Incorruptible Mass

What's Wrong With Our Economy?

• Anna Callahan • Season 6 • Episode 21

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This week, we continue our series on the economy with an even broader view on why things look so bleak right now. We talk about the unchecked rise of monopolization, how AI is distorting our economic and energy systems, and the urgent crisis of inflation. It's not all bad news, though — we also talk about what we can do at the state and local levels to help fix it, even while Trump is in power.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

To stay informed:

ANNA
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 legislature that truly met the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state. Today we are going to be talking about the economy. We're going to be talking about monopolies, about pricing abuses and algorithms and surveillance. We're going to be talking about how we can combat these things at the state level. We'll be talking about how our whole United States economy is being propped up by data centers and AI. We'll be tying all of this into the elections that happened on Tuesday and going into some discussion of what our government is currently choosing to do, who it's privileging, who is not privileging. And we have an amazing guest who if you like the three of us, you're gonna love this gu so. But before I introduce Pat Garofalo, I am going to have my illustrious co hosts introduce themselves. And I will start with Jonathan.

JONATHAN
Hello, Jonathan Cohen, he/him/his, joining from Boston in the South End and been active with progressive issue and electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts for a little over a decade.

JORDAN
Jordan, Jordan Powers, he/him, and I am in Worcester, Massachusetts and I have worked around, around lots of progressive policy and especially economics my whole life. And I have gray hair.

ANNA
And I am Anna Callahan, she/her, coming at you from Medford where I recently got reelected (woo!) with a whole slew of progressives. We did really well despite our fears. It was a great day. So great Election Day which we'll talk about later in terms of national elections. And now I would love to have Pat Garofalo, who's the Director of State and Local Policy at the American Economic Liberties Project, introduce himself. Pat, tell us who you are and the work you do.

PAT
Hey, thanks so much. It's so great to be here and to be chatting with you all. My name is Pat. I run the State and Local Policy Program at the American Economic Liberties Project. I've been doing that for a little over five years now. We focus on issues of corporate power and corporate consolidation. So I've basically spent that time organizing both elected officials and advocates to work on policy solutions to fight corporate consolidation and corporate power. So that's a little bit of antitrust, little bit of economic development, it's a little bit of labor law. It's a lot of making the largest corporations in America very mad at me.

ANNA
Awesome. And I'm going to tell you, if anyone listening is concerned about corporate consolidation, you should really look at the media. And I've been encouraged to put our mid roll at the beginning. This is now a big beginning role which is that if you listen to this and if you are concerned about the media and how much the media has consolidated and how it does not report on stories that we report on, if it does not talk about the issues that we are about to talk about, please donate to the show. There's a link below. None of it goes to us who speak on camera. It all goes to our young people who help us to put this show together with graphics and video editing and social media and all of that good stuff. Thank you so much.

JONATHAN
Just didn't have to chime in. The topic of a kind of reigning in corporate power just reminded me of there was kind of Oxium does its annual reporting about how much the top billionaires in the country or the world are gaining, gaining in wealth. And it was just kind of just a few days ago where we saw that the top 10 US billionaires collective wealth grew by almost $700 billion in the past year. With Elon Musk now getting his like trillion dollars, getting to be like a trillion or whatever I'm seeing his board recently voted for him. That can get worse. But one of the things in the report noted that if we're actually serious about addressing kind of that kind of extreme inequality, one of the strategies is reining in corporate power to rein in the ability of such anybody to have those obscene amounts of money that enable them to rig both the economy and the political system in their favor. But back to you, Anna.

ANNA
Oh well, let's turn it over to Pat. I'd love to hear you talk about this consolidation monopolies like give us a, give us an intro. What state are we in?

PAT
Not a good one. So the key fact to know is that in the last three decades, 70% of U.S. industries have become more consolidated. So it's like the obvious ones, right? Retail, big tech. But this is everything from eyeglasses to veterinarians to funeral homes. There's been both a consolidation speed in terms of mergers and acquisitions. The federal government has totally failed to stop big mergers amongst big corporate players. But also an underlying thread of smaller acquisitions and what we call roll ups done by things like private equity firms and venture capital firms where they buy up a ton of really small entities in a particular industry. This is what you're seeing in things like veterinarians and dental care and physicians practices and they buy a bunch of really small entities and those acquisitions run under the radar until you wake up one day and 85% of the dentists in a state all work for the same soulless private equity firm that is actually based, you know, six states over. So that's been one of the huge unnoticed underlying threats in the American economy. And a lot of our economic, and I would argue even social problems are downstream of the amount of corporate consolidation that has happened. You see the control of not just information, not just economic power, but then also power over the democracy. Right. Because the, the move that monopolies make is they empower them, is they roll up their monopoly. They then use that dominance to push down any to and prevent anyone else from entering the market that might compete with them economically and then entrench that power politically. That is always the really key final step is to then go to a place like the state legislature and say, you need to set all these rules that maintain my monopoly. And so at the federal level, we saw, you know, 40, 50 years of the mindset which started a little under Carter and then was really enhanced by Reagan and then Clinton and Bush and Obama didn't really do anything about it. This belief in bigger is better. Bigger is always more efficient. We don't need those small local businesses anymore. You did get a half a minute break.

