The popular mind is agitated with problems that may disturb social order, and among them all none is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity that has grown within a single generation out of the concentration of capital into vast combinations to control production and trade and to break down competition.
—Senator John Sherman, 1890, speaking of his Sherman Antitrust Act

Monopoly in Milk: The End of a Family Dairy Farm

An older Kentucky dairy farmer named Guy Coombs described dairy farming in the 21st century to an NBC documentary crew. He told them, “It’s been real rough mentally, more than physically. Feed man called me one day and said, ‘How ya doin?’ I said ‘Physically I’m fine, mentally I wanna shoot someone.’ . . . Dairy farming has been important to us. I guess we’ve made it a way of life, or it’s been our life; we’ve worked hard to make a living, and we’ve done pretty good for well over 60 years.”¹

Now, Guy Coombs and his son have retired from the dairy milk business. They are among a hundred farmers who lost their contracts—and their livelihoods—in large part because of a shrewd business decision by one of America’s behemoth retail corporations: Walmart.

The senior vice president of sourcing strategy for Walmart U.S., Tony Airoso, explained to a USA Today reporter in 2018, “By operating our own plant and working directly with the dairy supply chain in the Midwest, we’ll further reduce operating costs and pass those savings on to our customers so that they can save money.”²

The reasoning echoes Robert Bork’s fight to allow monopolies to form in order to guarantee low prices and “consumer welfare.”

But milk prices were already so low as to be pressing smaller dairy farmers out of business. Farmers who were able to remain in business relied on exclusive bulk contracts like the one that Walmart’s previous supplier, Dean Foods, had with more than 100 farmers in eight states, including the Coombs family.

Walmart may be able to deliver even lower prices for consumers, but its decision to take on milk processing also has had ripple effects in the economy far beyond the prices that consumers see in stores. Walmart’s milk-processing plant provides milk for more than 600 stores, and Walmart has famously squeezed out smaller alternative grocers in many places across the country. That means that Walmart is the exclusive bulk buyer and retail distributor for milk (and many other products) in many rural areas across America.

Walmart has built a massive milk-processing plant in Indiana and cut out several suppliers like Dean Foods. Those suppliers in turn canceled their contracts with family farms like the Coombses’.

The Coombses were left with no processors to buy their milk and no way to do it themselves. And so, in the third generation of the farm, the Coombses were forced to sell off their cows to slaughter.

Worse yet, the Coombses’ farm wasn’t paid off, so they were forced to immediately try to repurpose it just to eke out enough income to keep the bank from seizing it, and with it their house and livelihoods.

In my home state of Michigan, one reporter noted, “[s]ince 2016, it’s been difficult for most dairy farmers to cover 100% of their cost of production.”³ Low prices and monopolistic purchasing power have already stressed dairy farmers, forcing them to choose between leaving the business or burning through their home’s and generational equity.

The same pressures are happening across all sectors of agriculture.

For instance, just three suppliers—Tyson, Koch Foods, and Perdue Farms—control 90% of the $30 billion broiler chicken market. The result, as the Chicago Tribune reported in 2018, is that retailers saw a “roughly 50 percent increase in the price of broiler chickens” at wholesale.⁴ This meant the retailers would have to cut their workers’ wages to stay in business.

Market concentration and monopolies aren’t just bad for consumers and small businesses—when it comes to our food supply, having a diverse array of producers minimizes the number of people put at risk if any one supplier has contamination issues.

The pressures of globalized supply chains and the control that behemoth retailers like Walmart and Amazon (which owns Whole Foods) exert over those supply chains mean that generations-old family farms are being gobbled up, forced into exclusive contracts, or simply pressed out of business.

Big Ag Mergers

In a 2019 Huff Post interview, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) explained to Amanda Terkel the scope of the problem and what kind of action the problem requires from the American government: “[I]ncreasing concentration is true in pork, it’s true in beef, it’s true in chicken,” Sanders said. “It’s true in soybeans. And the answer is, you gotta break them up. . . . I think we’ve not only got to have that moratorium, but we have to go further.”⁵

A moratorium on mergers in the agriculture sector would pause the problem, but it would fail to address the current overconcentration of agriculture. As in other overly concentrated sectors, the first major solution that should be implemented is to enforce antitrust laws across every sector of agriculture.

Beyond that, we need to remove the hurdles for family farmers to band together in regional co-ops that could compete at scale with larger capital-intensive farms, and which would also provide regions with a relative measure of food security, independent of global supply chains.

Monopoly in Pharma: Big Private Profits from Publicly Granted Patents

In 1923, the patent for insulin was sold for $1 to the University of Toronto. Less than 100 years later, a 26-year-old Minneapolis man named Alec Raeshawn Smith died of diabetic ketoacidosis. Alec died three days before payday, his insulin injector empty and his blood sugar at a lethal level.

How did this happen?

Until a few years after World War I, no one had figured out how to synthesize or extract insulin in a way that humans could use it, and type 1 diabetes was all but a death sentence.

Then, in the early 1920s, a team of researchers at the University of Toronto discovered a process to extract and purify insulin. The discovery saved millions of lives and earned a Nobel Prize for two of the researchers in 1923—Dr. Frederick Banting and John Macleod. The researchers patented insulin as US Patent No. 1469994 on October 9, 1923—and they quickly sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1.

That’s not a typo. These researchers had the opportunity to become unbelievably wealthy with the patent on insulin— sure, a few million people may not have been able to afford insulin and might’ve died between 1921 and now—but the profits from insulin would’ve ensured that they’d never have to see the huddled, dying masses.

Instead, the researchers sold the patent to the university for $1 so that insulin could be made widely available and millions of lives could be saved.

So why is Alec Smith dead?

Just Three Companies

That’s how many companies produce and sell insulin: Sanofi of France, Novo Nordisk of Denmark, and Eli Lilly Company in the United States. It’s not a true monopoly, because there are three companies, all competing for the same customers.

Together, the three companies dominate 99% of the insulin market in the United States.⁶ According to a 2018 report from Prescient & Strategic Intelligence, the insulin market is expected to climb to $70.6 billion by 2023, up from an estimated $42.9 billion in 2017.⁷

According to the report, the factors driving growth in the human insulin market are “[i]ncreasing population exposure to key risk factors leading to diabetes, technological advancements in insulin delivery devices, growth in the number of diabetic patients, and [a] growing geriatric population.”⁸

In other words, three companies are going to continue to rake in massive profits because the global population is getting sicker and older, and insulin-delivery devices are getting more elaborate. But none of that has anything to do with the cost of insulin itself.

So why has the cost of insulin doubled and even tripled over the last 20 years? Carolyn Y. Johnson of the Washington Post reported in 2016, “A version of insulin that carried a list price of $17 a vial in 1997 is priced at $138 [in 2016]. Another that launched two decades ago with a sticker price of $21 a vial has been increased to $255.”⁹

The reality is simple: the producers of insulin care only about increasing profits.

Take Eli Lilly. As Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) director Merith Basey explained, “This generic drug has been around for almost 100 years, yet the leading cause of death for a child with Type 1 diabetes in 2017 remains a lack of insulin.

“Globally,” she continued, “one in two people with diabetes lack access. Eli Lilly was a mom-and-pop company when it entered into an agreement with the University of Toronto in 1922. Now it’s part of a global monopoly.”¹⁰

And it behaves like it.

During Alex Azar’s five-year tenure as president of Eli Lilly, for instance, the price of one insulin product more than tripled. In 2012, when Azar joined Eli Lilly, the company sold an insulin product called Humalog for $74 per vial. By the time Donald Trump nominated Azar to be secretary of health and human services in 2017, Humalog cost $269 per vial.

As Alexander Zaitchik wrote in the American Prospect in 2017, “Humalog’s $74 sticker price when Azar became CEO was already outrageous compared with other developed countries. In Sweden, a vial of the same medicine is reimbursed at the (still profitable) price of $18.38.”¹¹

The price increases had absolutely nothing to do with climbing manufacturing costs or expanding markets or climbing costs of research and development. The price increases happened only because three companies control 99% of the market in the United States, and higher prices mean higher profits for all of them. Three insulin producers have created a cartel situation, and the end effect is that patients in America are treated like renters in Monopoly. The insulin producers have divvied up the board, and with every property in their pockets, they’ve raised prices in lockstep.

