‘Crossroads on Corporate Power’ Luke Goldstein-Antitrust in 2025 and Coming Administration of Harris or Trump; with ‘When Everyone is Going Left Look Right’ per Late Sam Zell; Facts-Analysis
Influence Watch states: “The American Prospect is a left-progressive publication that promotes left-of-center public policy through articles on its website and in print. Founded in 1989 by Robert Kuttner, Paul Starr, and former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, the Prospect has received grants from a number of left-of-center organizations…”
According to the TAP website, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hewlett Foundation, Kellogg Foundation are major donors, which Influence Watch also stated. Per left-leaning Copilot on this date: “Rockefeller Brothers Fund: This fund has received grants from the Tides Foundation, which has been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” which in turn cited left-leaning Politico as a source for that statement. That Politico article cited by Copilot said: “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.”
Also, per Influence Watch, speaking first about TAP-cofounder Robert Reich: “He co-founded Inequality Media Civic Action, a left-leaning digital media company, and is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Reich is also the chairman of Common Cause, a left-of-center advocacy group focused on advancing left-of-center policies. 24
Kuttner is a co-founder and co-editor of the Prospect and is a professor at Brandeis University. 25 He also co-founded the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center research institute supported by labor unions. 26
Starr is the author of eight books and is the co-founder and co-editor of the Prospect. He is also a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. 27
A stated goal of TAP is to contribute to “the creation of a durable liberal majority.”
Listed by TAP among its founding sponsors is: John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006). Longtime readers of MHProNews may recall that Galbraith made the following often-quoted remark about regulators and industry.
Per Goodreads, quoting Galbraith (emphasis added): “Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age—after a matter of ten or fifteen years—they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.”
When someone thinks about the ‘need for regulations,’ Galbraith’s cautionary adage should come to mind.
With those points made, the following are extended excerpts from Luke Goldstein’s article in TAP entitled: “A Crossroads on Corporate Power.” Note the statement below a featured image of Lina Kahn photo reads: “Some of Kamala Harris’s donors want her to oust Federal Trade Commission [FTC] chair Lina Khan.” Unlike others in MHVille trade media that downplay or ignore antitrust and monopolization topics, MHProNews featured Khan dozens of times, including in the linked entitled: ‘Runaway Corporate-Monopoly Power Inequality-Generating Machine’-Ultra Rich Get Richer But 5 Billion Grow Poorer-Says Oxfam per Inequality Report–Facts with U.S. and MHVille Insights-Analysis. Note that TAP stated that this article also appeared in their October 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. MHProNews has edited Goldstein’s narrative to capture maximum wheat, reduce what is arguably the chaff, and thus shorten and clarify about 12 minutes of reading time by about 1/3. Remarks in [brackets] are added by MHProNews. Our analysis with MHVille and other related information will follow in Part II.
Part I – FromThe American Prospect – Ideas, Politics & Power
A Crossroads on Corporate Power
Where would Harris and Trump take antitrust enforcement?
For 40 years, untrammeled monopoly power has been the defining characteristic of the American economy. In the 1980s, after a laissez-faire approach to antitrust laws originating with the Chicago school took hold in the Reagan administration, wealth inequality soared and new innovators struggled to break through an incumbency advantage favored by Wall Street.
…during the Biden administration…new…antitrust regulators: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra have [purportedly] sent a clear message that the full body of anti-monopoly laws will be enforced to ensure open, competitive markets for consumers, businesses, and workers.
The presidential election will decide whether this brief window of opportunity to radically reshape economic liberty in this country can fully take root as a more permanent policy structure. …
On both the left and right, populist factions are battling it out with a more corporatist political establishment for the soul of their respective parties. …
Kamala Harris…resisted articulating a full policy vision until early September, when her campaign finally launched an issues page on her website [that was per sources largely a cut and paste from the Biden reelection site]. The economic platform gestures at giving new powers to antitrust enforcers under the overall framing of going after “bad actors,” a vague designation that leaves a lot of questions up to interpretation.
