The most optimistic progressive in Washington these days might be Barry Lynn.
Lynn, a prolific author and scholar, runs the Open Markets Institute, a think tank dedicated to exposing and reducing the danger of concentrated corporate power. At this juncture in history, he predicts, the public is behind him, and policymakers are beginning to see the light.
His team had been in contact with Biden’s people over the past two years and thinks there is a real possibility the incoming administration will take his ideas seriously. “I feel confident that the Biden team is actually ultimately going to do the right thing,” Lynn says. And that “right thing” does not need an act of Congress, he stresses. All it needs is the political will to enforce laws on the books that have gathered dust for generations as elected officials were beguiled by the notion advanced by certain economists that bigger corporations could make markets more efficient, and that market efficiency was the highest goal.
For years, Lynn was largely alone in his views on corporate monopolies. But recently, the nonprofit field has been crowded with organizations dedicated to controlling big corporations. Not only are many nonprofits looking at strategies to address corporate concentration, funders have jumped into the fray. Last year, Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook who has raised alarms about its growing power, created a $10 million anti-monopoly fund (AMF). Its donors include major foundations such as Open Society, Nathan Cummings, Ford, Knight and the Omidyar Network.
In 2019, the fund awarded grants to 16 groups, stating that funds donated would range in size from $300,000 to $25,000. In July 2020, AMF announced it was giving $1.6 million in grants to 14 nonprofits, some of them repeat recipients, but others new to the fund. The fund’s strategy is to financially support many nonprofits addressing monopolies in many ways, Hughes has said.
Grantees include diverse groups. For example, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance helps communities resist corporate domination through programs that include tackling food waste, supporting local banks and transitioning to clean energy. Likewise, the American Independent Business Alliance, which will help small businesses identify antitrust violations, offers a variety of resources to entrepreneurs and help with “buy local” campaigns. AMF has also supported groups that push to change tax policies that incentivize monopoly power, and the publication American Progress to back investigative journalism on the real-world impacts of corporate concentration.
“The funding community has become much more aware of this problem” than it was three or four years ago, Lynn says. But Lynn’s operation, also supported by AMF, stands out for its team of journalists, researchers, advocates and lawyers whose mission is laser-focused and longstanding: to “expose and reverse the stranglehold that corporations and monopolies have on this country.” OMI currently has an annual budget of about $3 million and a staff of 14, with four positions open.
Elected officials are more engaged
Lynn feels the time to break up monopolies has come. Not only are funders paying attention, so are elected officials. Last October, the House Judiciary Committee released an exhaustive report focused primarily on Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, and excoriating them for their anti-competitive actions. The report is “extremely hard-hitting” and “pretty much bipartisan … It actually provides a roadmap for… dealing with these most powerful corporations in the world,” Lynn says.
Such reports rarely get much ink from mainstream media, but the committee’s 31-year-old House counsel, Lina Khan, was a recent guest on a New York Times-sponsored podcast hosted by the paper’s contributing opinion writer Kara Swisher.
Khan was likely in middle school when Lynn, a journalist by profession, started toiling in this field. His essay, “Unmade in America,” was published in Harper’s in 2002. “It’s pertinent today,” Lynn says, noting that the essay concerned “supply chain dependency … us being dependent on China for manufactured goods that we need,” a problem that became acutely clear during the pandemic when the U.S. faced shortages of masks and pharmaceutical ingredients made in China, he says.
However, when the article was published 18 years ago, it did not make much of a splash. “Some people understood it, but the great majority of folks didn’t,” he says. His ideas were not widely embraced by policymakers. Since then, Lynn has written three books about corporate power, the final in his trilogy published in May 2020. He wrote a preface in keeping with the times: “COVID-19 is our last warning. Our last opportunity to understand that, acting together, we have the power to master the monopolist and to rebuild, from the bottom up, our lives, our communities, our nation, our world.”
To be sure, the public caught on much earlier than many politicians, says Lynn. “Americans have understood for more than 12 years that we have a monopoly problem in this country,” he says, contending that “one of the reasons” presidential candidate Barack Obama won the 2008 Democratic primary in Iowa was his promise to “deal with agricultural farming monopolies.”