As Kasia Lipska wrote in the New York Times in 2016, “[T]he big three have simultaneously hiked their prices. From 2010 to 2015, the price of Lantus (made by Sanofi) went up by 168 percent; the price of Levemir (made by Novo Nordisk) rose by 169 percent; and the price of Humulin R U-500 (made by Eli Lilly) soared by 325 percent.”¹²

Alec Smith died because he couldn’t afford his insulin, and his insulin was made unaffordable by a monopolistic global insulin cartel.

Hospital Consolidation Kills

Cindy Anderson predicted that hospital consolidation in rural Missouri would kill people. At the time, she didn’t realize that her husband, Butch, would be one of its victims.

The first big wave of hospital consolidations happened in the wake of Reagan stopping enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act in the 1980s and ran through the late 1990s. The second wave followed when the Affordable Care Act— written with plenty of input from the hospital industry— introduced more incentives to form monopolies in 2013.

Thus, while there were 1,412 hospital mergers between 1998 and 2015, 561 of them happened in just the 2010 to 2015 period.

The National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) did a deep dive into the industry in 2018 and concluded that hospital mergers “can lead to operating cost reductions for acquired hospitals of 15%–30%” while increasing “the average price of hospital services by 6%–18%.”¹³

As the number of hospitals shrinks—more than 150 rural hospitals have closed just since 2005—competition decreases, the number of people employed by hospitals falls, and prices (and profits) go up.

NCCI’s study found that there was not a single credible research study in America as of 2018 that showed that hospital mergers would improve “quality, access, or cost.” Instead, the organization found, “[m]ergers increase the likelihood of intensive surgery and total number of surgeries, but do not improve patient outcomes.” While mergers do “reduce hospital costs,” they noted, they do not “reduce the price of hospital care.”

In December 2019, Chris McGreal, a reporter for the Guardian, told the story of Cindy Anderson, who’d worked for 39 years at the Twin Rivers Hospital in rural Kennett, Missouri.¹⁴ The hospital had been acquired by Community Health Systems, which had just built a brand-new hospital 50 miles up the road in Poplar Bluff.

The Twin Rivers Hospital was making a profit—around $5 million in its last year of operation—but the CHS corporation apparently figured that shutting it down would drive people to its newer and more efficient hospital an hour away, lifting the new hospital into profitability. Increasing ambulance time to rural communities for emergencies like heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents didn’t appear to show up in their calculations.

When Twin Rivers was still open, Cindy’s husband, Butch, had a heart attack; the ambulance quickly got him to the hospital where his wife worked and he was saved. A few years later, after Twin Rivers closed in June 2018, Butch had another medical emergency; the trip to get care took much longer and he died before ever seeing a heart surgeon.

“How many more people have to die?” Cindy Anderson asked. “There are people dying in ambulances I think could have been saved.” A physician at the hospital for 29 years, Dr. Dave Jain, told McGreal, “We’re having probably three to five more deaths a month without having the hospital here.”

The town’s mayor, Dr. Chancellor Wayne, said that CHS closed the hospital “out of greed.” He noted that while he could send his patients to a hospital across the border in Arkansas for an $800 MRI, CHS’s fancy new hospital an hour up the highway charged $5,000.

Instead of putting the old hospital building up for sale or rent to anybody else who might have wanted to run a profitable rural hospital, the company paid the property taxes, cut the power, stripped the building, and let it rot for a full year. Twelve months, it turns out, is the exact amount of time a building would have to remain empty to force any new company that wanted to run it to spend “millions of dollars in renovations for it to reopen as a medical facility.”

And the monopolists are on the move. Of the nation’s roughly 2,000 rural hospitals, an estimated 673 are at risk of closure, according to the National Rural Health Association.

When I grew up in Lansing, Michigan, there were three hospitals in the area, all nonprofits. One had been endowed in 1912 by a cofounder of the Oldsmobile car company, the second run by the Catholic Church, and the third run by the county. Now all three are controlled or run by for-profit entities.

Prior to the Reagan era, hospitals and insurance companies were mostly run as nonprofits, the idea being that they should serve people and communities instead of shareholders. They were considered close cousins of the natural commons revered by our Founders.

Although Richard Nixon is blamed for the rise of for-profit health insurance and hospitals (he signed a law legalizing for-profit HMOs in 1973), both industries were already creeping in the for-profit direction.

As Reagan simultaneously ended antitrust enforcement and deregulated the finance industry, he all but assured the rise of hospital (and health insurance) monopolies. The sharks moved in, bought up or forced out of business the true nonprofits, and now largely control both fields.

Monopoly in Media: How Big Money Controls the Stories We Tell

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
—Thomas Jefferson in 1786, to his close friend Dr. James Currie

In 1983, 90% of the American media landscape (including magazines, books, music, news feeds, newspapers, movies, radio, and television) was dominated by 50 conglomerates.

Just 36 years later in 2019, a mere five conglomerates dominated 90% of the media that Americans consume (Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom).¹⁵

Looking at terrestrial radio in particular, the radio network that airs Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity—iHeartMedia— owns 850 radio stations in 150 markets across the country.¹⁶

After Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Supreme Court started using Bork’s strict interpretation of antitrust, there was an explosion of acquisitions and mergers in every sector of the economy. Thirteen years later, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to an even more startling concentration of media in a very few hands by eliminating rules about the maximum number of media outlets a family or company could own. As a result, freedom of the press in America today is as much an economic issue as a political one.

In 2003, after Louise and I sold our last business in Atlanta and retired to rural Vermont, we drove to Michigan to visit family for Thanksgiving. All the way there, we searched the radio dial for an intelligent conversation to listen to, but city after city all we found was Sean Hannity at a Habitat for Humanity site (he called it “Hannity for Humanity”), telling us that “no liberal” was ever going to live in the house they were helping build.

It was a bizarre experience. Having worked in radio back in the ’60s and ’70s, I had some knowledge of the industry, so when we got home from Michigan, I wrote an article, “Talking Back to Talk Radio,” about how liberal talk radio might succeed, if done right. Sheldon and Anita Drobny, a pair of progressive venture capitalists, read my article online, and as Sheldon noted in his book Road to Air America: Breaking the Right Wing Stranglehold on Our Nation’s Airwaves (in which he reprinted the article), it became the template for a business plan for that ultimately ill-fated network.

But rather than wait the almost two years it took the Drobnys to launch Air America, Louise and I, with the help of a local radio guy and friend, Rama Schneider, looked around Vermont and found a station in Burlington that was willing to put us on the air. The slot was Saturday mornings at 10 a.m., right after the swap-and-shop, so many of our callers, instead of discussing politics, wanted to know, “Is that John Deere still available?”

Ed Asner was kind enough to come on as a guest, helping us make a tape that caught the interest of the I.E. America Radio Network, run out of Detroit by the United Automobile Workers. Suddenly, broadcasting from our living room in Montpelier, Vermont, in a studio I’d thrown together for a few hundred dollars mostly from parts bought on eBay, we were on the air nationally, including Sirius satellite radio, taking on Rush Limbaugh (and beating him in some markets) in the noon-to-3-p.m. slot to this day.

In 2004, when Air America was finally rolled out, it was successful for as long as it was in large part because its programs were carried by stations owned by what was then Clear Channel and is now iHeartMedia: we were on more than 50 Clear Channel stations in the nation’s major markets.

Following a string of Democratic victories in cities and states where Clear Channel was carrying Air America shows, the company was purchased in a leveraged buyout by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and Thomas Lee.

Around that time, Clear Channel began pulling Air America’s progressive programming off the air, dramatically cutting Air America’s audience and their advertising revenue. The new progressive network was soon bankrupt, and two years later so was Clear Channel (because of the debt load dumped on it by Romney’s business model), then reincarnated as iHeartMedia.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media machine continues to elect Republicans with big funding from right-wing corporations and the billionaires who own them and fund right-wing think tanks. As Ken Vogel et al. pointed out in a 2011 article for Politico, “The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million [a year] to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s—and considers it money well spent.”¹⁷

To the best of my knowledge, none of the talkers on the left have ever been funded in such a fashion. Small wonder that Hannity now owns a real estate empire worth tens of millions, and Limbaugh can brag of an eight-figure net worth or more. But more important, the influence of those two well-financed talkers has altered America’s political landscape in less than three decades. What this shows is that the movers and shakers on the far right, the libertarian billionaires, understand the power of media (and took Lewis Powell’s advice).

