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 manipulating. We have to have this information problem in our society its like where did that come from . Theres always been this information but it was never wholesale the way that it is today. How is it that the russians and all the other disinformation spreaders an propandists how is it that they get eir word out, through google and cebook. Its because the Business Model is flawed and designed to manipulate people. So that is what iso terrifying is the ability to actually prevents from being able to communicate theay we expect and need to in a democracy. The thing that changed i the last three and a half yrs, how is it that we got congress, ich i think was less well prepared for the 2018 hearings with marc zkerberg than they are now. What was it that drove that a where does it go from here, well it doesnt lk like because youve got this case. How do we go from zero to 10. What happened is they went out and educated themselves and stop bickering for long enough to sit in a room together and learn about the problem and Work Together to use the same language to understand the problem. There were some heroes here and its important in understanding there are heroes in our midst. David ran that committee and is a true American Hero and he saw this problem and ive been working with the chair man for five or six years he always had the power to do this beginning in 2018 when the democrats took the house. Hes seen this man he and hesd to do something about it. He created a discussion that was both bipartisan and respectful and that educated people to the nature of the problem and he had help from a terrific staff, people including the slave bond so what is the lesson here, the lesson is if you are republican, dont vilify the democrats and if you are democrat dont vilify the republicans. We are all in this together. We will argue about other things but lets not argue about whether to have democracy or not. So is thisoing to get fixed overnight or is the Congress Going to screw this up, the departnt of justice, whats going to happen . Its notp to congress, its up to us. If we keep getting distracted and keep letting crazy talkers on tv distract usnd we dont spend our time saying to our ngressmen and state attorneys general and mayors and Public Utility Commission weve got to beat these monopolists then yes if we lose our demoacy its on us. Lets say we keep the pressure on. How long does it take before Something Really happens and where would that leave us . We are at the point now google and amazon and facebook they know they can turn people on and off. St as an example amazon five years ago were having a beef with a big book publisher who publishes important books and they just shut him off, they turned the switch and shut him off and said youre not selling any books. That is half the busins for many ofhe authors that he handles, he is 90 , 100 of their business. All the money went away. They were silenced overnight be that was five years ago. Google and facebook they can do that with reporters, policy wonks, policymakers. If we dont sh forward every dayt this point to master this problem, they will star reaching in and the quiet days and reaching their hands around peoples throats and making people afraid and start sort of separating people out. Right now weve got all the members of the Correctional Committee together providing stngth for one another. Give them time and they will start pulling people apart, prying people apart. This time when we fall this is what is different this time if we fall, theres never going to be an opportunity to stand it back up. So what are the priorities when people talk about antitrust they almost reflexively go to the notion of breaking companies up and we have an audience question about that and specifically in the context of tac and im curious as to whether when you are thinking abouthis what are the other tools in the tool chest that we want to make sure we use besides breaking it up and where does that fit relative to the priorities . Hats a great question because in order to get attention you say weve got to break these people up but it shows strength and i shows the size matters but in some cases, this is true of the Digital Economy in certain cases you may have a network and Network Effects are real. This is true with the railroad and the telegraph and the telephone and its true today with google, facebook and amazon. Certain things are going to be big and if something needs to be big to function then what we want to do is use, we want to neutralize it. We have a whole variety of tools and it means you have to treat everybody the same. Its the rule of law and everyone gets the same treatment, everyone gets the same prices. You get carried from one place to another and everyone is equal. It sounds technical but it just ans you are equal with the next pern. That might be a blionaire and your job may be sweeping t halls in the high school. So what about the wle issue of youown products because one of the challenges of these folks is that they run marketplaces and without exception they have products available in the marketplaces which they give preference to, so i would think that would be an important place. That is an iortant point because for amazon they sell books but often publish books. They sell batteries but also they make batteries. Google carries othereoples recommendaons and services but they also provide services. Anody we all know its common sense that tells us if you control the access to the buyer youre going to put your product first because you want to make mo money off of it so youre going toake the other persons product an hide it or put it a little bit further behind. So what do we do about that . This goes back to the civil war at the federal level if you control Something Really important, go for vertical integration that means if you are a banker all you do is provide credit. You provide banking services. You move people but you are not going to manufacture machine. Youre not going to have farms. Your job i just to move peoe to provide services and. How about the issue that w see commonly fro these companies where th use the data, the peoe on the system to then compete againsthe peoplpeoplein their system. The outrageousness of their actions. Lets be blunt its like google and facebook but especially amazon. A large part of their Business Model this theft. What they do is they take the information that they gather and they steal other peoples businesses. This is america. We want the entrepreneur to thrive. People spend their whole lives building something up and then amazon and google look at that and say they cant get to market without so im going to go out and im going to exploit that fact and steel their business for myself. It happens with startups. Obviously board dash have inserted themselves between restaurants and other Food Service Providers and their customers and effectively have taken control of the economics of that relationship just as google and facebook have done with newspapers and other forms of journalism. So there is a strategy. So, is there something that needs to be done about finance and Venture Capital that sit there and respect the fact that people who have built Something Real in the real world can be protected and can insert between the physical world and the customer . Part of this is antitrust and this is something going back to 2008 and 2009, going back to when Bernie Sanders really became Bernie Sanders as we know him over the last decade theres been a focus on wall street a the banks. Theres lot of money and power there but what is tt tool a banker in a nice sui they are not going to be, they need a corporation to do that. They need some way of getting their hands around your life, thats the corporation so antitrust going back to the beginning its the first line of defense against the financier banker runng the world because the