It was fourth of july weekend of 2017 and i was six months into my activism of trying to warn america about the threat from internet platforms like facebook. And i realized i needed to find a way to go to washington, d. C. And didnt know anyone. And a friend said you need to meet barry so as it happened, he was in new england for the fourth of july weekend and so was i, so we met at a hotel in boston and at this point, im terrified because i had been watching all the things that happened in 2016 and im beginning to get the sense that facebook and other internet platforms are so big that theres nothing we can do and hes got the hair, the tie, the suit, he sits back and proceeds to explain we will control these guys by bringing back antitrust law. At that point i had spent the better part of four years and antitrust was defunct. He says no you just have to believe in miracles. He said we are going to get back and restore capitalism in america. Im looking at him and i think that he is from mars. Whats he talking about, there is no way but here we are three years and four months later and we are on the cusp of a new era of Economic Policy one where we get the chance to restore capitalism so ladies and gentlemen i want to present to you and introduce you to the incredible offer of liberty for all masters. Welcome to the show. Thank you, roger. Its great to be with you today. When i readhis book the thi that really grabs mend i think everyone should read this book is that it puts the notion of monoly into Historical Context context. Walk us through a little bitf that. Is a great question to start with. America was founded or americans founded the country to fight monopoly and the reason thedid it is they understood that it meant concentrated power and concentrated power mea you dont have rl liberty. It means youont have democracy. It means you are not in control of your own communities and families and lives and folks said we want to be masters of our own futures and theres only one way to do it andhat is to break the power of monopoly. Right at the beginning we created these amazing too and we used them remarkably well for 200 years. Sometimes people dont appreciate how amazing the american accomplishment of liberty is so thats what im trying to get people to understand is the political economy is all about power and either we are using it or someone is using it against us. Its time for us to get back to using it. So the context of this was monopoly was a core part of englands economic strategy. Is that what you are saying . You had the king with all his power and then the chartered corporations with all their power so wherever you look to use a hierarchy. If you or anybody in the world at that time unless you were in aristocratic the one person of that time, you were groveling all the time before somebody. People got tired of it and thats what america is about is that you dont have to bend down. You are your own boss and its a long conversation but somehow we kind of lost our way so now we wake up today and theres all these losses around us and we should be really honest about how dangerous this moment is. But power once you see it, you can master it. We have what we need to master. You said we are at a moment in time power is concrete but this isnt the first time. The country has had to battle against monopolies numerous times in its past and about concentrated power. Right away theres bankers trying to take over. Thats what Alexander Hilton was doing with his ban and then we master the speculators and the bkers and then we got not ju those that have enslaved millions and are trying to take er the whole country but then its theres never been a point in American History where we have been safe. Or where someone has tried to take our liberty away from us. But what we did for so long for 200 years is we always figured out how to beat the other folks and preserve our communities and liberty. This is a truly amazing moment. Its a time of great hope for us if we just learn how to deal with power again. We learned in the past how to deal with it. Walk us through some of the highlights. What have we learned that perhaps weve forgotten . That makes the present moment so dangerous . There is this idea that the government is our enemy, that the government tells us what to do. The government is us. Being a citizen means you are part of government and the people that work in government, they work for you. Now if you are not there every day watching over them they will take advantage of that. But the government is something we created to make ourselves free and goes back to the first law the northwest ordinance. It was a vision of an activist government that was used. America started off as an engineering societ society but s engineered by people saying we are going to build a particular kind of town and economy and citizens so the first thing we have to learn is the myth that the government is our enemy. We have to make the government or tool and use it every day. And there is no way around that so. People say we live today particularly for those of us in the San Francisco bay area surrounded by Silicon Valley, the words of Ronald Reagan ringing in our ears that the government is the problem, not the solution and yet your point is that is a statement relative to the founding philosophies in this country. The idea this is the great mass of your time of reagan and clinton and its important that which government is the enemy, that there is a market system that will dysfunction without any help. That was used to actually sort of pry our hands off ofhe levers of control and its one of the great mysteries of the time how we got suckered into this and after 2 years of being masters o our own destiny how did we let these pple track us the way they had. Its a complicated question that we lost control and here we are waking up today. Youve written about thi amazingly well. The power that is concentrated against us and the control over our communications. Ths the most terrifying thing. Its not how big the corporations are. Its that they control the ability t talk with one another and communicate with one another and so tts the most immediate threat and one day soon we will wonder how did this hpen. First we have to stand up and fight and thats what