Monopolization

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This week, we take a hard look at corporate monopolization and how Donald Trump's administration is selling America to big business to line his own pockets. How does it affect our economy, how does it affect our society, and how does it affect your life? Let's find out.

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Transcript

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ANNA

Here we go. Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state government that truly represents the needs of the 7 million residents who live here. And today we are going to be joined by an amazing special guest. We're going to be talking about the monopolization of our White House and our economy. We're going to be talking about cryptocurrency, big tech and AI. We will also be talking about what is happening at the state level to try and combat some of these forces. We will be talking about the enshittification of the United States generally and all of that. We will have David Dayen from the American Prospect with us. But before we do, I am going to have my two illustrious co-hosts introduce themselves. I will start with Jonathan.

JONATHAN

Hello, Jonathan Cohen, he/him/his - I've been active and progressive issue in electoral politics here in Massachusetts for over a decade. And joining from Boston in the South End.

ANNA

Thank you.

JORDAN

And Jordan, Jordan Berg Powers, he/him, and I am in Worcester, Massachusetts and I love talking about the enshittification of the economy. Get on my tirade. And I've been working in and around policy and politics for over 10 years.

ANNA

And I am Anna Callahan, she/her, coming at you from Medford, where I am a city councilor and I've been doing a lot of work - work at the local level but around the country. And today I'm so excited to introduce, or have him introduce himself, our guest, David Dayen from the American Prospect. If you want to talk a little bit about what you do and some of your books and research.

DAVID

Sure. Thanks for having me on. I'm Dave Dayen. I'm the executive editor of the American Prospect. More important, I went to the same high school as Jonathan so I think that's.

ANNA

And Ro Khanna.

DAVID

Yeah, and Ro Khanna. So that's my main claim to fame. But yeah, I've written two books, Chain of Title about the foreclosure crisis in 2016 and Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power in 2020. And I write virtually every day at prospect.org where we tell stories about ideas, politics and power.

ANNA

Fantastic. And I thought, you know, I know Jonathan really thought let's start off with the story about ooh, here's the books. If you're watching here video if you aren't watching on video go check us out on YouTube. You can see those books. Hold them up. Jonathan. You can see the two books live and in person there. And we thought we would talk about the demolition of the White House, Trump's big beautiful ballroom. And Jonathan, I would love for you to go ahead and give this because you were speaking so eloquently before.

JONATHAN

No problem. Just because I'm leading up to this kind of in recent episodes and talking about the economy. I think, like the three of us hosts were talking about kind of rising inequality and then talking about issues around monopolization of the economy and kind of et cetera. And I feel like a perfect visual, like, visual representation of the economy. Now is the president demolishing the east wing of the White House to build a really disgustingly gaudy gold ballroom funded by, like, a who's who of large corporations in the US, especially, like big tech money. I remember earlier today I saw somebody comment about that kind of correlation between the companies on the list and companies that are looking to build major data centers in the US Kind of coming up. And that, like, it really does drive home that, like, where we are kind of where we are in the political economy of the US right now. And that'll be interesting just to tee that up for both general comments and as well as, like, how did we get here with that? Especially pulling off from what you've been seeing regularly, as well as from, like, the book, your recent book, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.

DAVID

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, as a visual metaphor, the literal destruction of the White House doesn't get much better than that. And then you run down this list of companies that have contributed to this. You know what? I think in some places they're. They're calling the Epstein Ballroom. That's what I've heard. That's why I've heard them call it. So I'm just going to. I'm just relaying that to you. So, yeah, it's a number of tech firms, number cryptocurrency firms, a number of, you know, companies that have business before the president. One of them, I saw Union Pacific. So why is Union Pacific, a railroad, giving money to build a ballroom on the White House grounds? And what you need to know is that Union Pacific is engaged in a transformational $85 billion merger with Norfolk Southern, another railroad which would actually realize the dream of. Of Jay Gould, the robber baron of the 1800s, who wanted to build a trans. Truly transcontinental railroad under the control of one man or one company. And that's never happened in America before. But this merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern would do it. And so, yeah, it's a small return, small investment with a big return. Give money.

ANNA

This is Trump's dream. It's Trump's dream is that the Gilded Age is the way of that's kind of the time period that he wants to send us back to.