Despite Harris’s coy attitude toward policy…
BASED ON RECENT POLLING, A MAJORITY OF VOTERS blame corporate price-gouging for inflation and support breaking up monopolies as a tool against it. The C-suite executive class also views antitrust and competition policy as one of the top issues on the ballot this November, but for entirely different reasons.
For months now, companies have been selectively timing the announcement of new acquisition targets, in the hopes of a more business-friendly administration with a more relaxed merger policy to wave deals through. Behind the scenes—and sometimes in public—Wall Street has also been waging an all-out pressure campaign to urge the next Democratic administration to remove Lina Khan from the FTC.
…But corporate leaders saw an opening when Harris, a Californian close to Silicon Valley, stepped in as the party’s new nominee. Her close advisers include the general counsel of Uber (who is also her brother-in-law) and a lawyer representing Google against an active Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit.
When Harris took over [the Democratic nomination from Joe Biden], a procession of CEOs and business leaders, led by Democratic mega-donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, went on cable shows to demand Harris oust [FTC Chair] Khan. Maryland’s governor, former investment banker and Harris ally Wes Moore, echoed this on CNBC. When asked directly about Hoffman’s proposition to move on from Khan, he said, “I think we will and I think we have to … There are going to be different dynamics that are going to require different philosophies.”
The remarks from donors came off as a thinly veiled quid pro quo and sparked widespread backlash. Even more centrist lawmakers in tough re-election races, like Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), scrambled to post pictures in a room with [FTC Chair] Khan to show support. Hoffman was forced to recant during a later CNN interview, claiming he was merely speaking about Khan as an “expert,” not a donor.
Harris has never commented on the incident, nor has she committed to keeping Khan if she wins, despite championing several of the policies of Khan’s agency on the campaign trail. …[Harris] included a federal ban on price-gouging for groceries, a crackdown on algorithmic price-fixing in housing, and reforms for pharmacy benefit managers driving up drug costs. Within weeks, DOJ sued RealPage over rental price-fixing, buttressing Harris’s message.
Undeterred, monopolists continue to pressure Harris’s campaign. They aren’t wrong to view the election in such consequential terms.
IT TOOK REAGAN TWO TERMS, AND REALLY A THIRD under George H.W. Bush, for the Chicago school consumer welfare standard to become fully ingrained. If the neo-Brandeisians get another four years with a Harris administration, they will be able to more fully institutionalize one of the most far-reaching policy revolutions since the New Deal.
In the first year of his administration, President Biden issued an extensive executive order laying out a whole-of-government approach to competition. The document [frequently referenced by MHProNews postures] all but dethroned the old enforcement model of the Chicago school and gave his new-guard antitrust regulators a green light to move forward with their agenda.
That agenda has resulted in a sweeping policy overhaul. Several of America’s largest Fortune 500 companies are facing antitrust lawsuits. Agencies have gone after scam robocall farms and initiated rules to make it easier for people to cancel digital subscriptions, limit credit card late fees, or ensure medical debt doesn’t appear on credit reports. The most significant new rule, the FTC’s ban on restrictive noncompete agreements in employment contracts, will ultimately be determined by the Supreme Court, and along with it whether the FTC has authority to create new rules through its unfair methods of competition powers.
…
The new merger guidelines, finalized by the FTC and DOJ last year, amount to a new corporate charter for how business can grow, and establishes that companies must innovate rather than acquire competitors for market share. While there have been some setbacks operationalizing this approach to corporate power, by the FTC’s count they’ve won in court or otherwise stopped roughly 90 percent of their merger challenges. DOJ has tallied notable victories, such as blocking the Spirit-JetBlue airline merger, and publisher Simon & Schuster’s proposed combination with Penguin Random House. In August, Google was found guilty of monopolizing search markets, the first major monopolization verdict in a quarter-century [Note: that winning case was launched by the Trump Administration, as Goldstein admits below]. These victories have shown that neo-Brandeisian legal theories can hold up in court.
The Google search ruling in particular could prove a major precedent for other monopolization cases the FTC and DOJ have filed, including Big Tech cases against Apple, Amazon, Meta, and a separate case against Google for monopolizing adtech markets being heard now. DOJ also has the RealPage lawsuit, and a monopolization case against Live Nation for rolling up the concert venue, promotion, and ticketing businesses.