Those of great wealth who are aligned with the left in America, however, have always largely ignored media, probably because they grew up in an America with the Fairness Doctrine and before the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and they always just assumed that “the truth will eventually be known.”

But investing in political media can produce a huge return on investment and transform the politics of the nation. That’s certainly what Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch thought when they lost an average of $90 million a year for about five years before the Fox News Channel became profitable.

The Early Days of Fox: Losing Money to Gain Political Power

Conservative commentator Brit Hume noted, in a 1999 interview with PBS, “This operation [Fox News] loses money. It doesn’t lose nearly as much as it did at first, and it’s—well, it’s hit all its projections in terms of, you know, turning a profit, but it’s—it will lose money now, and we expect for a couple more years. I think it’s losing about $80 million to $90 million a year.”

But that loss wasn’t viewed by these right-wing billionaires as a “loss”—rather, it was an investment.

It’s what Reverend Moon believed, as his Washington Times newspaper lost hundreds of millions of dollars but spread right-wing perspectives that influenced the nation. It’s how the Koch brothers have referred to the hundreds of millions they shower on right-wing politicians and causes. And it’s what the people who started Air America Radio believed, although they couldn’t get big funders to understand the stakes.

While Rupert Murdoch lost hundreds of millions of dollars (Air America’s bankruptcy was for $14 million) in its first few years, Murdoch hung on and kept pouring in the cash. And it put George W. Bush in the White House, according to several independent analyses.

As Richard Morin wrote for the Washington Post in 2006, asking rhetorically, “Does President Bush owe his controversial win in 2000 to Fox cable television news?”¹⁸ The answer was an emphatic “Yes!” according to academics who did exhaustive research into what they called “the Fox Effect.”

As Morin reported:

“Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its audience to shift its voting behavior towards the Republican Party, a sizable media persuasion effect,” said Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California at Berkely [sic] and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University.

In Florida alone, they estimate, the Fox Effect may have produced more than 10,000 additional votes for Bush— clearly a decisive factor in a state he carried by fewer than 600 votes.

The analysis looked at the vote from 1996 to 2004 in 9,256 American cities and towns where Fox was available on basic cable. “They found,” reported Morin, “clear evidence of a Fox Effect among non-Republicans in the presidential and Senate races, even after controlling for other factors including vote trends in similar nearby towns without access to Fox.” The researchers added that “the Fox effect seems to [be] permanent and may be increasing.” And that was in 2006.

This is problematic, because no democracy can survive intact when only one voice or political perspective overwhelmingly dominates any major branch of the media.

Literally hundreds of right-wing talk show hosts, both local and national, are broadcasting every day, all day, in every town and city in America.

Progressive voices, on the other hand, are few and far between; in most parts of America (and virtually all of rural America), the only radio signal that carries any progressive programming whatsoever is SiriusXM, which requires a subscription and special receiver—costs that are hard to bear among voters in the reddest states where Republican policies have destroyed unions and exported jobs overseas, thus leading to widespread poverty.

Jefferson made his comment about newspapers being vital to America just at the time he was being most viciously attacked in the newspapers. The core requisite of democracy is debate. When there’s only a single predominant voice in the media, American democracy itself is at greatest risk, be that voice on the right or the left.

It’s time to enforce antitrust in our media landscape and to bring back media ownership rules that both limit the number of outlets and prioritize local ownership.

Unbundling Cable, Phones, and TV

Unbundling is the word that the multibillion-dollar industry that controls much of our news and politics, our understanding of the world and our interactions with each other, doesn’t want us to discuss. But it may well be one of the most vital words for all Americans to understand. And it’s at the core of effective challenges to monopoly, particularly with regard to tech.

Unbundling could cut your TV, phone, and internet bills from an average of around $180 collectively to around $30 or $40 a month. It would diminish the control that giant ISP corporations like Comcast and AT&T have over our ability to access information. And it would create space for competition in the telecommunications sector generally and providers of internet access particularly.

Bundling is one of the most powerful ways some of the largest and most consequential companies in America maintain their wealth and power. They maintain—and grow—their wealth in the old-fashioned way that monopolists always do—price gouging and crushing competitors. They maintain—and grow—their power over both citizens and government by deploying their money and their influencing power over media (from cable TV to the internet).

The “bundle” at the core of this is the connection between the “pipe” (the wire, cable, fiber, or 5G ability to deliver internet and cable TV service to you) and the internet, phone, and TV content itself.

There are two parts here, which in America are bundled but in much of the rest of the world are unbundled. They were unbundled here in the United States, at least with regard to the internet, as recently as the 1990s.

The two parts are the pipes and what goes through them.

When it comes to digital data—unlike water, where there’s typically only a single source—there are tens of thousands of companies around the world that provide internet flow and data to companies and consumers. In countries that have successfully unbundled their internet pipes from the data, these companies compete with each other on the basis of cost, features, and services to provide people with their internet access. The main result of that competition is lower prices for consumers.

This is why bundled internet, TV, and phone service that typically costs around $180 a month in the United States (where we bundle pipes and data) costs typically around $30 in France for the same (and often even better) service.

Since FCC Chairman and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai killed net neutrality in 2017, American internet service providers are now doing what Google, Facebook, and other companies have practiced: detailed monitoring of your online activity and then using and/or selling that information.

The difference between Google and Comcast (for example) is that you can choose not to use Google, or even use one of their competitors like DuckDuckGo, which explicitly does not gather, track, or record users’ information. But if Comcast is the only company with a fiber or cable coming into your house, you simply do not have the ability (short of jumping through elaborate tech hoops like getting a virtual private network, or VPN) to prevent them from seeing every website you visit, reading every username and password you enter anywhere, and consolidating and selling that information without informing you.

However, when the data going through the pipe and the pipe itself are unbundled, so that Comcast may still own and maintain the pipe into your house but you choose to get your internet services through another internet service provider (ISP) altogether, those ISP companies can connect to you through invisible and maintenance-free VPN-like protocols, and Comcast loses access to your personal information. (It would also be possible for Congress or the FCC to categorize the company that owns the pipe coming into your home as a common carrier, meaning that by law they can’t snoop on you. The Obama administration did this, but it was reversed by Trump and Pai.)

Phone companies have been regulated as common carriers since the early 20th century. This means that they must respect your privacy (just as the post office can’t open and read your mail without due process). It also means that they can’t base pricing or other decisions on what you’re discussing or with whom you’re discussing it (outside of long-distance charges).

Your phone company can’t listen in on your call and then send you a bill that says, “Because you were discussing business with your boss, we’re charging you an extra $.10 a minute.” Or, “Because you were discussing your cancer diagnosis with your doctor, you’ll be getting material in the mail from a hospital that offers excellent cancer care.”

On the other hand, your ISP can do this. They don’t yet do it as explicitly as those examples, but it already happens in a big way in the commercial sphere.

For example, when my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer a decade ago, even though she never mentioned it in any public place (or even in a private forum), she started getting ads for breast cancer therapies, breast prostheses, and chemo wigs on pretty much any computer she used when visiting ad-supported websites.

Even the big email providers are now reading every word you send and receive (so they can “improve your user experience”); it may simply be that Louise’s correspondence with her doctor or a few close relatives got sold into the breast cancer industry marketplace.

On the “who you’re talking to” front, ISPs now have the ability to (and are already engaging in the practice, some suggest) speed up sites that pay them or slow down the loading of sites either that don’t pay them or with whose politics they disagree (sites advocating net neutrality or unbundling, for example).

Turning Financial Power into Political Power

Fox News isn’t the only example of a business that is willing to cut into its profits for the short term in order to change minds and drum up support for policies that will make it richer in the long run.