DAVID

Right. So you give a little money so Trump can build a monument to himself and in exchange, you get your merger approved and you get to wreak havoc on the U.S. economy. And you know, Trump wins, Union Pacific wins, the rest of us lose. That's bottom line.

ANNA

And I have heard people on the, you know, a lot of people on the other side saying that, oh, it isn't costing us anything. Right. At least we're not pay paying for it. But like, I gotta say, if you think that selling our entire, like, presidency to a bunch of giant corporations does not cost us anything, I, I got a bridge to sell you. I mean, that is crazy.

DAVID

Absolutely. And you know, we have seen, I think that we went into this presidency with some high and maybe misplaced hopes that the newly aggressive antitrust enforcement that we've seen, that we saw under Joe Biden, would continue in some form. And in some ways it has. Mainly at the state level, we have seen the fact that Lina Khan did what she did, that Jonathan Kanter did what he did, that Rohit Chopra did what he did, that has not sort of just vaporized into the Ethereum, but at the federal level, we've seen antitrust really transformed into kind of a pay for play operation where MAGA lobbyists get their business in front of either the President or the Justice Department. And regardless of what the antitrust enforcers want to do, they are being overruled by their bosses. And to engage in this sort of business as usual consolidation of the U.S. economy. And we've seen this in a number of instances, most prominently a merger between HP, which by the way, is also on the list of funders of the Trump Ballroom, the Epstein Ballroom. I'm sorry, let me give the right HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprises and a company called Juniper Networks. It's not really important what they do. They do back office WI FI networks for large institutions. But very early in the Trump administration, they challenged this merger at the Justice Department's antitrust division, saying that this would bring us down from three companies in that space to two. And this is an illegal merger. And what happened is that a bunch of MAGA lobbyists, Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz are the big names, basically got the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and her chief of staff, Chad Mazel, to overrule the antitrust Division who wanted to file a case on this. And we're going to actually see all of this come out in all likelihood because, because of what happened in the Nixon administration with the politicization of antitrust, because of pay to play mergers and corruption. Like I'm talking about, they put in something called the Tunney Act. And what the Tunney Act does is says that if you settle a merger challenge, it has to go before a federal judge, and that judge has to basically sign off that this is in the public interest. And the judge that actually got this case between HPE and Juniper is a Biden judge who was a labor lawyer who is very inclined to actually looking at this case and seeing what the corruption is behind it. And we are very likely, it's going to take a little while, but we're very, very likely to see a Tunney Act proceeding hearing in this case. And we know that the Trump administration is kind of worried about that because the main guy who pushed this forward, this corrupt deal, was this guy Chad Mizell, who was chief of staff to Pam Bondi. And he resigned. He resigned like three weeks ago because he didn't want to face the exposure of this corrupt deal. And so, you know, even there, there's some hope that, that, you know, the Trump administration trying to stage, manage the consolidation of the economy is going to run up against some, some guardrails that are going to expose the whole enterprise.

JORDAN

I want to, I want to say also, if you, if you're like, why should I care? Like, why should I care about what I just said about the mergers? Why should we care about these things? Yeah, you know, nominally, there's lots of reasons for inflation. Inflation's happening for lots of reasons, some of them fundamental to economic. But a lot of them are because when you have one corporation control all the railway, which is how a lot, how a lot of the, you know, especially if you're in. How a lot of the trucks, like their thing, they're big. Those big things get from place to place before they get on a truck, they're often on a train. So if they cost more, right, that's going to cost you more. Eventually, it's going to cost you more for everything you can. For everything you consume, it's going to cost more because one corporation can charge whatever they want to do that service. And if you want to be employed around it, let's say you own a restaurant, you own a restaurant, your ability to own, to make money from that restaurant is going to go down because the person who buys the food is going to be fired, they're going to be paid less because they can't compete against. If you are a train driver, you're going to get paid whatever they decide because there's only one person deciding. So in every way, like if you, you know, like, oh, why should I care about like my wi fi? Well, like do you like that service? It will get worse. You'll pay more for it. They won't care that it doesn't work because you can't go anywhere else to find an alternative.

DAVID

Right.

JORDAN

It's every part of it is like it affects you. And that's what people are frustrated with.