“Once a few more of these cases win in the courts, you’re going to witness a sea change in how businesspeople operate,” said Matt Stoller, policy director of the American Economic Liberties Project.
THE FATE OF THIS PROJECT TO FIGHT ECONOMIC concentration depends on the next administration’s appointments and continued support.
Anti-monopoly policy still relies heavily on the inexorably slow litigation process. It usually takes more than one presidential term to initiate an investigation into a company, file a monopolization case, argue it in court, and then hash out a remedy if the government wins. That’s a near-Herculean task for chronically understaffed enforcers whose funding is continuously put at risk in congressional appropriations.
By its very nature, this process requires more than four years to accomplish. Some antitrust experts believe this predicament necessitates some degree of bipartisan consensus, given how frequently the White House swings between party control in our current political era.
…Granted, the merger was between AT&T and Time Warner, the owner of CNN, a media organ hated by Trump. But it was a legitimate competition issue; his DOJ followed through on filing the merger challenge [under Trump], but lost (only for AT&T to voluntarily sell off Time Warner in 2022).
…Trump…His current platform says nothing about monopolies, but does promise light-touch regulation for crypto and essentially no government interference with the development of artificial intelligence. …
Despite his more business-friendly posture, Trump did pick as his running mate J.D. Vance, a bȇte noire of the GOP’s old guard, who comes from the populist wing of the party. On several occasions, Vance has openly praised Lina Khan, one of the few Biden regulators he thinks is doing a “pretty good job.” Some antitrust proponents on the right believe that Vance will steer the policy direction of their administration.
“We’re certainly a minority in our party but the energy is on our side … we expect that to carry through to appointments,” said Jon Schweppe, policy director at the American Principles Project, who worked on the antitrust sections in Project 2025 as part of the broad coalition assembled by the Heritage Foundation. …
But there is reasonable optimism for a modicum of continuity on antitrust, even if Trump wins. Khan and Kanter have been far more coherent and bold about their policy direction, but in key respects they inherited some of the previous administration’s work on corporate power, which began the initial break from neoliberal orthodoxy [bold added here and in the two paragraphs below are by MHProNews].
The Biden DOJ gets credit for winning the Google search case, but it was first filed by Trump’s DOJ Antitrust Division head Makan Delrahim. The Republican-chaired FTC under Trump also filed an antitrust case against Facebook, targeting its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. That case is being pursued by the current FTC.
Delrahim’s DOJ even brought some unexpected cases in labor markets, targeting no-poach agreements where competitive employers conspire not to hire each other’s employees. That was a rough precursor to the noncompete ban.
The next Trump administration would likely continue the cases against Big Tech, which conservatives view as harboring liberal bias. There could be overlap on some health care policies too. Republicans have started to rally behind cracking down on pharmacy benefit manager middlemen that drive up drug costs. Republican FTC commissioner Andrew Ferguson voted with the Democrats this July to issue a damning interim study of the industry. Pharma patent abuse is another area of convergence. “Institutional heft at the agency to take on bogus patent listings is pretty well solidified at this point,” said Spencer Waller, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, who mostly recently served as senior adviser to the FTC.
…
SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT IS ALSO A CONCERN for a [possible] future Harris administration. Her framing of taking on “bad actors” does not establish clear principles for what is and isn’t fair competition. Is Google, for example, a bad-actor monopolist? Harris doesn’t specify, despite a court ruling that the company violated the Sherman Act. It’s a far cry from the Biden executive order on competition, which diagnosed America’s monopoly problem as a widespread, systemic issue.
…
Her campaign’s rollout is especially focused on the consumer protection side. It makes sense to highlight those actions in an election year when inflation is still a major concern for voters. But it also hints at a quiet return to the consumer welfare standard, which could bleed into the policies that enforcers are pressured to target under…[a possible Harris]…administration.
…There are active investigations into OpenAI, Nvidia, and the health care giant UnitedHealth.
There’s also hope within the anti-monopoly movement that agencies will fully resuscitate a dormant prong of antitrust law, the Robinson-Patman Act, which targets pricing discrimination.