people are doing. That is what happened today. We will get to what happened today, but lets drill down on what happened in the 70s and use the context that came before it because what happened was a reaction to what came before and there was a long. Of prosperity that came were the world was relatively egalitarian. Is that correct . That is correct. What were the things that peoplthepeople who were trying e it, what was their story . One is not having huge concentrations of wealth. We aim to make sure nobody had more per. But there had to be a limit to how much any one person had. What we learned is we established a set of rules at the beginning to distribute wealth and opportunity and property. We forget re we are arguing whetheto cut people a 600dollar chec 600check or notn crisis. They cant pay their bills a the sickness has forced peoe to have this argument. At the binning we said everyone gets the property they need to be independent, to not have a boss. Its actually kind of interesting what that deal was. This is that first law that was signed by George Washington and its a vision ofn america that we need to reconnect with. Everybody is going to have a little citizen sized property ysized propertyyou can have a cd farm or shop, but youre going to be independent. That means as long as you keep your property you can be independent but some people are not made to be entrepreneurs. But theres going to be aot of different people who can hire you. You will always be able to go out d get a market wage ande able to do that becse there is no power over the employment market. Sohether you want to be an entrepreneur or whether you just want to go out and earn a wage, you will have the libty to do that and to earn a good living. Not a huge amnt of money but to just be free and have nobody tell you what to d nobody able to tell you what tohink. So the very first law said every ngle person but there is a twist to this, wel will get 160 acres of land. Every ngle person gets 160 acres of land. But the twist was i the first law everybody gets 160cres of land if you are black, you get 160 acres. And everybody gets a vote. Every man gets aote. That means if you used to b a slave i doesnt matter to District Attorney it doesnt matter what the color of your skin and what your condition used to be. And everyone has to live in a town and have a school in their town and theres not going to be any corporations. This is the law of the United States there shall be no corporations and there shall be no speculators in the system. All of the infrastructure is run to serve people. The only infrastructure people had back then was the post office and some people might call it utopian but it was an actual thing that we had, it was the actual vision of america and it was something that existed in this country for 200 years and its our fault today that we forget this. Its our fault we dont understand how radical our own past is and what we can do with those same ideas and law and principles today. So the organizing principle, where did that com from . Sometimes we follow these folks i think people are kind of settling in on this label of calling them the neoliberals. Their basic old idea was antimonopoly law and policy and system of liberty is here to serve us as citizens and to protect our liberty and our democracy. That was the fundamental idea. So that we can think freely and master all of the problems that we faced together using everybodys intelligence. But by the late 19th century, power was concentrated again, right . The waves really matter. Its not like weve never been here before. We have been here before. What the neoliberals did is Something Like what happened in the 19th century and they had this vision sometimes called laws a fair for neoliberalism and what we really want to promote here is let the bosses rule and concentrate power. Let them use their corporations to determine what happens. But they packaged it cleverly because the basic message was no, the market is the best way to allocate resources. What the neoliberals did in the late 70s and early 80s would have impressed orwell. They repackaged concentrated Corporate Power as liberty. They repackaged justice as efficiency. We could go back and look at what famous judges, legal scholars like robert bork and Richard Pozen are, go through and look at what they wrote, and it was doublespeak here in america and it was fantastically sophisticated. Thats why we got suckered into this because they came up with something that was truly it was drafted in the most awesomely confusing package and we thought as they took off regulations that were making us free, we thought they were making us free and so here we are a generation later and we realize wait, we needed those rules and regulations. We needed to use those tools in that way. But the neoliberal revolution the only real thing that ever happened in the United States was they succeeded because they took it and made it an intellectual coup. They changed the terminology through which we understand the world. Our challenge now is to awaken not just to the threat of google or facebook that to the real power that we have because we have more to do than just take care of google and facebook. So if you were to sit there and say the three, four or five things the neoliberals did they did the most harm and therefore we need to address, over 40 years there was a period of time where tremendous wealth was accumulated and weve built some giant businesses and fortunes so the community of people in Silicon Valley look at this as this is great this is the perfect time and yet the country as a whole is experiencing income inequality that may be unprecedented and the economy at the moment is struggling for reasons that are not related to the pandemic. So, walk us through what were the key changes that they made that took us from the system that proceeded to where we are today and the ones we need to pay most attention to to fix. The one i was mentioning before the markets are open, no one controls the market and what they said was a corporation is something that controls activities within a partisan political economy. And it says they blur the line whetr it is a market and hiding power but its how they labeled us, the american citizens and we were citizens. This