DAVID

I think the important thing you say there, there are obvious price harms to monopoly. If you don't have any other choices, then they can raise prices without worrying that another company will come in and undercut them on price. But there are non price harms. And in many ways the animating force behind sort of this antitrust revolution that we've seen over the last several years is the fact that this is about more than price. This is about economic liberty. This is about the ability to take your talents and use them. And it's also about quality, as you just said, because again, if you're a monopoly, you have no reason to deliver something that is a quality product because what are you going to do? What's your options? So I think where we've gone from just sort of a consumer welfare standard of as long as the price goes down, then everything's fine. We're now thinking about the tech firms may not charge you very much, but they take all your data. And there are serious privacy concerns around that. Or the fact that we have endless glitches on airlines. We just had one just in the last two days from Alaska that canceled thousands of flights. That's because every time they merge, they're slamming two systems together that don't talk to one another very well and they break down because they're tied together with like gum and tape.

ANNA

That sounds awesome. With airlines. Perfect.

DAVID

Yeah, right. So you know, there are these non price harms and it's also about the ability of you as a, as a worker or an entrepreneur to have an idea and, or to be able to use your talents the thing that you want to do. There's one thing in the book you mentioned in Monopolize. I talked to a farmer in Iowa and he said basically I'm the last of a dying breed, I'm an independent farmer. We have these agribusinesses out here that have basically made it impossible for us to work. Input prices keep soaring because there are monopolies in the seed business and other parts of this structure that make it very difficult for us to operate. The banks that lend us money are also monopolized. The equipment makers are also monopolized. And if we want to repair our tractor when we have a problem, we have to go to them rather than repair it itself because they say we don't even own the equipment that we own. And it just makes it impossible for the independent farmer to continue to exist. And he told me about how he's third generation, his family's been farming in this. In this country as long as they've been here. And he was talking to his daughter on the phone who was working at, like, a best Western, and she was telling him about her day, and she just started breaking down and crying. And he said, what's wrong? What's wrong? And she said, you know, I just want to farm.

ANNA

Yeah.

DAVID

And that's life under monopoly, is that you have a passion, you have something that you want to do in life, and you're just not able to do it. You have a loss of liberty, you're out of power, you're being controlled by other forces. And that coercion, that arbitrary power that's imposed upon you is at the heart of what it means to be living through monopoly. And that's the real problem.

JORDAN

I want to also talk about, to your point, I was thinking about what you said about some of the, like the importance of the antitrust fights and the importance of these, of these legal battles. And I keep thinking about and hearkening back to the settlement that Google just did and what came out in the antitrust lawsuit against Google. And one of the more, one of them, one of the many shocking things that came out of that, and we should be shocked by what we see, even as we expect, even though we sort of expect the worst, is that Google, the current leaders of Alphabet, people who got promoted into those positions, literally made their product worse and did not worry about the fear of it. So one of my favorite things that I tell people that I learned very recently is that if you feel like your Google search is worse, what they found in the, in the law, in the lawsuit, is that Google realized that it was. It was doing too good a job sending you away from the Google search. And so they purposefully made their search less usable. So they purposely made it so that the results would not give you what you wanted, so that you would spend, you would go back, you would spend more time on google.com and therefore they could monetize that time more. So they purposefully made it worse without fear that you would go someplace else.

DAVID

And they did this in a few ways. I mean, the one is what you're talking about. Another is just putting sponsored links at the top so they can charge more for advertising. And the third is, you know, adding these new AI features so that you get a summary without any links that you can go to outbound away from Google. And that just keeps you on the site as well. So, you know, Google has had a systematic practice. And this was, this came up in a, in a book which I was fortunate enough to talk to the author last week called Initiatification, which describes a life cycle of the platform economy. And it starts with, we're going to make this platform economy really good. We're going to make this website really good. And you're going to want to come onto the site because it's going to give you something that you need and that creates the network effect of everybody being on there and you just becoming, you know, used to using that service. Then they're going to make it worse for you and better for their business users. So the example is, you know, putting outbound links based on, you know, the placement of them based on whether you bought advertising on the website. And so now you have to scroll through a bunch of links if you're a consumer, if the scroll through a bunch of links to find what you want. But on the flip side, the business customers are really happy because the first thing which most people are clicking is something that they paid for. And then you make it worse for the business consumers, you know, and that's by using AI there to like, even, even the people who paid to get to the top, they're not at the top because, you know, these summaries are there. And so now it's just a pile of shit. It's just for everybody, not just the consumers, but even for your business customers. And that life cycle is repeated not just on the Internet, but in, in sites off, in places offline, because the businesses offline over and over again in this economy. And so Corey Doctorows, the author of Insurification, describes that process.