Just prior to the 2016 presidential election, the Progressive Change Institute commissioned a nationwide poll conducted by the highly respected firm GBAO Strategies. The result showed clearly just how deep and extensive is the problem of monopolistic, legalized political bribery in America.¹⁹

When asked whether the US government should negotiate prescription drug prices, 79% of Americans agreed and only 12% opposed. But because Big Pharma bribed Congress to the tune of $2.5 billion over the last decade, giving money to 9 out of 10 members of the House and 97 out of 100 members of the Senate, nothing has changed.²⁰ Tens of thousands of Americans die every year because of this bribery.²¹

Seventy-one percent of Americans (including 56% of Republicans) say that all Americans should have access to a debt-free college education, but banks spent millions bribing DC politicians to keep George W. Bush’s Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 in place so that students can’t discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy.²² At the same time, colleges and universities spent additional millions bribing politicians to ignore the soaring costs of higher education: as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2015, colleges and universities have become one of the most effective lobbying forces in Washington, “employing more lobbyists last year than any other industries except drug manufacturing and technology.”²³

A 2015 survey of likely 2016 voters found that fully 71% of Americans (and 63% of Republicans) supported giving “all Americans the choice of buying health insurance through Medicare or private insurers,” but the massively profitable health insurance industry spent over $158 million in 2018 bribing and influencing politicians to maintain their billions in quarterly profits.²⁴

The list of issues and industries where bribery has corrupted our legislative system could easily fill a book of its own.

Issues blocked politically by special interest groups and billionaires include the following: infrastructure jobs program (71% support, with 55% of Republicans); expanding Social Security benefits (70% support, 62% GOP voters); getting corporate executives out of “revolving door” government positions (59% support, 55% GOP); guaranteeing net neutrality (61% support, with 52% of Republicans); breaking up big banks (71% of Democrats and 51% of GOP); restoring the top 50% income tax rate that Reagan nuked (71% Democratic support, 53% GOP); and reprising FDR’s “government as the employer of last resort” job programs to rebuild America (83% Democratic support, 55% GOP).²⁵

About 70% of Americans are concerned about climate change, but we’re not holding the fossil fuel industry accountable.²⁶ Oil Change International documented in their study of the impact of oil industry lobbying, “In the 2015–2016 election cycle oil, gas and coal companies spent $354 million in campaign contributions and lobbying and received $29.4 billion in federal subsidies over those same years—an 8,200% return on investment.”²⁷

Americans are dying from vaping, but there’s still no regulation of “inhalable” drugs like nicotine because of decades of aggressive bribery of politicians by the tobacco industry.²⁸

We’re watching the destruction of public education by for-profit charter schools,²⁹ while the private prison industry is lobbying for more free prison labor and more kids in cages.³⁰

Businesses, because of deregulation from Reagan to Trump, are pumping more poison in our air, water, and food³¹ and exploiting low-income workers and people in the military via payday lenders.³²

Meanwhile, we helplessly watch an orgy of gun violence in the United States³³ as our country spends more on our military than the next eight countries combined.³⁴

It all goes back to one thing: bribery by monopolistic interests.

Political bribery has always been a problem, but it exploded during the Reagan administration because in 1976 the US Supreme Court had said,³⁵ for the first time in American history, that when billionaires and corporations bribed legislators, it was a matter of First Amendment–protected free speech; the Court later amplified that with its corrupt 2010 Citizens United decision.³⁶

Because of this, today the odds of legislation that puts the interests of working people first is equivalent to random chance, as Princeton’s Gilens and Page found in a massive 2014 study.³⁷

Martin Gilens wrote in the Boston Review in 2012, “When preferences diverge, the views of the affluent make a big difference, while support among the middle class and the poor has almost no relationship to policy outcomes. . . . [T]he support or opposition of the poor or the middle class has no impact on a policy’s prospects of being adopted.”³⁸

At the September 12, 2019, Democratic debate there wasn’t a single question about the bribery of our legislators by billionaires and corporations; only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pointed out the “corruption” problem, and their comments were ignored by all the other candidates—who were competing with each other and the GOP for billionaire and corporate money.³⁹

There are movements to get money out of politics (such as Move to Amend,⁴⁰ among others), but the flow of money into our politics has dampened any serious discussion from our corporate media and bought-off political leaders.

So long as corporations are considered “persons” that can spend unlimited amounts of money in our politics, the monopolists will continue to flood our legislatures with corrupting money.

The Racial Wealth Monopoly

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are their means of acquiring property strictly so called.
—James Madison, Property, March 29, 1792⁴¹

While the monopolization of wealth and political power by giant corporations and the billionaires they create has reached crisis proportions in this country, the monopolization of middle-class wealth by white people—and, particularly, white men—is also a crisis that keeps our country unequal and out of balance.

My mother’s family came to this country in the late 1600s from Wales and settled in Massachusetts. They did well over the generations; there are still places in that state named after the family, and since the early 1700s it’s a safe bet (looking at genealogical records my mom painstakingly compiled for decades) they were literate and educated. So it was only natural that Mom would go to college and graduate magna cum laude; her family was white.

My dad’s parents came to America from Grimstad, Norway, in 1917 and settled first in Chicago and then in northern Michigan. They were literate and educated, and by the 1930s they owned their own home in northern Michigan. My dad went to college for a few years on the GI Bill before dropping out because Mom got pregnant with me; he later bought a home with a loan made possible by the GI Bill. His family was white.

By the time I came along, my parents had benefited from centuries of education and wealth-building directed almost exclusively to white people. That’s not to say we were wealthy; my mom’s family lost everything in the Great Depression, and, in part because of that, her father died of a heart attack in his 30s when she was 13 years old. My grandmother raised her alone, working as the town clerk in Charlevoix, Michigan.

My dad’s father was a craftsman—a cabinetmaker—and made fine furniture, including, according to family lore, a piece that’s in the White House. But Dad only inherited from them his education and outlook: until I was five or six years old, he made a living selling Rexair vacuum cleaners and World Book Encyclopedias door-to-door, and we lived in a tiny two-room house in the poor part of downtown Lansing before he got a good union job in a tool-and-die shop that catapulted us into the suburban middle class.

I tell this history to illustrate that it’s a fairly common one for white Americans. Those of us descended from Europeans have almost always had at least a baseline of literacy and the generation-to-generation transmission of a sort of cultural wealth going back centuries that gave us an edge over African Americans and nonwhite Hispanics.

We also benefited from centuries of laws and policies in this nation that nakedly favored white people, even long after the end of both slavery and Jim Crow. My dad could go to college on the GI Bill and buy a house with its help, but of the first 67,000 mortgages that the GI Bill made possible, as Jamiles Lartey wrote for the Guardian, “fewer than 100 were taken out by non-white people.”⁴²

This is particularly critical because home equity represents the vast majority of wealth held by middle-class and working-class families in America.

The house Dad bought when I was six for $13,000 in south Lansing was in an all-white neighborhood; most of the other dads in the neighborhood were also World War II vets like him and probably bought their houses the same way he did. And even if an African American family had succeeded in buying a home in our lower-middle-class neighborhood, they may not have lasted long before being harassed out of their new house.

I went to a brand-new school (the entire subdivision, including the school, was built in 1957, the year we moved in, on what had previously been cornfields) and got a first-rate education. An education system funded largely by property taxes did, in the 1950s and today, what it was designed to do in the late 1800s and early 1900s as public schools spread across the country: keep prosperous neighborhoods prosperous for future generations through good education, while letting poorer neighborhoods—particularly those where black people lived—basically rot.

While Democratic Keynesian economics put into place by FDR in the 1930s created the middle class intentionally, it was also intentionally a white middle class, with numerous guard-rails to keep it that way. The institutional barriers to people of color building wealth through education or home ownership did not vanish with the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s; as recently as 2012, Wells Fargo pleaded guilty to pushing black and Hispanic families into exploding subprime mortgages while steering white families into traditional fixed-rate 30-year mortgages.

During the era from the 1930s to the 1980s, FDR’s New Deal economic policies of unionization and high progressive taxes kept wealth inequality at bay; the middle class actually grew their wealth and income faster than the top 1% did. And when the ’60s and ’70s came along and many of the entry barriers that blacks and Hispanics had previously faced began to fall (particularly in government hiring, which is nearly 20% of the economy), the middle class began to grow beyond just white people.

Chicago School libertarian trickle-down Reaganomics (particularly his war on unions and his tax cuts for corporations and the ultrarich) put an end to all that: they halted the growth of wealth and income for working people and erased the gains of minority families who were just beginning to emerge into the middle class but didn’t yet have multigenerational education or wealth to fall back on.

