Antitrust Victory

Good news, reported by Matt Stoller:

The problem is not convincing voters that monopolies are a problem. They already believe that. The problem is convincing them that doing something about these problems is possible. This fatalism also shows up in conversations with policymakers, businesspeople, and workers. There are any number of comments you’d recognize making this point. Congress is corrupt. Big tech is too powerful. Washington is broken. Big money runs everything. The government works for big business. Essentially, the case for concentrated corporate power is that, well, they are simply too entrenched to overcome.

Well yesterday, the anti-monopoly political movement showed that it is possible to use our political system to fight concentrated power. In a shocking action, the House passed a provision to strengthen antitrust laws by a vote of 242-184. Google, Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and various big tech funded trade associations opposed this bill, and Republican leaders like Jim Jordan and Silicon Valley Democrats Zoe Lofgren fought it bitterly. But they lost. And this is very weird to write, because Google never loses in legislative votes. Ever. But they did yesterday.

Continue ReadingAntitrust Victory

Some Hope for Insulin Users, Courtesy of the Revived U.S. Antitrust Division

Excerpt from Matt Stoller's website:

[O]n Thursday, the FTC voted to resurrect the Robinson-Patman Act, a bill prohibiting corporate bribery and price discrimination by middlemen that hasn’t been meaningfully enforced since the 1970s. I wrote several chapters in my book on the titanic fight in the 1930s to tame chain stores with this law, and the equally vicious conflict in the 1970s to stop enforcing it. The end of RPA enforcement is why chain stores like Walmart and Amazon took over our retail space, and why dominant middlemen control every area of our economy at this point. It’s worth noting that Robert Bork’s most hated statute was the Robinson-Patman Act, and he considered it a tremendous victory that he helped end the enforcement of the law.

So what happened at the FTC? All five commissioners voted on a policy statement saying that the use of rebates by dominant middlemen in the insulin market were a potential violation of different laws under the jurisdiction of the FTC, including the Robinson-Patman Act. This vote is a signal to every private antitrust lawyer, state attorney general, and judge, that the Robinson-Patman Act can once again be dusted off and used.

Insulin is a great test case for this law, because everyone knows how unfair and inefficient the insulin market truly is. It’s a medication that has been around since 1922, and yet it has been increasing in cost every year for decades. And while the three main producers engage in all sorts of schemes to push up cost, most of the high cost of insulin is actually a result the middlemen named pharmacy benefits managers - CVS Caremark, Cigna (Express Scripts), and United Healthcare (OptumRx) - who manage and control how medicine is priced and sold. PBMs demand rebates of up to 70% for the right to have an insulin company sell their product to patients. These rebates in turn massively drive up the price of insulin.

Continue ReadingSome Hope for Insulin Users, Courtesy of the Revived U.S. Antitrust Division

Needing More War News, NBC Analyzes Impending War with China

Here's the military-industrial-news-media complex hard at work today, focused on the western flank.  I'm smelling the stink of military manufacturers frightening and corrupting politicians in order to procure more orders for weapons. And why not float the idea of a two-front war with two nuclear armed adversaries, one of whom manufactures much of America's high tech goods?  Trump is mostly out of the news these days than to drum up more warmongering? This will allow NBC to sell more commercials and thus enjoy some largess too.

Caitlin Johnson comments at her website:

NBC's Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China. . . .

As we've discussed previously, citing war machine-funded think tanks as expert analysis without even disclosing their financial conflict of interest is plainly journalistic malpractice. But it happens all the time in the mass media anyway, because the mass media exist to circulate propaganda, not journalism.

This is getting so, so crazy. That the mass media are now openly teaming up with war machine think tanks to begin seeding the normalization of a hot war with China into the minds of the public indicates that the propaganda campaign to manufacture consent for the US-centralized empire's final Hail Mary grab at unipolar domination is escalating even further. The mass-scale psychological manipulation is getting more and more overt and more and more shameless.

Continue ReadingNeeding More War News, NBC Analyzes Impending War with China