JORDAN

Yeah, and just to, just to round out what I'm thinking about and sort of rounding into your comments about the loss of economic opportunity, but also economic dreaming, sort of fulfilling, the things that give you things is that your people are getting squeezed in both those directions, right? So on one side of it, they're getting squeezed because there's less opportunity to sort of do the things that can make life worthwhile, fulfilling, and the things that you want to do. And on the other side is there's a complete disdain for you as the person who's also using their products. Right. So you get squeezed in both directions at the same, and not just those directions, in lots of directions. Right. You're also getting paid less for your time. You're spending more time getting less for it. You have less opportunity. The things. And then when you have free time, the things that you're spending time on, they're extracting more and more money from you for those things. And then when after they extract that money, they're also worse to use. And so you get this. And so that, to me, really speaks to the sort of political moment we're in, is that there's that feeling underneath that people are sort of getting, but don't really understand exactly what's going on. But they feel that in their core, those things. I similarly worked on a. I supported a farm, and they were able to survive when the organic boom happened, right. So in the early 2000s, they sort of were able to like, make some money. And that family farm has gone away because they got squeezed for all of the reasons that you've described. Who they sold their product to, got monopolized, who gave them the things got monopolized. The ability to get seed monopolized. Even the ability to feed their animals went through. They used to buy those feed from local farmers, but all of that became agro business who bought up all that thing. So, so they just got squeezed out of the business in every direction. And now, like you have basically dis. People who are land rich, economically destitute and frustrated. Right.

DAVID

And frustration, I think, is, is. Is a defining feature of this economy and also fear. So the, the ability for people to speak out who are competing, trying to compete in this economy is palpable. When I talk to companies that are having problems, you know, trying to compete with a big company, big competitor, they. They inevitably say, well, we don't really want to talk about that in public. You know, I, I co host a podcast called Organized Money, which talks about this entire structure of our economy and shows you how the business world really works. And it has been difficult at times to get people who we know would have a great story to tell about some corner of the economy. It's difficult to get them onto the show because they don't want to. You know, they fear reprisal, and that's, that's a Byproduct of control. And ultimately monopoly is about control. And you see it in. In so many walks of life.

ANNA

And I mean, you mentioned before, like, powerlessness, like, the feeling of powerlessness that, you know, if you thought that by speaking up that maybe you could make a change, then they're more likely at least to try, even if you yourself personally suffer, but you might be able to make that change. You know, I was listening to a story about a surgeon who, you know, raised. She was on, you know, TikTok or somewhere and talking about how United Healthcare had, you know, treated. Like, called her literally in the middle of a surgery to say that, you know, patient could not.

DAVID

I met her. I know, I know. You're talking about.

ANNA

Absolutely. Great. So. And, you know, like, she. As long as we feel like maybe we can change things, then it might even be worth people making their own personal sacrifices. But at that point where we feel totally powerless, that's when the real fear sets in. Because there's. There's no point even. Right? There's no.

DAVID

Let me. Let me try to bring the sunny side to this a little bit.

JORDAN

Excellent.

DAVID

We love it. I think the public has really woken up to this imposition of coercive control on their lives by large multinational corporations, and they're fighting back against it. And we're seeing this oddly, I think.

ANNA

Electing Trump was trying to fight back. This is what's so funny is that it really was the opposite of the goal. But I do think that a lot of people felt that he would have, you know, he was an outsider and he was going to shake up the system and he was going to get rid of the swamp, at least in 2016, like, this was how he marketed himself. And so this desire that I think people really have grown in over the last eight or 12 years that we, you know, the billionaire class, the elite class, is controlling us, and we need to chuck that. That is why we are in the situation that we're in.

