It's great to welcome back to the program, Thom Hartmann, who's the host of the Thom
Hartmann program and also author of the new book The Hidden History of Monopoly's How
Big Business Destroyed the American Dream.
Tom, as always, great to see you.
Thank you, David.
The book has a forward by Ralph Nader two, which is the forward is almost worth the cost
of the book.
That is I. I've actually spoken to Ralph Nader about.
About this issue and made many people I mean, maybe a good place to start is I don't know
that everybody understands how far back monopolies and monopolistic behavior by firms in the
United States goes.
You talk about it dating all the way back to the revolution, which may surprise some
people.
Yeah.
The Boston Tea Party was a revolt against a monopolistic company.
The East India Company was the largest monopoly in the world at the time.
They had monopolized tea in the United States along with a lot of other things.
It was illegal to manufacture fine clothing in the United States, for example, certain
types of weaponry, certain certain types of furniture.
They all had to be manufactured in England and imported via the East India Company.
And so when the depression or recession of 1770 is the t.k, the East India Company petitioned
the British government for basically some cash.
They were stretched and the British government said, we'll give you a refund on millions
of dollars or the tea that you've got in today's dollars that you have in an inventory, because
they back then they paid tax when they received the tea from India, not when they sold it.
And so the East India come to get this huge multi-million dollar tax rebate that allowed
them to drop their price on T into the United States and compete with the with the American
Smugglers', which made the American people just furious.
And thus the Tea Party in our nation was birthed in a revolt against corporate monopoly.
When we think about the different times in American history where there's been more of
a focus on trust busting and going after monopolies, are there certain industries that have regularly
sort of skirted the the scrutiny that maybe they deserve?
Well, there are some industries that have been better at it than others, and that tends
to have to do with how much political power they have, which is usually a consequence
of either financial power or essential industry banks or pharmaceutical companies, for example.
But, you know, the simple reality is that, you know, just like cancer in the body is
when one cell decides I'm going to take over the entire body and starts growing and growing
and growing without limit and redirecting all the resources of the body to itself until
it ultimately kills the body.
Monopoly is cancer within capitalism, and our bodies have an immune system that we're
constantly every day where our bodies are producing cancerous cells in our immune system
is gobbling them up.
This is just a normal part of biology.
Well, similarly, you know, we developed an immune system and capitalism is really in
its modern form.
Only about three hundred years old.
And back in the nineteen eighties here in the United States, we developed an immune
system following on what had been done in Europe just before, too.
That cancer of monopoly, which was the Sherman Antitrust Act, and then later in the nineteen
thirties, the Clayton Antitrust Act and then the 1956 Antitrust Act or Antimonopoly Law.
And you know, it worked, too, worked fairly well.
But the problem was in nineteen eighty two, nineteen eighty three, Ronald Reagan ordered
the Justice Department, the S.E.C. and the Commerce Department to stop enforcing those
laws.
And that led to this explosion of consolidation, the mergers and acquisition mania, those people
old enough to remember it.
It was a wild time.
Michael Milken.
And, you know, greed is good.
And all this stuff and all these companies being jammed together and the workers being
fired, the pension funds, funds being stolen.
Most people remember the airlines DPW day and Easter.
And then, you know, the guy got it this way.
But it happened in every sector of American business.
And now here, 40 years later, there is not literally not one single industrial sector
or major sector of the American economy left that is not dominated by three to five large
companies that control 60 to 80 percent of the total revenue and operate as functionally
as a monopoly.
Technically, you'd call it an oligopoly as a result of this.
The average American family is paying about five thousand dollars a year more for the
goods and services that they buy than they would if we didn't have a monopoly.
Internet service, for example, in Europe is typically twenty five to thirty dollars a
month for one gigabyte.
Up and down here in the United States, you pay two to three times that because we've
got just a handful of Internet service providers.
Now, what I wanted to ask about the 5000, because they think that that's interesting.
So when you write in the book.
That the monopoly in the United States essentially expands or increases the amount that the average
family spends on a yearly basis by five thousand dollars, and what you're talking about, there
would be well, on Internet, it might be an additional sixty dollars a month, times 12.