Obama did not deliver on that pledge, he says. “Instead he bailed out Wall Street and Detroit and did not deal with pharmaceutical monopolies. What happened? We had the Tea Party in 2010. We had Occupy [Wall Street] in 2011. We had Bernie in 2016, and we had Trump in 2016.” Trump’s campaign was informed by the right-wing populism of adviser Steve Bannon, Lynn says, which was “anti-monopolist.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, he adds, a number of Democrats, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Sanders were all “very strongly anti-monopolist.” As president, he says, Trump “repeatedly” used anti-corporate rhetoric, but “his actual ability to deal with corporations was somewhat hampered by his incompetence.”
OMI has been trying to help the public see the connection between concentrated corporate power and “less money in your paycheck, why it costs more to go to the hospital, and why there’s so much disinformation, in your newsfeed,” he says.
Engaging a Larger Community
But OMI is also engaging with a broader audience that includes not only policymakers at the federal and state levels, but also lawyers, economists, “especially in the antitrust academy,” business people and investors. The goal, he says, is to spur widespread recognition of the dangers of corporate monopolies, to present solutions to the problem, and “actually begin the process of doing something” about them.
Lynn’s operation had been housed at the New America Foundation for more than a decade. In 2017, however, New America fired him. Lynn says his termination was prompted by his statement praising the European Union for imposing a $2.7 billion fine on Google. The company, a major funder of New America, did not take kindly to the criticism. New America President Anne-Marie Slaughter said that Lynn’s dismissal resulted from his failure to give New America advance notice when his actions were likely to upset funders. Lynn says he had given such notice, and charged that his termination amounted to caving into a major donor.
New America ultimately decided to eliminate the entire Open Markets program, leaving its 10 staffers without jobs. The day after his termination, Lynn and his staffers became an independent operation. The media attention, Lynn adds, and negative publicity for Google, helped change minds. It was one of those moments when “citizen awareness of concentrated power leapt up a whole step. We, through our lives, drove the story up a whole level.”
Until the pandemic hit, Lynn and his group had expected President Donald Trump to win a second term. Not considering him up to the task of breaking up giant corporations, his group intended to work with state AGs and Europeans and “bypass D.C.” That strategy is in his back pocket “if things go terribly awry with the Biden administration, which it won’t.” But even if the White House is “not with us,” he asserts, “we’re still going to win.”
Lynn is looking for nothing less than fundamental change in how the government addresses monopolies, beginning with Amazon, Facebook and Google. Getting there, Lynn acknowledges, requires an entirely different way of thinking about corporate power. When Congress approved antitrust laws under President Woodrow Wilson, the philosophy was that “the purpose of anti-monopoly laws was to protect our democracy and our individual liberty,” he says. But during the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, and under the influence of the neoliberal Chicago school of economics, efficiency supplanted democracy as a political economy’s highest goal, he says.
Philosophy Is Policy
“Philosophy is policy,” he says, contending that it is “more fundamental than personnel.” Policymakers have to return to the original understanding of anti-monopoly laws and “use these tools to protect us in the way they were intended to… If you change the philosophy on day one, then everybody who’s working for the administration is guided by a different compass.”
The Biden administration must then “take actions that will make clear to the world” its intent to “restructure and apply rules to Google, Facebook and Amazon, whose power poses “grave threats to our democracy… because they control the flow of information and news and ideas between individual and individual.”
Lynn is heartened that state attorneys general have gotten the message. In the last few years, he notes, “we saw something unprecedented, which was all 50 states, plus D.C., plus Puerto Rico, running an investigation of Google on antitrust grounds. And we saw 49 states plus D.C. plus Puerto Rico bring investigations of Facebook.”
Lynn says that the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Communications Commission are agencies that have “awesome anti-monopoly powers.” And, he contends, “breaking apart” giant corporations “is not as controversial as a lot of people make it seem, “adding that “it’s just corporations,” and “neutralizing” them is not the same as “killing anybody” or “invading Iraq. … You’re moving some papers around.”
He concedes that breaking up giant corporations does have some winners and losers. A few people may lose a few billion dollars, while most Americans will benefit, he says. He also acknowledges that corporate giants likely will go to court to fight these efforts.
Given the conservative pro-business bent of the current Supreme Court, that could spell trouble, he concedes. But he remains hopeful that even some conservative judges are beginning to see the danger of corporate concentration.
“Even justices on the Supreme Court, they look around them, and the world is changing. And they see concentrations of power that are truly disturbing,” and they may fear the effects of this concentrated power on them or their children, he says. “They may come to conclude that, in some fashion or other, they were wrong.”