The wealth monopoly in America isn’t just the concentration of money in the hands of the top 1%; it’s also the concentration of wealth among white people.

Those Reaganomics policies that America has been groaning under since 1981—even through two Democratic presidential administrations—continue to push people of color underwater. Referencing a 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute, a headline in the Guardian summarizes the entire crisis in a single sentence: “Median wealth of black Americans ‘will fall to zero by 2053’ warns new report.”⁴³

It’s not just white people who have seized almost all working- and middle-class wealth; it’s largely white men. While black men faced huge barriers to education, housing, and good jobs up to and through the 1970s (and still do, albeit less explicitly), so did white women (albeit less severe).

Prior to the early 1970s, women couldn’t get a credit card without their husband’s signature, pretty much regardless of their wealth or income.⁴⁴ Women weren’t allowed to serve on a jury in most states until the mid-1970s,⁴⁵ and possession of birth control—even for married women—was illegal in some states until 1965, when the US Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down that state’s law criminalizing the possession of condoms, diaphragms, and birth control pills even for married couples in their own homes.⁴⁶

Women had a separate area in the help wanted section of the newspaper, and getting pregnant (or even married, for jobs like flight attendant or waitress) was a firing offense. Ivy League and military colleges were almost entirely all male until the 1970s (not to mention all white), and in 1963, white working women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by white men (the ratios were similar across races).⁴⁷

Much good work was done by civil rights and women’s rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, but conservative white men have continued to block the Equal Rights Amendment, which simply says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” since it was first written by Alice Paul and introduced to Congress in 1923. “Conservative” men have blocked it every year for generations.

While the top 1% now owns more wealth than the entire bottom 90%, the 61% of America that is made up of non-Hispanic white people⁴⁸ owns the majority of middle-class wealth: for every $100 in wealth held by white families, black families have $5.04.⁴⁹ It’s hard to find a clear gender breakout of that white wealth, but it’s safe to say the majority of it is held by the roughly 30% of Americans who are white men.

These racial and gender-based monopolies of wealth in America keep down women and nonwhites, while producing a significant drag on the economic and cultural vitality of our nation.

Monopolies over Labor

When people consider monopolies, or even highly concentrated markets like airlines or pharmaceuticals, generally the only thing they think of is the ability of companies in concentrated markets to set prices wherever they’d like. But there are fully three primary benefits to monopoly or oligopoly, from the monopolists’ point of view.

In addition to setting prices by restricting competition, monopolies can (and typically do) drive down wages so that they end up with a steady supply of cheap labor, and—both by market (selling) control and labor market (workers) control—they send vastly more money flowing to stockholders and senior management than can companies in truly competitive marketplaces.

Cheap Labor, and Getting Cheaper

At its core, virtually every aspect of the movement that embraced monopoly (Bork actually wrote about all the “lost” inventions, innovations, and profits that were caused by a lack of monopoly!) boiled down to cheap labor. Joe Lyles, writing as Conceptual Guerilla, put up a brilliant analysis of this more than a decade ago titled “Defeat the Right in Three Minutes,” suggesting that quite literally everything we call “conservative” was really about driving down wages. While racial hatred and misogyny also play big roles these days in the “conservative” movement, there’s still a lot of truth to Lyles’s analysis.⁵⁰

• Cheap-labor conservatives don’t want a national health care system, because they want workers to be dependent on their employers and thus willing to accept lower wages.

• Cheap-labor conservatives hate the minimum wage and unions because both support wage floors and, over time, raise wages for working people.

• Cheap-labor conservatives want women relatively powerless (particularly over their own reproductive functions) so that, as in the era before the 1970s, they’ll work for far less than today’s $.78 to a man’s dollar.

• Cheap-labor conservatives go on and on about, as Lyles notes, “morality, virtue, respect for authority, hard work and other ‘values’” so that when workers can’t climb the ladder, society will blame it on the individuals instead of a system rigged to maintain cheap labor.

• Cheap-labor conservatives encourage bigotry, fear, and hatred to prevent working people from seeing their commonality of human and economic interests, regardless of race, gender identity, or the urban/rural divide.

America has a long history with the cheap-labor crowd: slavery was the ultimate expression of this “conservative” value system, and under the 13th Amendment, it continues to be legally practiced in the United States in our for-profit prison systems.

The 13th Amendment didn’t actually end slavery in the United States; it merely turned it over to prisons, be they state-run or for-profit corporations. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” As a result, the pressure on Congress and state legislatures from for-profit prison corporations to increase criminal penalties to give them more literal slave labor has exploded.

Cheap-labor conservatives, it turns out, are also huge fans of monopoly and oligopoly, in large part because these systems keep wages low. There’s a marketplace for labor, just like for everything else, and when a small number of corporations control a large number of employment venues, they can simply keep wages low through that market power. Check out the pay of fast-food workers or flight attendants or nurses back in the 1960s compared with today; every industry that concentrates or consolidates sees wages go down.

Less for Labor Means More for CEOs

Monopoly also produces extremes of inequality, and extreme inequality kills societies.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust in the UK have done extensive research on the topic, leading to two best-selling books and a brilliant website.⁵¹ They document in startling detail, going nation by nation and, in the United States, state by state, how inequality damages the lives of everybody except those who live in massive wealth bubbles at the top.

It’s not the poverty that extreme inequality produces that does much of the damage. Instead, because we’re wired like all mammals to understand and perceive both fairness and unfairness, when we find ourselves in unfair situations, our interactions with the world and each other become distorted. (These experiments have also been done with dogs and monkeys,⁵² among others; every mammal studied reacts negatively to inequality and unfairness.)

Wilkinson and Pickett have documented how, as society becomes progressively less fair and more unequal, a whole host of cultural and psychological problems ripple across the culture. These are not caused by poverty, but simply by inequality, and include the following:

• Less social cohesion and trust among people

• More teenage pregnancies and STDs

• More crime, from shoplifting to murder to mass shootings

• Decreased worker productivity

• Increased suicide

• Lower grades in school

• Increased mortality and morbidity, shorter life spans

• Increased obesity and the diseases associated with it

• Higher levels of mental illness, including diseases thought to be totally “organic,” like schizophrenia

• Lower rates of social and political engagement

• Less empathy and altruism among and between individuals (making for a more brutal society)

But inequality isn’t just driven by tax cuts or hoarding by rich people. Instead, in country after country, state after state, the main driver of inequality is market concentration, also known as monopoly and oligopoly. The tax cuts and hoarding are the result of the political and economic power this market concentration brings.

Lina Khan and Sandeep Vaheesan produced a brilliant scientific analysis of this phenomenon published in the Harvard Law and Policy Review,⁵³ and followed it up with a more consumer-friendly analysis in the Washington Post.⁵⁴

Simply using monopoly labor market power, for example, senior executives at Google, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Adobe had “stolen” an estimated $3 billion from 60,000 workers when the illegal collusion between the companies was uncovered by the Justice Department in 2010.

They reported on how 20,000 nurses in Detroit lost an estimated $400 million between 2002 and 2006 because of hospital consolidation and collusion among hospitals in hiring.

While these examples represent actual crimes against persons by these giant corporations, trillions of dollars have been upwardly redistributed from working people to the top 1% over the past four decades by corporate giants in ways that are generally less visible and perfectly legal but wouldn’t work without high levels of market concentration.

Much of it is because the political and economic power that comes with massive corporate oligopolies allows CEOs and senior executives to take pretty much whatever paycheck they want. As the Economic Policy Institute notes, “From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2%). In contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just 11.9%.”⁵⁵

In the preceding 40 years, prior to Reagan’s introduction of trickle-down neoliberalism, working people actually saw their wages grow at a higher rate than the CEO class (although CEOs were doing just fine, thank you very much). But Reagan’s cutting the top income tax rate from 74% to 28% gave CEOs carte blanche to take as much as they could.

As the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2007, William “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealth, took over a billion dollars in compensation.⁵⁶ One could argue that much of it came from the company telling people, “No, we’re not going to pay your claim; we just discovered you had a preexisting condition (or you hit your lifetime limit).” His successor, Stephen J. Hemsley, walked away with hundreds of millions.⁵⁷

America used to have a thriving middle class; in 2019, fully 40% of Americans struggled to pay for food, housing, utilities, or medical care.⁵⁸ Half of adult Americans have no retirement savings, and nearly two-thirds would be wiped out financially with an unexpected expense like a medical bill or accident costing only $500.⁵⁹

Meanwhile, even entrepreneurs are being wiped out. Khan and Vaheesan document how creation of new businesses in America dropped by 53% between 1977 and 2010.