Then you've got 720.
What what are the other areas?
Where is it on services, pharmaceuticals.
You know, basically everything except cheap junk from China.
And and and what the cheap junk from China has succeeded in doing is running out of business.
Literally thousands of American American companies know since the 1980s we've been losing, you
know, on average seven, eight hundred factories a year, in some cases thousands of factories
a year.
We were up to losing 5000 factories a year.
You know, after the after signing NAFTA and and each one of those factories represents
hundreds to thousands, in some cases even tens of thousands of jobs, according to the
Commerce Department.
According to our official statistics, we've lost millions of jobs to to to this kind of
monopolistic behavior.
Only in this case, the monopoly is another country, you know.
And, you know, a little help from Wal-Mart and their friends.
So, you know, it's right across the board.
David, how has the when you look at the lack of appetite to really deal with this in the
United States dating back for some time?
You talked about Ronald Reagan.
You've talked about it in the 18th century.
Is it as simple as a sort of version of regulatory capture and a calculation from those in power
that this is just not where the regulatory oversight is?
What an area that they want to focus?
Or is there more to it than that?
Well, by and large, that's how it's played out.
But they're there, as usual.
The story is a little more complicated and a little seamy or weirder.
You know, back in the 1960s, Milton Friedman was teaching at the University of Chicago
and or was at the University of Chicago.
And one of his students, Robert Bork, got all inflamed about this idea, all the hair
on fire, about this idea that he had learned from Milton Friedman that that we shouldn't.
Traditionally, America had viewed a corporation as having multiple constituencies.
A corporation had a responsibility to the community in which it operated to not mistreat
that community or pollute to its employees, to pay them well and serve them to its customers,
to make sure its customers weren't ripped off or burned to the institution of the corporation
itself and to its shareholders and senior management.
And Bork came along and said, all that is nonsense.
You guys have complicated this way too much.
It's really simple.
If consumers pay less, then it's not a monopoly.
And, you know, people thought he was a crackpot 60s, but he persisted.
He wrote a book about it.
He testified to Congress.
He engaged a multi-year major lobbying campaign.
And by the time Reagan tried to put him on the Supreme Court and we discovered that he
would not only was a crackpot, but also a racist and a homophobe.
By that time, the Supreme Court in the 1970s, in a case called GTP, Silvania had concluded
that Bork was right and that, you know, and that Reagan was right and that we're going
to set all this stuff aside and we're only going to enforce the antimonopoly laws based
on whether prices are going up for consumers.
Of course, since then, prices have caught up on consumers tremendously.
But, you know, basically the enforcement was killed.
So we're back right now where we were in nineteen hundred.
You know, and we're faced with a situation like the one that Teddy Roosevelt and William
Howard Taft took out.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that that the Corona virus pandemic has really
accelerated the consolidation of market share for the players that were already some of
the biggest players.
I mean, we're seeing with Amazon, Wal-Mart, places that immediately scaled up, particularly
those that are that that use if they're using these third party sprinter vans to deliver
stuff, that is a sign, if you work backwards, that those are the the players that are increasing
market share.
And I just don't think we would need a total rethink of the economy to prevent that from
naturally happening in a situation like the one we find ourselves in.
Right.
I mean it from my perspective.
What the virus exposed was that a bunch of the economy is significantly more fragile
than what we like to believe on a day to day basis.
And as soon as that became clear, those that were positioned to seize on the opportunity
have done so.
Yeah.
I mean, the reason why so many AIDS patients died of Kaposi's sarcoma a cancer is because
their immune system is been shut down and, you know, so cancer could grow in the body.
The reason why Monopoly has now seized America and our economy is being run by a couple of
hundred billionaires is because that is because Ronald Reagan stripped away our immune system.
He gave us the business equivalent of AIDS.
And and, you know, our country is suffering terribly for it.
We've got to bring back that immune system.
We've got to be pushing back against the cancer monopoly.
So what's the infrastructure that you think needs needs to be put in place?
Is it as simple as just enforcing what is on the books?