corporation is what gives the banker the powero get into your life, to take ur house om you. Without you, they cant do that so thats why its so fundamental because it protects us against. When you think about the president ial election coming up in two wks, weve got very different candidates running and yet it is the Trump Justice Department that initiated against google and its the democratic cmittee that went against the companies t weeks ago so does it matter who gets elected and if so in what way will it matte i run a nonprofit organization. Does matter and i think i can say safely the Trump Administration has had for years power and the only reason we brought the case today is because they got rolled by the states. It isnt because they e particularly competent. There was a lot of energy they said we have a problem with these big tech companies. But ey were very slow to move and its not like they are going to follow up with this, so judging by what we have seen t last four years, i wouldnt expecthe administration to push this the way it needs to b pushed. Now the Biden Administration i think the k thing for people to understand is today once they stood up even if there is a fference between the Biden Administration or trump adminiration we can do this without the ainistration. We have the power to roll this all the way to the goal line without the person in t white house being with us. Talk about how that works because in california we have a referendum on the ballot to put teeth into the computer privacy act which is a different domain entirely and so one of the questions that came from an audience member is going at this issue because iisnt the whole answer. You make the point states have a lot ofower in antitrust and some have a lot of power in privacy and every state has Consumer Protection capabilities, so when you think out this, how do things like section 0 of the communations act which is the safe harbor that shelter the internet platforms from litigation and frankly from responsibility for the harms they caused, how do things like that get taken care of . Because they are clearly outsi of the domain of antitrustut not outside of the domains of your expertise. One little bit of history thats important for folks to know is back in 1913, 1914 and of the era, the congress of the United States anthe Bush Administration and Louis Brandeis said we he to make sure that antitrust power is distributed everywre in america. So they passed the law that said every state in america has the same power as the federal government so that way the powerfu who coand capture control over washington could subvert the government and we would still have all these other governments. Every state we would have the govement in every state that we could use, so thats acally democracy in action and so we should remember that ery state is as powerful when it comes to this they just usually dont have the same resources. But in terms of privacy, california privacy. It like were having these parallel debates about antitrust, antimonopoly and privacy. When we bring these conversation together, we can actual make these very powerful tools that we have both privy tools and antimonopoly tools and we can work them gether to set up a privacy system that promos and breaks power. You can use power in a way that creates privacy. Is it not true we can also use safety. If you think about it, Silicon Valley engineers are the only engineers in the economy who are protected from the consequences of their mistakes. Write if you are a chemical engineer and there is a spill, you and your firm are responsible. If you are a Building Contractor or building engineer and your building falls down or hurt somebody, you are accountable. If your Pharmaceutical Company your accountableor any harm. This is a unique place and so the notion we are gog to not just change the economic structure with antitrust and the personal rights structure with privacy but also to think about safety. One of the questions that came in that i want to bring up because the person asks are we talking here about socialism or a return to capitalism, because if i underand the book properly, monopolys not pitalism. It is a thing that sor of it can lead to monopoly that onc you get to the monopy that is no lger capitalism. Its historically associated with democracy. That is what i took out of the book. What we have today is something that america looks more and more like theoviet union or like china under the communist party rule. You have a couple of extremely powerful corporations that control the growing portions of the politilconomy and destroy the ability of investors to get a fair return, entrepreneurs to build something new. This is absolutely capitalm and socialism usually involves the state control. Its like youve got the state over here and a privat corporation overere but you have a toothat keeps them apart. We dont want them joining. The tool that kes them apart and you have a tl to keep both of them small so the power end up in our hands and we are in control of our lives and our communities and our businesses and our investments and our ideas. Thats a ptty good world we used to have and we could have it again. Its capitalism, its liberty but its not through state control. Another one of the Great Questions here is okay, how do help, what are we all supposed to do right n . Who do we put pressure on, is it politicians, companies, what can each person on this lifestream do if they want to be part of seeing this reform take place . I will go back to the mid1990s. Microsoft is going to take over the entire internet using sort of leveraging with its control of the personal computer and the administration didnt want to do anything about it. They didnt want to get into it. They wanted the opposite. I scratch your back you scratch mine. I give you a monopoly, you kick back some money. Thats the way that it worked in the Clinton Administration and then an attorne in attorney genn iowa, tom miller small towns and riverboats and we say you know what we are not going to live under this monopoly of microsoft. So, they started and said we are going to use this tool, this power to break the biggest corporation of that time and they got a few other state agencies to go along and they started an investigation and forced the Clinton Administration to dohat. They are going to mak it hapn so people can do this an every state of the union its all the power they have over t utilities. Everyone is ripping you off today. Its because we are not usi our local governments, state governments and federal governments keep us freend safe. Part of this is recognizing the trap so if you are on the school board, google is going to offer an amazing meal on chrome books. The trick is to recognize t price that you are paying is not just the upfront peace its all the downstream damage that comes from these products what you areoing if you are on the school board it is a great example. Aantastic example if youre on the school board and they say we have a bunch of chrome books. This is a terrible te right now with covid. Its like we have this crisis and so take thi laptop and use it and educate yourself,ut what they are doing is spying o your kids, studying your ks from the get go fromhe time they are fe, the time they are seven so they knowow to manipula your kids Going Forward forever more. And microsoft does the se thing because they have all the chilens games and capture em all the way up tough linked in. So everybody wants to be part of that same economy. They get involved at every level and we have to make some tradoffs. We have to be wling to pay a little bit more for the high stream down cost o turning over the liberty tthese people. And in exchange for paying a little bit more now sometimes we will have demracy and a vce and in the long run a much more prosperous economy in which we get more for less
vimarsana.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.