These ambitious policy efforts require a lot of time and resources, as well as the luck of the draw in the courts. But the transformational power of this work is already playing a major role in this year’s election. It could reshape our country’s politics for decades to come, if the revolution under way can coalesce.”
Part II – Additional Information with More MHProNews Analysis
1) For progressives like Goldstein and The American Prospect (TAP), there is a case to be made that admitting that anything that Trump did correctly or that Trump and Vance could also do if they win is typically a painful thing that requires a dose of pejoratives and innuendo to make their side (i.e.: Kamala Harris and Democrats) seem superior and Trump and the GOP seem inferior. But by removing the chaff in the above, what remains of Goldstein’s article paints a reasonably more coherent view of reality. As MHProNews previously reported, and Goldstein admitted, it was the “Trump’s DOJ Antitrust Division head Makan Delrahim” that launched what is now lauded as possibly the most consequential antitrust case in a quarter of a century. The Google case ruling, per legal minds, will cause general counsels to advise corporate leaders on the impact of possible antitrust ramifications in decisions and actions for years to come. Kahn and Kanter, Goldstein and TAP admits, is beholden to what was started under Trump and Delrahim. The edits (…) above make that clearer, as do the two reports that follow.
2) MHProNews has laid the foundation in 2024 and prior reports for the ways that employees of problematic consolidators of the industry who have apparently ruled the roost at the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI) for years to support Trump-Vance and aligned “MAGA” Republicans (vs. RINOs like disgraced figures like ex-Congresswoman Liz Cheney (WI-R) who endorsed Kamala Harris, but previously lost her reelection bid by a wide margin. Citing left-leaning NBC News, and then left-leaning PBS News, Copilot said on 10.28.2024 the following.
“Liz Cheney lost her GOP primary in Wyoming to Harriet Hageman by more than 32 points.” Cheney’s opposition to Trump and her role on the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol were key factors in her defeat.”
3) While the Biden-Harris era has postured antitrust support, a Goldstein, TAP, and other sources have pointed out, an important swath of Harris big dollar donors do not want serious antitrust efforts.
This next video is from MI, not MSG in NYC. But it is reflective of what is seemingly an unlikely coalition that has taken shape to support the Trump-Vance ticket.
What is shaping up in a potential Trump victory is what is being billed as a coalition government. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) is expected to take a leading role in “Make America Healthy Again” (a.k.a.: MAHA) by rooting out corruption in corporate-government agencies that have witnessed a tragic decline in health outcomes in the U.S. for years.
As the tweets above by centi-billionaire Elon Musk is expected to root out government waste and corruption, which many may not realize has reached reportedly epic levels during the Biden-Harris years. Some of that has been exposed by House Republican committees, but there is much more that will likely need to be exposed as the kickbacks to the donor class, special interests and their political cronies has been massive under Democratic leadership in the last 3.5 years. Note that Musk has been a Democratic supporter and is a self-described moderate Democrat. RFK Jr. comes from a historic Democratic family.
4) Under the Biden-Harris regime, which appears to be facing a historic defeat based on early voting numbers, whistleblowers were threatened and punished. “Biden’s DOJ Seeks Revenge On IRS Whistleblowers” adding: “The filing suggests Biden and the DOJ are seeking revenge on the IRS whistleblowers who helped bring the Bidens family’s misconduct,” said the Federalist. Left-leaning PBS SoCal said: “Biden Admin Ignored Warnings About Migrant Child Labor …”
New York Times: Biden Admin Ignored Warnings About Migrant Child Labor, Punished Whistleblowers
Our guest Hannah Dreier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at “The New York Times,” has published a bombshell new investigation headlined “As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings.” It reports that the Biden administration has repeatedly ignored or missed warnings about a surge of migrant children as young as 12 working in factories across the United States under grueling and often dangerous working conditions in serious violation of child labor laws. “People were punished for bringing this to the attention of their supervisors,” says Dreier.
5) The truth is there, but it must be organized into articles like this one, where the wheat is separated from the chaff.