goesack to the declaration of indepdence. There were these scientists in the archives because there was onelace whe jeffers had scratched out this were. He created ahole new sense of where we are. Its a type of intellectual knowing who we are. They scratched the wor out in the aitrust law and they wrote in the word consumer and said to the pointhe point is to promoter welfare it says you are a consumer and what we are going to do is take care of you and watch over your welfare by seeking efficiency. We are going to give you more stuff. You are no longer part of the system here. You dont have to worry your heads. We will take care of you just sit back. This sounds like some kind of heavy conspiracy idea about consumerism but they literally wrote in the word and changed the law so some ways the most subversive thing is changing how we see ourselves. Part of what we do right now is say reawaken what it means to be a citizen and someone who makes things and who says things and when you go to the market you want to make sure you have absolute freedom to sell your work and ideas and speak the words you want to speak and have nobody stand between you and your neighbors are the only people regulating this are you and your neighbor. So looking for the consumers that is going to freak them out completely. What else happened that would have bothered . And that concept they had no idea what that concept was. It would have been long since worked to them. Even some of the most conservative membe were afraid ofanks and large corporations. They fought again the british east india comnies. They understd that the corporation was dangerous and that if you dont take care o it and that they would strip mine the society and infrastructures and communities, destroy your wellbeing. Both modern liberism and modern conservatism, edmund burke, both smh and burke when they wrote their wds they were responding to the british east india company. So both of them said this is an evil use of power the other thing they would have said is how we allow corporations to rule us i cannot believe these people, these citizens. Dyou describ how bipartisan this was but yes it began under reagan and with republins. But democrats embraced it every bit as much. As radical as what reagan did and bill cnton was even more radical. We have these antitrust laws its at thdepartment of justice that ishen its ghting antimonoly, fighting monopoly and federal trade communication, the commission. They have specific types of laws, antitrust laws but we have all these other types. We have those that regulate the banks and the defense industrl se, laws and policies to regulate energy. Clinton and his team went to all of these and subverted them and said the peoples power, no more. Are going to give pow to the corpora masters. So the reaganeople started and the clinn people actually accelerated it. They made it vastly worse. It was one of the reasonshe American People got confused and didnt actually stand up is because wherever you look you look towards your liberals, conservatives, progressives, libertarians. Everyone is saying the same thing so the debate wasnt there to educate people. We are 40 years into this revolution and when you and i met honest to god it looked like it was permanent and there was no way to change yet something is happening since you and i met three and a half years ago because the house of representatives has published a report that takes antitrust to a level that has mint been seen and a long time and the department of justice filed a case against google today. There are 47 or 48 states plus a whole bunch of territories. Three and a half years ago you told me i shouldnt be afraid of miracles and tell me what happened. How do we get to hear and then tell us whats going on now. This is a great question because its not that any one person, it wasnt something senator warren did or senator sanders or any candidate did. The change took place when the American People were kind of waking up to this problem. You mentioned you have all these state attorneys general. All the states including dc and puerto rico opened an investigation. That is the people rising up at the local level to say this world is ours and we are going to use whatever we have at hand to fight them so the thing thats probably most important for people listening and to understand is in the house of representatives and the committee they came out with a report that didnt get a lot of press because its hard nowadays to hear new things but the report that came out and said they pose threats to the democracy and liberty and we will use every single tool we have at hand to deal with this interoperability, everything. And we are going to instruct every part of our government to do this and we are srting today. And it was bipartisan. Republicans and democrats in complete agreement on all of the key issues. So we are in a new world today. These corporationsre still there and have the same power they still had this morning when we woke up. Th difference is that we see them and whats dangerou about them. Weve said we are ownersf this country and of ouelves and we are going to take back full ownership of ourselves andur country. Why do we pick the big tech . This is something youve done such a great job of working on. Walmart is a problem, hospital monopolies or a problem, pharmaceutical monopolies are a huge problem. We woke up in masks. Thats all it costs to make an and 95 mask but we still dont have enough in 95 masks because the monopolists came in and took control of that technology and destroyed the capacity to make it so we look at everything wrong with our society today. All of the tension, everything we worry about made worse. Google, facebook and amazon its different because they control how we communicate. They move in between us as speakers in a way no corporation ever has. They are able to gather information so we have a lot to do. We have the tools to do it. But google, facebook and amazon pose threats that must be dealt with today. So, when you are looking at that what must be dealt with first, what is the first order . Its the way they manipulate information. We have people gathering news for us or we have our politicians trying to connect with people. We cant have private corporations manipulat