DAVID

I think that's true to a degree. And certainly in the Biden administration, you saw after a really a win over the war of ideas within the Democratic Party, you saw a much more oppositional stance towards corporate power. People like Lina Khan and Jonathan Cantor and Ro Choper getting into the government and making those decisions, which was really, like, unthinkable just a few years before those. Those would be the animating ideas. You know, I personally remember being at a conference and at the end of the day, sitting at a table with a bunch of people saying, you know, what are we going to do this was in 2017, you know, like we have no power. How are we going to move these ideas forward? And at that table was Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter. And you know, within four years they're literally making these decisions. And that has, that has not dissipated. I think you're seeing more candidates adopt these ideas. I think you're seeing more state legislatures moving forward on these ideas and not limited to blue states. Actually one of the most wide ranging bills of the past year was in Arkansas where they said if you run a pharmacy benefit manager was this middleman that raises prices for prescription drugs, that if you run one of those, you can't run a pharmacy because it's a huge conflict of interest. And CVS actually has one of the largest pharmacy benefit managers called Caremark under their umbrella and also Aetna, an insurance company. And so this was, this was Arkansas saying like all you CVS's have to go out of business right now and give those to independent pharmacists. So imagine that. Right. And, and, and we've seen other interesting ways in which these ideas are coming forward in blue states as well. And so I think there are opportunities there. I think there is more of an awakening and it's, it's interesting to see how that's going to go forward.

ANNA

Okay, we're going to, we need to dig in on those. I want more because we want to know a lot of our list listeners are into state politics here in Massachusetts. And so you know, I think a little bit more extended conversation about things that are happening in other states to help that would be great.

JONATHAN

And Jonathan, before we do do that transition, I can make a quick point that I wanted to piggyback on some of the earlier discussion on. We were talking about how monopolists create like they have price harms and they have various non price harms and quality of goods, efficiency, et cetera. And there's also underlying all this kind of a throughline of the democratic harms that monopoly has to a system of the way in which, and that kind of speaks to the points that you're making about people using, using voice, sense of agency that when things are largely controlled by, by a few actors it has kind of, you both have the, the broader impact on let's say demobilization that that can have, but also the ability of that one actor to try to continue to rig systems in their favor.

DAVID

Looks what, look what happened with CBS and Stephen Colbert and the hiring of Barry Weiss that came out of a merger between Larry Ellison's Son, a giant oligarch, Trump fan and ally, and buying Paramount and instituting different things. The thing about censorship is that if we have 50 communications outlets, then if you censor one of them, it's, it's hard for you to exercise total control because you can always go to another outlet if you have three, if you have four. You know, that censorship regime is much easier to institute now. You know, we saw an attempt to do it with Jimmy Kimmel and the people fought back and upended that. However, it was a much easier thing to try to accomplish because we have a consolidated media structure. And that is consolidating even further potentially because Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns HBO and CNN and Warner Brothers Studios is on the sale block and Paramount is attempting to purchase them. They've made three different offers in the last month. And so, you know, media consolidation has, has democratic harms all over them in terms of what, what programming gets selected. It's, it's obviously bad for news, but it, even, even for entertainment as well. It affects the individuals who make entertainment and who make other programming because they can't bid up their, their prices. You know, on the flip side of monopoly is monopsony. So monopoly is about consumers and, you know, products they buy and monopsony is about labor and whether, if there are few bidders for labor, then your wages are going to go down. And you know, we see that very directly with all sorts of consolidations. So you know, the, and that has, you know, impacts on, on liberty and as well as innovation because, you know, if there is no way to break into a particular industry, then the disruptors who might have some better idea are unable to get there as well. So yes, I think you're right to bring up the, the democratic harms that are at risk from, from Monopoly.