Or do we actually need a new framework in which we are going to approach this issue?
Well, as is so often the case with with, you know, proper structural problems in modern
America, so much of this goes back to the Supreme Court.
You know, my last book was all about that and actually the book before last.
And, you know, between the court and 78, 76 and 78, giving billionaires and corporations
the right to own politicians and entire political parties and calling it free speech, combined
with the G.T.
Silvania case, where the court read, you know, re understood explicit monopoly laws, the
antimonopoly laws explicitly talk about these multiple constituencies and how you determine,
you know, everything.
And the cautious at all.
You know, we're gonna draw all that and go with Robert Bork.
You know, we need legislation that includes a court stripping provision, which I write
about my Supreme Court that overturns that Supreme Court decision and the ones that have
followed and that reregulate American business in a way that prevents it from being cancerous.
If you have the idea that if Joe Biden wins in November and put somebody like Elizabeth
Warren, who has spoken about the issue of Monopoly as secretary of commerce, for example,
or in some regulatory role, is it naive to think that that alone might make a difference?
Like, is this just way bigger than that?
I think that America is poised on the edge of the possibility of a another great renewal.
It seems like roughly every 80 years we go through a crisis.
And then as we come out of the crisis, on the back end weeks, we experience a renewal
explosion, the crisis of 1770 that led to the American Revolution and the crisis of
the Civil War and the oligarchy in the south.
And that led to the civil war, but also led to all the changes the post civil war changes,
very positive changes.
You had the great crash of 1929, the Republican Great Depression that led to the New Deal
and all those changes.
You know, a smaller crisis, the assassination of Jack Kennedy led to Medicare, Medicaid,
Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, etc..
And I think that the crisis of the Trump presidency and this giant drifter on job, the billionaires
have been running on us has set the stage for a renewal.
The question is, No.
One, can we get a Democrat elected now?
Or as Trump so corrupted Americans, America's electoral systems that that he's going to
turn us into?
You know, Trump is.
And number two, if we do get a Democratic administration, whether they will have the
vision and the boldness to go ahead.
If if Elizabeth Warren is at the helm or is has a substantial say in it, wherever that
may be and however it may play out, I'm very enthusiastic and very excited and very hopeful.
If she gets marginalized and it becomes, you know, basically a reinvention of the Clinton
and Obama presidencies, that we're deeply in the pockets of large corporations, then,
you know, I'm I'm concerned.
But that's a that's a debate and a discussion we can have once we once we put our you know,
our house is on fire right now.
You're out.
Yeah.
First, you put the fire out before you figure out how to do how to fix what what what's
been burned.
Let's not discuss how to paint the rooms.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
The searching for that analogy.
And you found it less.
The last thing on this.
There's an entire political movement in the United States which heavily fetishizes the
idea of eliminating regulation, which is hampering and restricting business, et cetera, et cetera.
How much of this is going to be an uphill battle until that starts to be dealt with
as well?
Well, this is where we've got a big job to do in educating the American people, because
the simple fact of the matter is that there is only one force on Earth that can constrain
or restrain a billion dollar corporation when it wants to pollute the water, put poison
in the air, kill people with crappy products, oppress workers and rip off their employees.
There's only literally one power on Earth that can fight back against that.
And that's government.
And, you know, the right wing billionaires, you know, the Koch brothers and their buddies
back in the day knew that.
They understood that.
When their boy, Ronald Reagan, got elected, they, you know, in his first inaugural address,
in his four minutes after he was sworn into office, his first speech, he said government
is not the solution to problem.
Government is the problem.
He laid the he set the table for this destruction of America.
That's been going on for 40 years.
And and, you know, it is some serious repair work that needs to be done.
But I think if enough people wake up and realize how badly we have been harmed by this bizarre
small government ideology that was only promoted over these 40 years by people who simply wanted
to be able to pollute and poison and rip off it with impunity, then I think that there's
some considerable hope.
The book is The Hidden History of Monopoly's How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream?
We've been speaking with the book's author, Thom Hartmann.
Tom, it's always so good to talk to you.
Thank you, David.
It's always not our pleasure to be on.