What has changed so much in America in the past 40 years? Simple. Reagan and the Supreme Court put Robert Bork’s theories into effect, and our formerly diverse and competitive corporate landscape has been wiped out, replaced by a few hundred giant corporations that control nearly every aspect of our economy—and our politics.

Solution: Democracy’s Immune System

If the continuous accumulation of wealth and the political power associated with it is a cancer in our economic, political, and social system, then the immune system that can take it on is an empowered middle class.

A middle class that outnumbers both the rich and poor combined is a uniquely American invention. At our nation’s founding, the middle class made up the majority of free Americans, in part because land stolen from the Indians was so cheap, and free slave labor helped produce a general prosperity for white people.

While the source of the American middle class in the 18th century may have been pernicious, the lesson for us today is how it produced a general economic, political, and social stability. Fully two-thirds of white people in America at the time of the American Revolution owned land and thus were largely self-sufficient. Meanwhile, in England only a fifth of the population owned land or had any control over their own economic destiny. The middle class of that era was a very small group of shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, and small businessmen (like Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge, who had a one-office company with a single employee).

Wealth and land were highly concentrated in the England of 1776, as was the political power that flowed from that wealth. To keep the middle class from expanding, England even had “maximum wage” laws, punishing employers who paid workers too much. The rest of Europe was in a similar situation, a remnant of feudal times.

In America in 1776, the top 1% of Americans received only around 8.5% of the income, with the rest of it widely distributed among working people. Today, the top 1% get around 20% of all income, leaving far less for the rest. This has gutted today’s middle class. While almost two-thirds of Americans were middle class in the decade before Reaganomics, today it’s slipped below the 50% danger-mark threshold.

The loss of economic power by America’s working people has paralleled a loss of political power. Prior to Reaganomics, labor unions effectively balanced the economic and political power of big business and its lobbyists, so much so that a mere $200 million was spent on lobbying per year in the first years of Reagan’s administration. Today, with Reaganomics firmly entrenched and labor unions decimated, corporate and billionaire spending on lobbying runs well over $3 billion a year.

This rupturing of working Americans’ economic and political power has not just produced anxiety and despair; it’s also caused Americans to disengage from politics because they rightly view the political system as hopelessly corrupt and only beholden to the billionaires and the corporations that made them rich.

Solution: Replace the “Consumer Welfare” Framework

Robert Bork’s consumer welfare framework for determining if a company is a monopoly concerns itself with only two outcomes:

1. Low prices for consumers

2. High returns for investors

But if a company is concerned only with consumers and investors, then it is going to squeeze everything else, from environmental protection to wages and worker safety to product quality. This is also an incentive to cut labor expenses by merging with other companies and eliminating entire departments. The new company won’t need two sales, HR, or accounting departments; tens of thousands of jobs are typically lost in large mergers.

Bork’s policy, now America’s policy, means that companies now cut pensions as a way of cutting liabilities. It means that all firms are encouraged to cut corners on environmental, workplace, and consumer protections, and to lobby endlessly to kill those protections entirely.

Corporate stakeholders should include workers and their unions, who arguably have the greatest interest in maintaining the solvency of a corporation, because their wages depend on it.

An extension of the workers and their families’ stake in locally owned nonmonopolistic companies are communities as a whole. We’ve seen across America’s Rust Belt, where once-thriving towns and cities have been mired in deepening despair since the 1980s as a result of neoliberal trade policies, the fruits of trickle-down Reaganomics, and the adoption of Bork’s consumer welfare framework.

In some industries, such as heavy manufacturing and chemical processing, the impact on the environment is clear and immediate in the form of pollution discharged into the air and waterways. But every corporation has an environmental footprint.

Cloud-based companies are dependent on stable power production, which means that massive servers like Amazon Web Services can have equally massive carbon footprints. With more and more goods being shipped across the United States, the wear and tear on our nation’s roads not only is a concern for infrastructure but also means increasing environmental costs associated with asphalt and tire debris in the air and runoff directly from the roads, along with salts and de-icers in the winter—all costs that are dumped onto the public and the commons.

Finally, there is the corporation itself. A corporation can be a positive institution in a community—a touchstone for workers and families to gain dignity for their work, and for the community to take pride in the manufacture of goods that are distributed across the country.

That sense was lost to Bork’s doctrine as corporate raiders and vulture capitalists like Carl Icahn and Mitt Romney began to gobble up corporations and strip their assets (this is the crux of the plot of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street).

All of these stakeholders (workers, families, communities, the environment, competing corporations, governments, and the corporations themselves) can either benefit or be hurt by a large corporation’s actions. All are ignored by Bork’s doctrine.

The solution is to reverse Bork’s community-killing consumer welfare framework and return to real antitrust regulation, like what we had in part from Senator John Sherman’s time until the Supreme Court and Reagan put Bork’s bizarre theory into practice.

Solution: Break Up the Internet Giants

I was oblivious to the real significance of Facebook in everyday life until the company disabled my personal, private account. The list of possible reasons they posted for doing this included “impersonating a celebrity,” so maybe they shut me down because they thought I was pretending to be that guy who’s a talk show host and author (ahem).

It’s also possible that somebody at Facebook took offense to my interviewing Judd Legum⁶⁰ around that time about the groundbreaking research he’s been publishing over at popular .info pointing out the right-wing, pro-Trump slant that Face-book’s corporate management and founder took in 2019.⁶¹ Fact is, though, I have no idea why they did it, although my account spontaneously reappeared a few weeks after an earlier version of this chapter appeared as an article on Salon.com and other sites.

When they first disabled my account and asked me to upload my driver’s license (which I did at least seven times over several weeks), I figured it was a mistake. Then, a month or two later, they delivered the final verdict: I was out. I could download all my information if I wanted before they finally closed the door, but even when I tried to create a new account using my personal email address, they blocked my attempt, saying that I already had a (disabled) account and thus couldn’t create another.

I checked Facebook only once a week on average, and only followed close friends and my widely scattered relatives, having configured my personal account to be as private as possible. I figured I could do without knowing what my cousins’ kids, or my nieces and nephews, were up to; I could just call them or send them Christmas cards, after all. And the Salem International private group of international relief workers I was a member of could keep me up to date through our email listserv.⁶²

What I discovered in the weeks after I was dumped by Face-book, particularly when one of my Salem friends in Germany was badly injured in a car accident, was that I was shockingly reliant on Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends. As the Joni Mitchell song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Which raises the question, has Facebook gone from being merely a destination on the internet to being so interwoven in our lives that it should now be considered part of the commons and regulated as such?

Is it time to discuss taking Facebook out of private, for-profit hands?

Or, alternatively, is it time for the federal government to break up Facebook or even create a national town square, an everyperson’s civic center, to compete with it?

The history of Europe and the United States, particularly throughout the 19th century, often tells the story of how wealthy and powerful men would congregate in exclusive members-only men’s clubs to determine the fate and future of governments, businesses, and even local communities.⁶³ You’ll find them woven into much of the literature of that era, from Dickens to Doyle to Poe.

Because these clubs had strict membership requirements, they were often at the core of governmental and business power systems, helping maintain wealthy white male domination of society. The rules for both initial and continuing membership were typically developed and maintained by majority or even consensus agreement of their members, although the homogeneity of that membership pretty much ensured that women, men of color, and men of lower social or economic status never had a say in public or private institutional governance.

Then, at the cusp of the 20th century, things changed.

The first decade and a half of the 20th century saw an explosion of progressive reforms, best remembered as the time when progressive Republican presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft (who followed him) engaged in massive trust-busting, breaking up America’s biggest monopolies to make room for local, small, and medium-sized businesses to grow.⁶⁴

An often-overlooked phenomenon during that era was the creation of egalitarian, public civic centers across the country, usually built and owned by local or regional governments. While to this day men’s clubs remain places where the brokers of great power and wealth can congregate, these new publicly owned civic centers replaced the much smaller and less comfortable public parks and private pubs as places where average citizens could socialize, strategize, and form political movements at no cost.