JORDAN

I think it's also, I just want to say in terms of, you know, the guardrail we have for our democracy is our media system. And so it's not just, you know, increasingly. I think a lot of the ways in which we'll see harm is actually through the sort of invisibility and sort of feeling of the ways in which people talk about computers as if they're, as if they're neutral, as if they're harm, neutral people neutral. And so the algorithmic sort of. My worry is about the sort of algorithmic harm. And all right wing accusations are actually confessions. And so the, the like, you know, the work that they did to try to tell people that they were being harmed by Facebook and all these other people is actually Them saying very directly that's what we plan to do. And so, you know, I think about the book Careless People a lot care if you don't know. There was a book called Careless People which is about a person who is in the higher echelons of meta Facebook at the time, who actually created her own job working with governments. And normally Careless People is about like the carelessness of, of, of Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, but it's actually about herself and about how she accidentally let Mark Zuckerberg understand the power he had to, to, to control governments. And, and so one of the things that you sort of get from this book is his maturation into understanding the power of Facebook to basically move governments towards his aims. And so you're seeing like, and not just him, but actually a lot of people. Because the other piece about it is we sort of see Mark Zuckerberg, we think Mark Zuckerberg, but actually he hires people who are really terrible people who have, who have like no qualms. And they're also, they're mostly invisible, but they also have political ideas, political arms, political things. And so, and so, you know, those people haven't have at their heart a desire for sort of outcomes in the world. And so you're seeing that like in the 2024 election cycle, there's both a ratcheting up in the algorithm of people getting angry and fearful. Like those sorts of animating emotions are the things that Facebook is trying to get you to do. And sort of things that like links out to newspaper articles or things that might inform people get buried in the algorithm. So you have sort of like outrage increasing, conflict increasing to keep you angry and on the site and keep your attention and actual facts get decreased in the algorithm. I, you know, TikTok has been a sow for a lot of young people. Well, it just got bought by or it's, you know, Larry Ellison's right wing son and Baron Trump is going to be on the thing. I guarantee you the algorithm is going to invisibly do what it's already done recently, which is if you are on TikTok, which I am, you will see that creators who have a liberal bent or talking about Trump have been started to be hidden and more right wing stuff has started to slightly be ratcheted up. You know, when I'm on YouTube, it does not take long for YouTube to try to get me into a deep dive into conspiracy and right wing things. If I'm watching something like I, you know, I was, I was, I was you know, similarly, like, I was. It wasn't even remotely about politics, but all of a sudden I'm in a conspiracy with a right wing tint on like some sort of thing. Like it's trying to pull me into that place. And so I worry about the Democratic norms around that as those systems where we think of, oh, we'll be able to escape. Like, I don't know, I don't watch cbs. I'm not old. Right. Like, we're not gonna worry, but we should be worried about these consolidations because it's affecting even the ways in which we're talking to each other.

ANNA

All right, I'm gonna rein us in because I know we only have a few minutes left. And I really wanna get to the question of state level ideas and some positivity and what things we could do. Cause I know our listeners, you know, love state politics. And so we would love to hear any other things that are happening around the country at the state level to try and rein some of this in and take back some of our power.

DAVID

Sure. I mean, I think, I think this session in California is really, really instructive. So one of the things that's more high profile, even though it's based on a bill that was passed years ago, is that California announced that it's selling its own insulin at $11 a pen, which is substantially lower than the actual rate they're manufacturing it. They have a. They have a private provider that is, you know, assisting with this, but they're. They're manufacturing their own insulin and not just for California, but for the entire country.

ANNA

Oh, my God.

DAVID

And at a substantially lower rate. And thank you, Bernie Sanders, for going.

ANNA

To Canada and like, doing this thing over and over and over where he's like, this caused me 1% of what?

DAVID

Good, good impression there. So. But I think the important thing about this is that this is largely for people who don't have any insurance and who would see people with diabetes who would see the cost of their insulin be just completely out of reach and be rationing and all of this. So now there's an affordable option for them. But addition, this year California backed that up by saying people who have insurance, including commercial, like private insurance, cannot pay more than $35 a month in co pays for insulin.

ANNA

Wow.

JORDAN

So.

DAVID

So that's. It's the manufacturing combined with the regulatory approach. So that's one example. Another great example is California passed a law this year, it was signed by the governor that says that algorithmic price fixing, which is the way in which algorithms are used to gather proprietary information. This is primarily done, you might have heard of RealPage, which is a software company in the rental markets that basically buy up or gather up all of the rental information in a particular area and then use that to set prices higher and higher and higher. This sort of collusion, which is already presumptively illegal when it's individual people going into a smoke filled room and CEOs saying let's raise prices. It's also, this law says that's also illegal if you use an algorithm instead of three people in a room.

ANNA

Thank you.

