The wealthy, corporations and the GOP have worked hand-in-hand to rig the economy against average Americans and in their favor over the last 50 plus years. Monopolies dominate many industries and they are responsible for much of our inflation. This costs workers and the economy billions of dollars every year in needlessly high prices like the exorbitant costs for pharmaceuticals that no other country has to pay. Their greed has made them very wealthy and successful but at the expense of the rest of us. Too often our government doesn't serve or protect us, it only works for corporations and the wealthy. Biden is aggressively trying to change that, but corporate interests are entrenched in our agencies and laws and are fighting him, and us, every step of the way. Knowledge and outrage about this situation can help tilt this in our favor. Great Article!

A Pitched Battle on Corporate Power - Biden’s expansive executive order seeks to restore competition in the economy. It’s been a long, slow road to get the whole government on board—but there are some formidable gains.
The American Prospect https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-25-pitched-battle-corporate-power/

#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GreedKillsTheEconomy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#MonopoliesKillTheEconomy
#GOPHatesAvgAmericans

"On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden signed one of the most sweeping changes to domestic policy since FDR. It was not legislation: His signature climate and health law would take another year to gestate. This was a request that the government get into the business of fostering competition in the U.S. economy again.

Flanked by Cabinet officials and agency heads, Biden condemned Robert Bork’s pro-corporate legal revolution in the 1980s, which destroyed antitrust, leading to concentrated markets, raised prices, suppressed wages, stifled innovation, weakened growth, and robbing citizens of the liberty to pursue their talents. Competition policy, Biden said, “is how we ensure that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.”

The executive order outlines a whopping 72 different actions, but with a coherent objective. It seeks to revert government’s role back to that of the Progressive and New Deal eras. Breaking up monopolies was a priority then, complemented by numerous other initiatives—smarter military procurement, common-carrier requirements, banking regulations, public options—that centered competition as a counterweight to the industrial leviathan.

It’s been a year and a half since Biden signed the executive order; its architect, Tim Wu, has since rotated out of government. Not all of the 72 actions have been completed, though many have. Some were instituted rapidly; others have been agonizing. Some agencies have taken the president’s urging to heart; others haven’t. But the new mindset is apparent.

Seventeen federal agencies are named specifically, tasked with writing rules, tightening guidelines, and ramping up enforcement.
...
The small team that envisioned and executed the competition order put the weight of the presidency behind it, delivering a loud message to return to the fight against concentrations of power. It’s alarming and maybe a little disconcerting that you have to use a high-level form of peer pressure to flip the ship of state. But that battleship is starting to change course.
...
THE EXECUTIVE ORDER’S PREAMBLE VALIDATES Khan and Kanter’s aggressive perspective on competition policy, hinting at the practices of previous reform eras. For example, antitrust enforcement since the Bork revolution of the 1980s has relied solely on one criterion: Does an anti-competitive action explicitly harm consumer welfare, defined as higher prices. But the preamble to Biden’s order stresses the plight of workers in a concentrated economy, which impedes the ability “to bargain for higher wages and better work conditions.” Though the consequences of too few buyers in an economy (monopsony) had been the subject of numerous studies in recent years, presidential-level discussion of monopsony and monopoly in the same breath was novel.
...
Perhaps the most quietly radical passage of the preamble states that “the United States retains the authority to challenge transactions whose previous consummation was in violation” of the antitrust laws, citing the Standard Oil breakup of 1911 as an example. Retroactive merger review had essentially been abandoned since the Microsoft case in the late 1990s. “We wanted to bring it back to the mainstream of conversation,” Wu said."