Progressive political movements like the suffragists used these public squares heavily, and they became an essential building block of movement politics (along with public schools—many states passed laws authorizing their auditoriums to be used as civic centers).⁶⁵

Public dialogues and even local or regional discussions about local and national politics have moved from the men’s clubs (1700–1900) to the civic centers (1901–1990s). Today they are held on the internet, another public space that was created by the US government (DARPA) and universities.

Facebook, however, figured out a way to privatize a large part of that public space and turn it into cash, making Mark Zuckerberg, at $77.8 billion, the eighth-richest person in the world.⁶⁶

While Facebook was, in 2019 and 2020, embroiled in a controversy over whether it was wrong for it to allow Trump’s political advertising that contained naked lies, the debate over fully or partially nationalizing the platform, or breaking up the company, has gotten much less coverage.

But it’s an important issue and deserves more attention. Facebook was so critical to Donald Trump’s 2016 election efforts, for example, that his 2016 digital media/Facebook manager, Brad Parscale, was elevated to managing the entire Trump 2020 effort—again, with Facebook at the center of it.

Political change flows out of public dialogue.

The American Revolution would probably never have gotten off the ground were it not for meeting places available to the public—the most famous being Sam Adams’s tavern.⁶⁷

Similarly, churches open to the public (although privately owned but regulated on a nonprofit basis) were the core of the 20th century’s civil rights movement.

Facebook has, for millions, replaced these public places as a nexus for social, cultural, and political interaction. As such, it resembles a part of the natural commons.

When radio achieved the equivalent of four hours of “screen time” a day for the average American, in 1927 and 1934 we passed comprehensive regulation of the industry to prevent the spread of disinformation and mandate responsible broadcasting practices.⁶⁸

Similarly, our nation’s telephone systems have been both nationalized (during World War I) and repeatedly heavily regulated since 1913 to ensure users’ privacy and prevent the exploitation of customers or their personal information by Ma Bell.

For many Americans, Facebook is a primary source of news as well as a social, political, and civic activity center. It controls about a third of all web traffic.⁶⁹ Starting from scratch, it would be hard to imagine such a central nexus for these kinds of critical interactions without envisioning it as a natural commons, like a civic center or broadcasting service.

The company controls that commons in ways that invade Americans’ privacy and disrupt democracy. Facebook’s exploitation of user information has been so egregious that Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., one of America’s most outspoken digital privacy advocates, has openly speculated about sending Mark Zuckerberg to prison.⁷⁰ As Wyden and others point out, we regulate radio, TV, and newspaper advertising; how did Facebook get a free pass when it has a larger “news” reach than any other medium?

One solution is to regulate Facebook like a public utility. Alternatively, the federal government could take majority ownership of the company—or fund an alternative to it—so that it or the government version of it could be run not just to enrich executives and stockholders but also, like the Ma Bell of old, to serve the public good.⁷¹

The dominance of Google in everything from email to internet search raises similar concerns. At least in the days of Ma Bell, I had access to a phone regardless of my politics or what I said on the phone, and the company couldn’t sell access to the contents of my phone calls or a list of the people I called.

Solution: Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty

While the human death penalty has largely disappeared in the world and is fading in the United States (a good thing), the corporate death penalty needs a revival.

The corporate death penalty, widespread in the 19th century, is a political and economic process that weeds bad actors out of the business ecosystem to make room for good players. The process of revoking corporate charters goes back to the very first years of the United States. After all, the only reasons that states allow (“charter”) corporations (normal business corporations can be chartered only by a state, not the federal government) are to serve the public interest.

As the Wyoming Constitution of 1889 laid out:

All powers and franchises of corporations are derived from the people and are granted by their agent, the government, for the public good and general welfare, and the right and duty of the state to control and regulate them for these purposes is hereby declared. The power, rights and privileges of any and all corporations may be forfeited by willful neglect or abuse thereof. The police power of the state is supreme over all corporations as well as individuals.⁷²

When a corporation does business ethically and legally, it serves its local community, its employees, its customers, and its shareholders. For over a century, American corporations were held to this very reasonable standard.

Beginning in 1784, Pennsylvania demanded that corporations include a revocation clause in corporate charters that automatically dissolved them after a few decades so they couldn’t grow so large or so rich as to become a public menace. It also authorized the state to dissolve any corporation that harmed the state or its citizens, including harms to customers and employees. “Nor shall any charter for the purposes aforesaid be granted for a longer time than twenty years,” Pennsylvania’s corporate law read, “and every such charter shall contain a clause reserving to the legislature the power to alter, revoke, or annul the same, whenever in their opinion it may be injurious to the citizens of the commonwealth” (Article I, Section 25).⁷³

As the United States grew, the federal government passed laws requiring corporate-death-penalty revocation clauses in the state corporate charters of insurance companies in 1809 and banks in 1814. By the late 1880s, every state required them for all business corporations.

From the founding of America to today, governments routinely revoked corporate charters, forcing liquidation and sale of assets, although it’s been over a century since such efforts have focused on corporations large enough to have amassed financial and, thus, political power.

In the 19th century, banks were shut down for behaving in a “financially unsound” way in Ohio, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania. And when corporations that ran turnpikes in New York and Massachusetts didn’t keep their roads in repair, those states gave the corporations the death sentence.

In 1825, Pennsylvania passed laws making it even easier for that state to “revoke, alter, or annul” corporate charters “whenever in their opinion [the operation of the corporation] may be injurious to citizens of the community,” and by the 1870s, 19 states had gone through the long and tedious process of amending their state constitutions expressly to give legislators the power to terminate the existence of badly behaving corporations that originated or operated in those states.

Candidates have even run for public office (for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary) and done very well or won on platforms including the revocation of corporate charters. One of the largest issues of the election of 1832 was Andrew Jackson’s demand that the corporate charter of the Second Bank of the United States not be renewed.

Following that lead, states all over the nation began examining their banks and other corporations, and in just 1832, the state of Pennsylvania pulled the corporate charters of 10 corporations, sentencing them to corporate death “for operating contrary to the public interest.”

Oil corporations, match manufacturers, whiskey trusts, and sugar corporations all received the corporate death penalty in the late 1800s in Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska, and New York, among others.

President Grover Cleveland invoked the mood of the times in his 1888 State of the Union address when he said,

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.⁷⁴

Today, all of the states still have laws that allow them to impose the corporate death penalty; it’s just been decades since these laws have been used against a large corporation. (Small companies are routinely shut down by secretaries of state, sometimes for malfeasance but mostly just because they’ve become inactive or failed to pay their taxes.)

Corporations have successfully argued before the Supreme Court that they should have First Amendment rights of free speech, Fourth Amendment rights of privacy, Fifth Amendment protections against takings, and 14th Amendment rights as “persons” to “equal protection [with you and me] under the law,” among other “rights of personhood.”

It’s long past the time that these “persons,” when they become egregious and recidivist criminals (and particularly when they repeatedly kill people), be treated the same as human criminals: remove them from society permanently. New, smaller, more innovative companies can fill the spaces now occupied by bloated corporate criminals. The result will be (as it was after AT&T was broken up in the 1970s for violating anti-monopoly laws) an explosion of innovation, competition, and opportunity.

If enough corporate criminals are targeted, the American business renaissance could spread across industries including media, pharma, airlines, tech, banking, insurance, food, chemicals, oil, and beyond.⁷⁵ It would be a real stimulus, meaningful and long-lasting: it’s time for our states to start enforcing the corporate death penalty.

Solution: Ban Preemption Laws Written by Corporations

Preemption is a legal doctrine whereby superior government bodies may make rules that inferior (smaller) governments must follow or may not violate. A state, for example, can pass a law forbidding any of its towns or rural communities from banning fracking or giant hog farms.

Preemption essentially strips democracy away from communities; British preemption of colonial American laws is one of the main reasons why the Revolutionary War was fought and is heavily cited in the Declaration of Independence.