DAVID

And this is one of the biggest. And New York passed a similar law. This is one of the biggest assaults on what, you know, a broader set of what I would call surveillance pricing, which is the use of your personal information or just any information algorithms, big data to set prices in ways that can be inflationary. In addition to that, where that all starts is with the collection of data. Right. And so California has pretty wide ranging laws on what data can be collected and, and opt outs that have to be posted. If you're in California, you go to any website and you, you get to control what data is collected. But that, you know, website by website by website is a little more, it's a bit of an arduous process. So California passed a law this year that says you can do that at the browser level. So you sign onto your browser and you can say, I don't want any websites collecting anything from me and at all. And they'll say, okay, that's fine. And then that goes out to every website that you visit.

ANNA

So it's like the state legislature in California is actually like being creative and thinking about people.

DAVID

Right.

ANNA

It's so refreshing, you know, here in Massachusetts.

DAVID

Well, I know. Well, I mean we've written about that. We have. You know, Bob Kutner is a Bostonite. For many, many years he's written about, yeah, he wrote about the Massachusetts legislature not too long ago. So you know, and, and we did a ranking actually earlier this year we did a blue state power index of how states are operating at the state level. You can, you can check that out on our website.

ANNA

How much do we suck?

DAVID

Yeah, you're pretty low on the list, I have to say. We looked at all the trifecta states, the states where Democrats were in control of both the legislature and the governorship. And I don't remember the exact number, but it wasn't one or two, let's put it that way. But you know, I think that the new activity that we're seeing in other states can really create models for advocates, activists to go into their legislatures and say, look, this is something that was done elsewhere and it's working and these are the results and here's how we could do the same thing. And I think that's always an important navigation that you can go from one laboratory of democracy to the other. So I think there are good things happening.

ANNA

Absolutely. That is wonderful. I tell you, we could talk to you for another two hours, I'm sure. I'm like, come on, guys, we got to rein it in here. But I want to respect your time. I so appreciate you being here with us and all your work. Final thoughts. I will start with Jonathan. Ooh.

JONATHAN

Just that I feel like, I like that we ended on a positive note in this discussion of knowing that even despite the fact that we have kind of the, the state of the world is not great right now, that there are concrete things that can happen, especially as we're thinking about what work can be done at the state level. I typically end up thinking that the only things that one can hope for on the national level in the next few years is like incompetence or lawsuits. But on this, like, when you go down a level, there's actually real progress that one can make and not making that progress on that level can filter up later on.

ANNA

Fantastic.

JONATHAN

Jordan.

JORDAN

Yeah. Just to. If you are a politician listening, know that you can win a lot of votes if you take, if you tackle this issue of the, of people's lives like it is a winning issue. And yes, you may get money spent against you, but you will win. Like, people are thirsty for somebody to see them, see them struggling and care. And so, like, this is a winning issue for people. And I just wish people got how much of a winning issue this is because it does cross the MAGA sort of base. It does cost class. Like, people are really frustrated and there is a, there's a reason you can really make hay if you got serious about this. Like, I think the Biden administration did a good job selling it, but it tried to like, touch this in like, small ways with, with Ticketmaster and other things. But like, there is a real base of things that you can do if you tackle this issue and do so loudly and proudly and, and, and with as much as possible. And the other, I'll just say really quickly is a reminder that we are an independent small thing that you should donate to and that we do not get paid. But there are people you don't see who, who support us being up and on these problematic platforms and so you're donating to them is and to the ecosystem generally the sort of independent media system. The American prospect like it is important to donate to these places.

ANNA

I'm gonna go and then I'm gonna.

JONATHAN

Let so quickly back on Jordan is just a reminder of that reigning in corporate power is a kitchen table issue for the Democrats who keep wanting to talk about kitchen table issues that maybe they should start thinking about that but everybody back handing it back.

ANNA

Great, I'm going to go and then I'll let David have the last word. My two thoughts are let's get back to corporations having Google's old motto don't be evil and and then my other little motto when we fight, we win. David, what are your last thoughts?

DAVID

I would just echo some of the things that were said. There is a politics here that's available and I think that that Americans are hungry for their leaders to govern in their interests again. I mean in nine of the last 10 elections, national elections, we've seen over the last 20 years a changeover of one house of Congress or the presidency. So voters are ping ponging back and forth looking for someone that will deal with the real challenges in their lives and they haven't found it yet. And so the party that actually takes up this kind of politics and acts to really improve their lives in this fashion is the one that can realign the country.

ANNA

Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks to everyone listening and we look forward to seeing you all next week.