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[2020-02-11] American Economic Liberties Project: She Wants to Break Up Big Everything.
Trustbusting advocates like Sarah Miller, who target corporate power, have finally found themselves at the center of the political conversation
The American Economic Liberties Project launched in February 2020 to help translate the intellectual victories of the anti-monopoly movement into momentum towards concrete, wide-ranging policy changes that begin to address today's crisis of concentrated economic power.
SOURCE: EconomicLiberties.us, captured 2020-07-07
The American Economic Liberties Project launched in February 2020 to help translate the intellectual victories of the anti-monopoly movement into momentum towards concrete, wide-ranging policy changes that begin to address today's crisis of concentrated economic power.
Economic Liberties is led by Sarah Miller, who served as the Deputy Director of the Open Markets Institute and has been recognized as "one of the primary architects of the modern antitrust movement." As concern over concentrated economic power has broadened beyond the community of antitrust reformers, Economic Liberties has quickly grown into a hub for organizing a diverse set of leading policy experts and advocates in areas impacted by concentrated power, ranging from community development to national security to entrepreneurship.
Prior to Open Markets, Sarah spent 15 years in Washington D.C. working on policy and strategic communications from the vantage points of campaigns, advocacy organizations, and the federal government. She was a policy advisor at the U.S. Treasury in the Obama Administration, worked as an advisor to John Podesta at the Center for American Progress, helped launch and lead the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and served as a policy staffer for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run. She graduated from the University of Chicago with honors and hails from Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Working together with a growing network of allies, we call on the government to re-assert essential policy tools -- like aggressive investigatory agendas, robust antitrust enforcement, anti-corruption measures, corporate accountability, and a reinvigorated administrative state -- to challenge monopolies' dominance over markets and society.
We are non-profit and non-partisan and do not accept any funding from corporations. Contributions and grants from foundations and individuals pay for the work we do.
SOURCE: EconomicLiberties.us, captured 2020-07-07
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." -- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Over the last 40 years, concentrated economic power in the United States has reached extreme proportions.
Across a wide range of markets-not just tech, banks, media, health care, and airlines, but everything from eyeglasses to baby formula and mattresses to meat processing-a few corporations dominate sector after sector of our economy. Often deeply integrated with Wall Street interests, these corporations wield tremendous power over our economy and democracy.
This means that the underlying structure of most markets are pre-programmed for driving inequality and producing unjust outcomes. Corporate monopolies extract more and more wealth and power from working people, independent businesses, entrepreneurs, ordinary investors, consumers, and entire communities. And they are often the vehicles through which a handful of individuals have amassed unprecedented fortunes.
Dominant corporations also wield tremendous power over our democracy to shape public discourse, influence government policy, and avoid accountability. Their political power entrenches and exacerbates economic and political marginalization among historically excluded communities. It also contributes to deep injustices in the application of the law; for the most powerful corporations, laws are often mere suggestions, in stark contrast to the abusive ways our legal system treats the poor and communities of color.
Below, we catalogue some of the ways that concentrated economic power causes or contributes to a broad range of social problems and injustices, drawing on a growing body of research and analysis.
Combined with lower wages, corporate consolidation costs the average American household $5,000 a year in lost purchasing power. Mergers between companies result in a 7 percent price increase, while markups-how much companies charge for products beyond their production costs-have tripled since 1980.
Without decades of corporate concentration, wages would be substantially higher. Recent research found that median annual compensation-now only $33,000-would be more than $10,000 higher if employers were less concentrated.
Employment falls as employers' power over the labor market increases-and is roughly 13 percent less today because of concentration. Concentrated firms hire fewer workers, produce less output, and earn higher profits than would otherwise be the case.
Large corporations increasingly dominate local economies, pitting states and cities against each other to win pro-corporate policies. Yet counties where small, locally-owned businesses account for a larger share of the economy have higher income and employment growth and lower poverty rates.
The startup rate has collapsed, by nearly half and the remaining dynamism is often an illusion. Existing corporations open 40 percent of new businesses, while "high growth" firms-young companies that play an especially important role in employment, productivity, and wage growth-have declined.
Dominant corporations invest less in basic research. Business investment has fallen by half since the 1970s; in 2018, corporations spent just $404 billion on research and development compared to more than $1 trillion in stock buybacks.
Dominant corporations expose American consumers to significant risks of disruption from concentrating supply chains, including shortages of essential drugs. Parts suppliers have also consolidated in recent decades, exposing supply chains to greater risk of product shortages if disaster strikes.
Dominant corporations spend unprecedented amounts to influence policy outcomes. Lobbying spending reached an eight-year high in 2018, totaling $3.4 billion. But corporations also invest heavily in unregulated lobbying, likely more than doubling their total influence spending.
Securing economic liberty for everyone in America means empowering consumers, workers, and communities and freeing them from discrimination, extortion, and abuse from unchecked monopolies and predatory finance. It means ensuring entrepreneurs and businesses are able to succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work. And it means broadly distributing wealth and market power to promote equitable political power and safeguard American democracy.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution or single bill to pass to guarantee economic liberty for all. Instead, our democratic institutions must aggressively and vigilantly wield a suite of powerful policy tools -- like aggressive corporate oversight, antitrust enforcement, anti-corruption measures, financial regulation, international trade arrangements, and a reinvigorated administrative state -- to challenge monopolies' dominance over our economy and democracy. It is up to us -- as consumers, workers, business people, and citizens -- to make sure that they do.
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