States and Monopoly
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While I am always highly skeptical that the states can really lead on major issues such as fighting monopoly, it is necessary now given the stranglehold the far right has over the judiciary and over the Republican states. What else are you going to do, not try? Obviously you have to try and control the power of giant corporations. So it is going to have to start at the states, as it did in the Progressive Era. The Prospect has a new piece out on what is happening at the state level.
Today, Fight Corporate Monopolies (FCM), a nonprofit dedicated to promoting antitrust enforcement, announced a task force with an initial cohort of eight elected officials from four states: Delaware, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. It aims to create a community of anti-monopoly policymakers, provide them with resources for research and messaging, connect them with adversely affected constituents and small-business owners, and even help draft legislation to restrain the power of large corporate actors.
The task force can be seen as a counterweight to conservative organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-sponsored outfit that supplies model legislation on a host of right-wing causes to state legislatures. In a small way, the FCM task force can do the same for the cause of preventing corporate corruption and monopolization.
“All these task force members really have a deep record of championing legislation that has stood up to concentrated corporate power and are currently sponsoring new legislation that protects workers and local businesses from abuses of dominant corporations,” said Helen Brosnan, FCM’s executive director, in an interview with the Prospect. She sees the task force as a space for these anti-monopoly advocates to trade ideas and strategize, and predicts political strength because the issue has salience across class, racial, and ideological divides.
“I already had concerns about what essentially is corporations benefiting from the tax dollars of working-class Black and Latino families,” explained task force member and Illinois state Sen. Rob Peters, who was drawn to the work of FCM as a way to protect his constituents from corporate exploitation disguised as economic development.
Peters is the chief sponsor of the Honesty in Economic Development Act, which would largely ban nondisclosure agreements between Illinois state and local governments and the companies they contract, which aligns with an FCM-sponsored initiative called “Ban Secret Deals.” Peters was also instrumental in passing the Fair Food and Retail Delivery Act, which protects restaurants from third-party apps using logos and listing menu items of restaurants without permission.
FCM, along with its sister organization the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), has worked with members of the task force on many of their state-level policies already. Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy at FCM and AELP, told the Prospect that the 21st Century Antitrust Act in New York is the “biggest and most groundbreaking” legislation that FCM has worked on. The bill, if passed, would drastically lower the threshold for antitrust enforcement and allow class action lawsuits for antitrust violations, among other provisions.
We’ll see what happens but this is certainly a good thing.