Publications
He was America’s most powerful businessman and the Treasury secretary throughout the 1920s. His corruption would lead to an impeachment inquiry. This is an exclusive excerpt for The American Prospect from the new book 'Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy', by Open Markets Fellow Matt Stoller, out this month from Simon & Schuster.
Read MoreOpen Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller publishes an adapted excerpt of his book "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy" on the Wall Street Journal. He asserts the loudest complaints against today’s monopolies come not from Occupy Wall Street types but from leaders of firms seeking freedom of commerce.
Read MoreOpen Markets Health Care Researcher and Reporter Olivia Webb writes on The American Prospect about how investment firms have bought up emergency medical service companies, squeezing soaring profits from vulnerable patients. "The Great Recession created an opportunity to financialize the practice of lifesaving emergency transport," she writes. "After 2008, a number of private equity firms moved to take over ambulance and air ambulance providers."
Open Markets Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan argues on The American Prospect that corporate power can be neutralized if federal agencies simply used the prodigious authority they’ve been granted. "The president already has extraordinary authority under decades-old statutes," Vaheesan writes. "The question is will he or she appoint officials—to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and other agencies—determined to tame corporate dominance of our economy and politics."
Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller published a piece on The Guardian on the heels of news that U.S. state attorneys general are launching a bipartisan investigation into Facebook and Google. “These corporations have become too powerful to be contained by democratic societies,” he writes. “We must work through our government to break them up and regulate our information commons, or they will end up becoming our government and choosing what we see and know about the world around us.”
Read MoreOpen Markets Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan asserts that fine print isn’t “voluntary” and we should overhaul our thinking about contractual agreements. In this piece for Current Affairs, Vaheesan explores how we are subject to a dense web of contracts that grant us—or (more often) deprive us of—rights. He argues that against corporate power, Congress must wield its power to ban abusive contractual provisions.
Read MoreIn this piece for The Atlantic, Nathan Schneider and Open Markets Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan argue that tougher regulation will help to fight monopoly, but workers and small businesses also need the ability to join forces against corporate power. "Collective power—that is, allowing independent workers and small businesses to collaborate to negotiate better treatment from megacorporations, or to start enterprises of their own—should be a pillar of creating an equitable economy," they assert.
Read MoreOpen Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard published an op-ed on CNN Business on the Federal Trade Commission’s $5 billion settlement with Facebook and asserts that the company needs a new business model. “Instead of fines, changing destructive business models and anticompetitive practices is the only way to lessen the platforms’ harms,” Hubbard writes. “These fixes fall into four main buckets, spelling out the acronym PAIN: privacy, antitrust, interoperability, and non-discrimination.”
Read MoreIn this third and final part of his three-part series on the resurgence of antimonopoly for Pro-Markets, Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller explains how the election of Donald Trump helped bring antimonopoly thinking back to the forefront of political discourse. “The most important political figures in the return of antimonopoly politics are Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump,” asserts Stoller. “There are many people in Europe, India, and Australia making critical policy choices, but in terms of setting the boundaries of what is possible, it is Warren and Trump who have re-politicized this area.”
Read MoreIn this second installment of his three-part series on antitrust’s recent resurrection on Pro-Market, Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller discusses the legacy of Obama’s presidency. The real policy for which Obama will be known is not Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, but bailing out the banks after the 2008 financial crisis and helping Americans and the rest of the world understand that liberal democratic rhetoric was really an ornamental cover for a system of concentrated financial and political power.
Read MoreIn the first part of a three-part series for Pro-Market, Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller explains why antimonopoly politics is experiencing a resurgence. “To understand how far we’ve come, we must understand what was,” writes Stoller. “I am going to try and help us reach back to the 1990s, before the financial crisis, Iraq War, Big Tech’s monopolization, before Nickelback jokes, and so forth.”
Read MoreLegal Director Sandeep Vaheesan blasts the Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association v. Thomas arguing that the decision nullifies the 21st Amendment’s will that states control their alcohol market, and paves the way for monopolistic retail corporations such as Amazon and Walmart to overrun the markets for beer, wine, and spirits.
Read MoreOpen Markets Institute Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard has published a piece on CNN Business describing the extent of the concentration crisis in America and how monopoly is killing the American Dream. While big tech remains in the crosshairs for lawmakers and the 2020 presidential candidates, as seen during the first night of the Democratic debate, Hubbard emphasizes that the monopoly problem extends far beyond tech, crippling economic growth, raising prices, depressing wages, and making life increasingly harder for average Americans.
Read MoreOpen Markets Senior Fellow Matthew Stoller and Lucas Kunce published a feature on The American Conservative exposing the devastating history of military monopolization in America. They describe how Wall Street has given foreign rivals such as China growing leverage over our defense industry by usurping what used to be American manufacturing, not only in telecommunications but in various sectors which are key to our national security.
Read MoreOpen Markets Institute Senior Fellow Matt Stoller published an op-ed in the New York Times condemning Facebook’s plan to create a new global currency. Stoller writes, “Sorry, but no thanks: We should not be setting up a private international payments network that would need to be backed by taxpayers because it’s too big to fail.”
Read MoreIf you are thinking about Facebook or questions of political economy, an important and telling hearing took place recently in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Democratic leaders Frank Pallone and Jan Schakowsky did an oversight review of Facebook’s regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, with all five commissioners, including Chairman Joe Simons, advancing ideas on how to address privacy rules in America today.
Read MoreOf the big four tech giants, Facebook, Google and Amazon have been taking heat for abusing their market power, while Apple has been flying under the radar. That's because Apple's business model, unlike that of Facebook and Google, doesn't depend on closely tracking your data, and it has been more restrained than Amazon in the number of markets it muscles into. But thanks to a US Supreme Court decision on Monday, Apple is finally getting the attention it deserves.
Read MoreAfter decades of virtual silence, the #MeToo movement has publicized the epidemic of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. The recent New York Times investigation of Sterling Jewelers exposes the depth of the problem and shows how long and hard women’s fight for justice remains. Since women who complain about harassment face retaliation and even termination, often the only way to escape it is to find a new job. Yet for many women, continuing their careers with a new employer turns out to be impossible.
Read More