6) MHProNews has previously, and exclusively, reported that during the first Trump Administration, top antitrust attorneys at DOJ met to discuss antitrust action in the manufactured housing sector. Note that there has been no known push-back against those reports. To illustrate that point, consider this from Copilot on 10.28.2024
MHProNews has previously, and exclusively, reported that during the first Trump Administration, top antitrust attorneys at DOJ met to discuss antitrust action in the manufactured housing sector. Scan the internet and see if you can find any source that denies those off the record sourced claims from multiple sources.
I couldn’t find any sources that explicitly deny the claims made by MHProNews regarding the meeting of top antitrust attorneys at the DOJ during the first Trump Administration to discuss antitrust action in the manufactured housing sector. It seems that the information provided by MHProNews remains unchallenged in the public domain.
If you have any other questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask.
7) Mega-Podcaster Joe Rogan offered to have both Kamala Harris (D) and President Trump on. Harris declined. Trump accepted. On left-leaning YouTube alone, there are 33 million views as of 10.28.2024 for a nearly 3-hour discussion. A snippet is below.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I’m on TikTok now. And I’ve done really well. Have you seen the numbers? Billions of hits — it’s crazy.”
ROGAN: “I think young people are rejecting a lot of this woke bullshit. They’re tired of being yelled at and scolded.” pic.twitter.com/7eAexxQ6Tl
Per Larry O’Connor on WMAL this morning, Trump took no ‘bathroom breaks’ during that three-hour marathon.
8) This article opened with opening words in our headline from Goldstein and TAP’s article entitled:
A Crossroads on Corporate Power
Anyone who thinks that Trump doesn’t get that corporate power is either naive, improperly informed, or are deluding themselves or attempting to mislead others. When one of the richest people on earth, Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame and the owner of the left-leaning Washington Post personally decided to not allow an endorsement of Kamala Harris (D), that is just one more indicator that the tea leaves have shifted to Trump-Vance and Republicans.
9) As now-former lifetime Democrat RFK Jr. said in the video posted above, the Democratic Party has become the party of big corporate interests, of the military-industrial spy complex, of censorship and throttling of free speech, and embracing oddities like allowing men and women’s sports. Kennedy said Senator Ted Kennedy (MA-D) wrote Title IX to protect women’s sports, which now Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are in practice undoing. RFK Jr. opened his campaign about 15 months ago as a Democrat who ran against the very powers that have aligned themselves against Trump, Musk, former DNC co-chair Tulsi Gabbard (then HI-D), and RFK Jr. himself.
11) The only way that Democrats Kamala Harris and Tim Walz could win is by misleading enough people to vote for them. That is one of the reasons why MHProNews has pulled together an array of evidence, often from the left, the demonstrates that what they say and what they do are often quite different things.
13) It must not be thought that just because there are many strong signs for Trump and MAGA supporters. It is obviously important that Republican must keep and expand their House majority and need to take the Senate too. The polling shows all of those things are possible. The early voting indicates a potentially historic victory. That said, it is necessary for as many informed and motivated people who want to fix what has gone wrong in America to actually vote if you haven’t already done so. Vote, and as Musk and many others have said, you must then get your circle of influence to vote. The momentum is looking good, but it must be followed up by millions of more actual votes. Millions, including traditional Democratic base voters, are rejecting Harris and Walz and are embracing Trump-Vance and MAGA. See the related reports and videos to learn more. Be a part of history and vote wisely as if your future depends on it, because it does. ##
“The most successful people go right when everyone else goes left,” the Wall Street Journal stated on May 5, 2017,” the opening remark in an article linked here that probes insights from the now-late Sam Zell that quoted him saying: “When Everyone is Going Left, Look Right.”
Our son has grown quite a bit since this 12.2019 photo. All on Capitol Hill were welcoming and interested in our manufactured housing industry related concerns. But Congressman Al Green’s office was tremendous in their hospitality. Our son’s hand is on a package that included the Constitution of the United States, bottled water, and other goodies.
Tony earned a journalism scholarship and earned numerous awards in history and in manufactured housing.
For example, he earned the prestigious Lottinville Award in history from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied history and business management. He’s a managing member and co-founder of LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC, the parent company to MHProNews, and MHLivingNews.com.
This article reflects the LLC’s and/or the writer’s position and may or may not reflect the views of sponsors or supporters.
