent of the S&P 500 index, by market capitalization, is under an actual antitrust lawsuit or an investigation.
Yet this renewal is under threat from a new president coming in next January. We know that business leaders are trying to get their hooks in a future Harris presidency, and that Trump has generally used antitrust as a weapon against political enemies rather than a way to protect the public from the dangers of concentrated power. Who will win—the election, and the race to define policy after it—is genuinely uncertain.
There’s another side to this potential shift: a business media that sees its stakeholders as the investing public, which has convinced itself (against actual logic) that bigger is better and anything that gets in the way of that is blasphemous. The perch from which 1,000 CEOs yell “fire Lina Khan” is CNBC, the communications provider for capitalism. Any deviation from the orthodoxy of the last 40 years is seen as strange and unnatural, like in this Vox piece on the “New Progressive Economics” (which mentions the Prospect a bit). Media that comes from the perspective of those on the front lines, trying to compete against corporate power, isn’t really out there. In other words, there’s no anti-CNBC, something that explains how the business world really works.
That’s where we come in.
I’m the co-host of a new podcast called Organized Money, along with Matt Stoller, of the American Economic Liberties Project. The name comes from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden a week before his re-election, when he said, “And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
Each week, Matt and I and our guests will take you inside a different market, and break down how it really works. It’s a perfect audio companion for those who like stories about ideas, politics, and power, as we do here at the Prospect. (I’m not going anywhere; Organized Money is a supplement to our work here.)
We’ve released two episodes so far. The obvious choice for our first episode was Google. Its name is a verb! And it was just found guilty in federal court of monopolization—twice. But in 2011, the Obama administration announced an investigation on similar grounds, but didn’t prosecute. Why? We talked to Brody and Luke Mullins, authors of a terrific book called The Wolves of K Street about the D.C. lobbying game, and learned about Google’s “Mean Girls” technique to create a form of peer pressure, making Obama’s FTC officials feel like they would be uncool and shunned if they took Google to court.
In episode two, we look at the Federal Trade Commission’s challenge to the proposed merger between the two biggest “one-stop shop” grocery chains, Kroger and Albertsons. There was a critical three-week federal court hearing about this in September, and we talked to attorney Laurel Kilgour, who was in the courtroom. These antitrust trials are fascinating moments where executives have to explain how they actually do business, under oath. And you get to see their decisions in real time, with startling admissions that may even drive our politics.
Future episodes will tackle monopolies in pharmaceuticals, baby formula, online gambling, and many more. We’re doing a first season from now until the end of the year.
Here’s how you can find us. You can go to organizedmoney.fm and sign up for our emails, and we will deliver every episode to your inbox. Or you can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, be it Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever. I’m told that it’s useful to leave a review and a five-star rating, so if you like the show, please do that!
I think it’s important to grow the audience for a new way of talking about business and economics, which is at the heart of how this country is run. It’s a show about all the money and power in the world; we think it’ll be of interest! I hope you can check it out.
