Project 2025’s Federal Trade Commission Cleanser

Enforcers for the Bigot Agenda

Aug 26, 2024

In recent years monopolies and oligopolies have used their power to abuse employees, spy on customers, crush would-be competitors, and stifle innovation. What’s worse is that people at the top of the economic pile have come to think this sort of behavior is part of the natural order of things.

The $82 in added service fees I paid to see a concert this month, the man who Disney tried to stop from suing over willful food poisoning because he signed an agreement for their streaming service, and the millions of Americans buying bogus dietary supplements are all part of this commercial landscape.

So, if I had to nominate a federal agency that’s pushing hardest to benefit the average American, I'd pick the Federal Trade Commission. This is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to changing corporate behavior.

The big time billionaires of America know this, which is why the effort to get FTC Chair Lina Khan fired is coming from both sides of the aisle. Lawyers for the Kroger grocery chain are pursuing a legal strategy aiming to get the agency’s existence declared unconstitutional.

While corporate America is antagonistic toward Khan and the FTC, Congress members from both sides of the aisle count themselves as supporters of the agency.

For the first time in half a century, a federal agency tasked with enforcing civil antitrust law and promoting consumer protection is actually doing its job. The processes required to accomplish busting monopolies and keeping corporations honest are achingly slow; many cases come up against armies of high priced lawyers capable of killing the best-intentioned action with a thousand cuts.

None-the-less, the FTC has ruled to ban virtually all non-compete agreements for non-senior executive employees. This far, the courts have ruled in its favor. Thirty million people are getting the opportunity to leave abusive work environments, seek higher pay or benefits, or escape unsafe working conditions.

So far this year, the FTC has:

challenged the Kroger-Albertsons merger, arguing it would drive up grocery and pharmacy prices, worsen service and lower wages and working conditions.
released a report that found higher profit margins as a driver of inflation for grocery prices.
announced a probe of grocery prices looking for anti-competitive behavior and price gouging at chain supermarkets

"The bipartisan concern that we see about monopoly power, the way we see concern about people's data being harvested and surveilled, the way we see concern about financialization of health care -- these are all issues that I think will continue to attract concern no matter who's in this job," Lina Khan said in a recent interview with ABC News.

***

Federal Trade Commission. Author: Adam Candeub*

The Project 2025 chapter on the Federal Trade Commission posits that this corporate bigness is bad for different reasons, namely the power they can exert on society and morality. Unlike other agencies, the FTC regulatory scope would be expanded to target corporations implementing socially progressive policies, such as DEI initiatives and climate mitigation efforts.

“Unless conservatives take a firm hand to the bureaucracy and marshal its power to defend a freedom-promoting agenda, nothing will stop the bureaucracy’s anti-free market, leftist march.”

P2025’s rationale for such an expansion is their claim “that the authors of our antitrust laws did not intend this purely economic understanding of competitive markets—and the normative assumptions that undergird it—to guide their legislation.”

Conservative economic North Star Milton Freeman is quoted as saying that the only social obligation of businesses involves the tools and tactics necessary to increase sales and profits.

Corporate managers are accused of appropriating shareholder wealth to further their personal political beliefs, pursuing a “socially responsible” or “moral” agenda. The roadmap for the next conservative (Trump) administration says “bah humbug” to all that stuff.

State Attorney Generals would be delegated to handling the actual business of tackling economic monopolies, meaning that there could be little enforcement related to market or vertical concentration. At this point, State AGs from Republican-dominated states are in the majority, and are already being used as a tool in the culture wars.

Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation about the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) as the legal attack dogs of the right, funded by donors who overlap with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

But RAGA AGs are also committed to doing the dirty work for every other hellish Republican policy idea, from destroying the environment to gutting voting rights to undermining vaccines, because apparently states need “defending” from science, facts, and public health.

***

…There are 10 state AG elections this November, including absolutely critical races in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, as well as important races in Indiana, Missouri, and West Virginia, where voting for the RAGA AG could lead to the criminalization of pregnant people seeking reproductive care even in other states.

Having the States pursue monopolization would seem to fly in the face of the constitutional mandate (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3) for congress to regulate interstate trade, but for a ruling class bent on restoring “state’s rights” and a bribable Supreme Court this won’t be a problem.