Federal preemption is why marijuana is still technically illegal in the states that have legalized it: it’s still federally illegal, and federal agents can arrest you (as of this writing) even in states like Colorado and Oregon that have legalized it. The Constitution requires that federal law will almost always trump state laws: Article IV, Section 2, says that the Constitution and federal laws “shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”

Where this doctrine goes off the rails is most often at the state level, where corporations can less expensively buy off legislators to ban counties, cities, or towns from regulating corporate harms to their citizens. States have passed preemption laws that forbid local communities from banning everything from fracking to giant hog farms and toxic waste plants. Preemption laws have been passed across the nation to prevent local control of the tobacco, pesticide, fossil fuel, nuclear, firearms, and pharmaceutical industries, among others.

The leading organization fighting against this corporate abuse of governmental powers is the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which helps local folks draft laws that challenge preemption and work to restore local democracy.⁷⁶ CELDF’s website is rich with their work in this area, and they also put on educational seminars and offer the help of their lawyers to communities under corporate assault.

While the US Supreme Court, most notably in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Pennsylvania v. Nelson (1956), has extensively defined the powers and limits of federal preemption of state laws, the power of states to block local democracy hasn’t been so well defined.

The golden era of state preemption laws began in 2010. In January of that election year, the US Supreme Court, in Citizens United v. FEC, overturned a century of good-government laws and ruled that virtually unlimited corporate (and billionaire) money could rain into the political process.

A few weeks later, in his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said, “With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.”

He was right, and, as in 1979 after the Supreme Court first legalized corporate bribery of politicians in its 1978 First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decision, the rest of 2010 and 2011 saw a geyser of corporate money flowing into state elections, with the GOP picking up 675 state legislative seats, nearly doubling their control of state legislatures (25, up from 14 in 2009), and seizing total control (House, Senate, governor) of fully 21 states.

Forty-three states have now passed laws forbidding cities from regulating gun ownership, 44 have passed laws prohibiting cities from regulating Uber or Lyft, 25 have blocked cities from raising their minimum wages, and 20 have made it illegal for a town or county to make low-cost high-speed internet service available to their citizens.⁷⁷

Continuing the trend, in 2019, when the City Council of San Antonio, Texas, voted to kick Chick-fil-A out of their airport because of the company’s anti-LGBTQ discriminatory hiring policies, the Texas Legislature passed a preemption law overturning the city’s decision and banning any other city from doing the same. That year also saw the majority of preemption legislation submitted at the state level banning so-called sanctuary cities, guaranteeing a steady flow of cash to private prison contractors.⁷⁸

While the real cancer here is a series of Supreme Court decisions, from Buckley v. Valeo to Citizens United to McConnell v. FEC, which need to be overturned (the subject of my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America), federal legislation to limit state preemption laws passed purely to benefit corporate interests is needed immediately.

The Core Solution: Competition

The key to a functioning regulated-capitalist economy is competition; as competition declines, so do innovation, investment, employment, and the wealth of working people. Lacking competition, those people and corporations in the economic top .01% will explode their wealth while everything and everybody else suffers.

Since the 1980s, when Reagan began aggressively applying Chicago School neoliberal policies and Robert Bork’s perspective on antitrust, industry after industry, sector after sector, has been interpenetrated and then consumed almost entirely by cancer-like monopolies and oligopolies. Not only have wages and innovation suffered, but the overall economy itself has largely stagnated, relative to the preceding four decades.

As the Federal Reserve reports, the decade of the 1950s saw real GDP growth of 3.8%. Massive government infrastructure investment by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, along with strict antitrust enforcement, saw GDP in the decade of the 1960s jump to 4.5%. The 1970s were hit by the shock of two Arab oil embargos producing a huge recession and double-digit inflation, but nonetheless they came in at 3.2%.⁷⁹

Starting with Reagan’s economic ideas, though, the next four decades went from 3.1% in the ’80s to 3.0% in the ’90s to 1.7% in the ’00s to 2.1% in the 2010s.⁸⁰ And that’s with several rounds of massive stimuli, a dropping of the top tax rate from 74% to around 28%, and the Fed lowering interest rates to ranges never seen before (creating a huge debt bubble that threatens, 1929 style, to wipe us out when it bursts).

Because these new monopolies and oligopolies that Reagan and his successors allowed to metastasize care more about protecting their markets than creating new products, America, once the world’s leader in innovation and new patents, has now fallen behind China, which is growing its patent applications at a rate of over 14% annually while we’ve slipped to 0.2% growth.⁸¹

The grand neoliberal experiment of the Reagan Revolution, continued through the administrations of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump, has failed. American consumers—who were supposed to be protected by Bork’s insistence that low consumer prices were the only thing to consider with regard to antitrust laws—are paying more for cable TV, internet service, pharmaceuticals, air fares, health insurance, college, and imprisonment (among other things) than the residents of any other developed country in the world.

The cure for all this isn’t some sort of big-government micromanagement of the economy; nor is it less antitrust regulation and thus even more consolidation to produce pure monopolies that are then regulated like utilities. Neither of these “solutions” will work over the long haul, although both have been tried at various times in various industries.

The cure for our cancer-ridden economy is to activate our economy’s primary immune system: competition.

Competition, of course, is the result of specific rules being enforced, just like in sports. Twist the rules to benefit one side, and the game’s no longer worth playing or watching.

When we deregulated much of our economy in the 1980s, knocking out the rules that allowed for a sportsperson-like competition among relative equals and killing off the spaces in which new companies could start and grow without being absorbed, the cancer of monopoly and oligopoly began to grow with a vengeance, as documented previously.

To bring back economic vitality, we must reject the now-discredited Bork doctrine and Reagan’s neoliberalism and put back into place reasonable rules that support competition in the game of business.

That starts with Congress essentially reaffirming (and updating for the digital age) the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950 so that the Supreme Court will have to reverse its GTE Sylvania and subsequent rulings.

Nowhere in any of those laws do we find the phrase “consumer welfare”; instead, they all address the multiple harms caused across business, politics, and society itself by monopoly and its cousins. Bork’s ideas must be revealed as utter failures, and we must return to sane antitrust policies.

We’ve been here before.

In the late 19th century, John D. Rockefeller grew a business cancer within the oil industry, Andrew Carnegie unleashed his business cancer in the steel industry, and J. P. Morgan metastasized his business throughout banking.

Others arose, each exploiting the cancerous tools of monopoly to freeze out competition and destroy competition: Cornelius Vanderbilt with railroads and steamboats (he died the richest man in the world); Éleuthère Irénée du Pont with gunpowder and chemicals; and a whole host of other monopolies within niche markets like manufacturing matches or train cars.

Some used vertical integration, like Carnegie and, in the early 20th century, Henry Ford, who owned everything necessary to make a car, from the iron mines to the ships and railroads to the plants that made steel and precision parts. Others monopolized horizontally, as Rockefeller did when he bought out or forced out of business virtually every oil company of consequence in several states where he operated.

Regardless of how the cancers of monopoly spread, Congress recognized this threat against our economic and political systems and passed the Sherman Antitrust Act to cure it. Progressive Republican Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft used the law with enthusiasm, and Congress fine-tuned it with the Clayton Act and the Anti-Merger act, bringing us a half-century of prosperity.

Similarly, today’s labor markets, lacking the immune system of unions, need to be cured by overturning the Taft-Hartley Act, which created the infamous “right to work for less” laws.

And we must address the shortsighted exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources; the biosphere is the ultimate natural commons.

The economic disaster wrought on our nation by Donald Trump’s feckless and incompetent handling of the corona-virus crisis presents us with new challenges as well as new opportunities.

All of these issues have been significantly exacerbated by the political power that corporations achieved through their monopoly and oligopoly status, and none will have a successful resolution without first breaking up these huge and concentrated sources of wealth and its attendant political power. As with Bork’s transformation of America’s business landscape, this healing process begins by understanding and publicizing the solution. Bork was an absolute evangelist for what he thought would positively change America’s business landscape; now that we know he was wrong, we must become evangelists for a return to sanity.

A return to sanity means remembering that humans create the economy, and we should not be servants to our own creation.

A return to sanity means rejecting Bork’s arguments that our governments, communities, and environment should be subordinate to low prices and high profits for investors.

It means forging a new framework for the game of business, where companies invest in our communities, respect and reinvest in their workers, and improve and protect our environment.

If we want our grandchildren and their grandchildren to have a chance at a vibrant democracy and a livable planet, we must bring back the corporate death penalty and break up the monopolistic corporate giants that are draining communities of their resources, impoverishing working people, and, in many cases, helping destroy the planet.