Moreover, the Biden administration’s FTC has already been working with states in lawsuits against Amazon and Facebook. But the suits are focused on economic matters, not the building of a propaganda platform.

Big tech’s concentration of power is worthy of federal attention, according to the document, in that its existence outside the normal parameters of economic behavior “facilitates collusion between government and private actors, undermining the rule of law.”

And, if the enforcement of antitrust laws cannot be relegated entirely to the Department of Justice by eliminating the FTC, then a “careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement” is called for.

The role of the Federal Trade Commission does cause some division among conservatives, but the direction P2025 points to would be its use as a legal cudgel to fight the “woke” agenda.

(*) Adam Candeub is a professor of law at Michigan State University whose research focuses on telecommunication, antitrust, and Internet issues. He was an acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Deputy Associate Attorney General at the Justice Department for the Trump Administration.

***

The Deep History of the Radical Right’s (No Longer) Stealth Plan for America by Jim Miller at The Jumping Off Place (I’ll repost it here later today) is a must read.

***

Tomorrow: Project 2025 as a brand (Conclusion of this series)

Previously:

***

Monday News You Should Read

***

The DNC asked: What if men led with empathy? by The 19th, via Daily Kos

The portrayal of manhood on stage in Chicago this week was a marked departure from the one conveyed when Republicans met last month for their convention. Walz on Wednesday both gave a football metaphor when talking about the state of the race and spoke emotionally about the formation of his family and his pride in them. His son, Gus, stood in the audience, tearing up and pointing at the stage while saying, “That’s my dad.”
In Milwaukee last month, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump walked out to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” retired professional wrestler Hulk Hogan ripped off a muscle shirt to reveal a Trump-Vance tank top, and Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White spoke about the candidates as fighters. The RNC was about demonstrations of physical strength and masculine prowess. The speakers who softened the images of the men on stage were the women in their families or those who worked alongside them.
For Democrats in Chicago, on the other hand, it was Josh Zurawski who became emotional on stage as he and his wife, Amanda Zurawski, told their personal story about losing a pregnancy and not being able to easily access abortion. Ashley Biden introduced her father, President Joe Biden, as the “OG girl dad.” Walz shared a video clip of his children giving him bunny ears on national television the first night, saying they keep him humble. A video produced by Cole Emhoff to introduce his father and Harris’ husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, noted how he left his law practice to support her. Cole Emhoff narrates that he was “so proud to watch him do it, an example of true partnership.” The video was co-produced by his mother—Emhoff’s ex-wife.

***

Mainstream media on a path to irrelevance by Marc Jacob at Stop The Presses

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not ready to write an obituary for mainstream media. Viewership of the networks’ nightly news broadcasts has been steady in recent years. And the New York Times has more than 10 million subscribers. Legacy news outlets are still hugely influential, though not as much as they may think they are.
I’m also not saying it’s a good thing for politicians to bypass interviews and news conferences with big news outlets. I understand politicians’ wariness, given the clickbait focus of some journalists, but it’s important for candidates to face hard questions.
What I am saying is that mainstream news outlets should be alarmed by the trends. In 1976, 72% of Americans trusted mass media to fairly report the news; 32% feel that way today. While the right wing dismisses mainstream journalism as “fake news,” many of us criticize the media for kowtowing to the “fake news” crowd and refusing to acknowledge the threat it poses.

***

Is Your Water Bottle Really Made From Recycled Plastic? Via The New York Times

Eastman and other chemical recyclers, like Exxon Mobil, use this system to allow its mix of recycled and virgin plastics to be certified as recycled. Under this system, Eastman says it tallies the building-block molecules it produces from recycling plastic and lists them in a materials inventory. It gets a recycling credit for those molecules and, under the mass balance protocol, it can then assign the credit to any number of products made by the company. The broken down recycled waste products go “into a very wide spectrum of Eastman polymer products,” Mr. Pierce said. “It’s not just one product that gets the content.”
But the system allows the company to assign all or most of the credits to a single product, as long as the tally of the molecules necessary to make that product matches — or “balances” — the tally of recycled molecules on its inventory. So the company can market Tritan Renew as “up to 50 percent recycled plastic,” even if it has little recycled material in it because something it manufactured contained those recycled chemical building blocks.
And when a product is marketed as recycled or sustainable, it can command a higher price.

Words & Deeds

Discussion about this post