ANNA
I was wondering, right, David.

PAT
Yeah. Many faults. I'm not on the Biden administration. I'm not here to relitigate all of those. But the one thing they did well was put people in power who didn't think that way. Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Jonathan Kanter running the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, all of them both believed in the power of government to rein in corporate consolidation, but also just rejected the dogma of the past 40 and 50 years that said bigger is always better. And like, it's hard to understate how bipartisan that consensus became amongst both Democrats and Republicans that we just need these giant corporations to do all the things and the world will be better. And so those enforcers particularly rejected that. Now they're gone and we're back in this situation where not only is the old dogma in place again, we, but we're seeing it corrupted to a cartoonish level. Right? You can, like, just go to the Department of Justice and basically buy a merger enforcement action at this point, and corporate America realizes that and is acting accordingly. So the thing that I spend all my time working on and thinking about is the federal government's out to sea on this and is making everything worse. So what can and should state government be doing to stem the tide?

ANNA
Oh, well, you, you are in the right place.

PAT
Right.

ANNA
Because like, really we used to just.

PAT
Talk about state politics.

ANNA
We started to work in some, some national stuff, especially since our ethics is so boring. They don't do anything. So we would love to hear from you some of the, some of the policies that other states are doing. Like, what are some options that we have to help kind of rein this in?

PAT
Absolutely. So the first thing I would say is that state AGs are playing an important and growing role in this area. And the best of them are really stepping up and are really stepping into the void that has been left at the federal level. When I say the best of them, I think of folks like Chris Mays in Arizona, Keith Ellison in Minnesota, Tish James in New York, Rob Bonta in California. They have really made it a point to step up on the enforcement side. Because an interesting thing that a lot of people don't know or forget and a lot of state AGs would prefer you don't know, is that state agencies can enforce federal law. Over in the antitrust space, they can use the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, which are federal antitrust laws. They can enforce those on behalf of their states. As long as someone in their state is being affected, they can wield the same powers that the feds use under those same federal laws. So that's step one is just do the thing that the federal government is not doing. But then those folks and others like them are actually working through their state legislatures and to increase their powers for the modern economy. Because a really important thing about antitrust law is both through, actually, I was going to say both through the text and the precedent, but it's actually not really the text. The text is fine. The precedent that's lying around makes it really hard to take action against the monopolies of today. Your Facebooks and your Googles that don't cost anything, where the cost is your privacy and your data and your time can be really hard. And Amazon, where their whole thing is, is supposedly low prices. They don't trigger a lot of antitrust laws. This is how Lina Khan got famous was by writing a law review article saying, look at how our antitrust laws are not equipped to deal with an Amazon. So a lot of states are, in addition to taking those federal laws and using them to the extent they can, stepping up with new solutions to the problems that we face now. And the things that are top of mind for me are California just recently passed a first-in-the-nation law against what's called algorithmic price fixing. So this is the practice of multiple corporations getting together and using algorithms to decide on common prices of goods or services. The most I think prevalent and famous example of this is in rental housing. There are a bunch of companies that sell software that corporate landlords use to collude on rental prices. They all enter all of their information and then the algorithm spits back a price to all of them. That is meant really importantly, here's the key point, meant not to increase any of their revenue individually, but revenue across the market as a whole. So it's meant to inflate the rent, my rent prices across the entire market. So this law, and then actually a new law in New York that's aimed specifically at rental housing would prevent that practice. Our price-fixing law is just as courts have shown, just not really equipped for that problem. And so that's a way in which states are stepping up. There are other examples and I'm happy to get into them, but that one is really top of mind for me.

ANNA
Let me jump in on that one because I think about that a lot. Like as a local legislative official, I think about that because people make all these arguments about housing and the price of housing and why the price of housing goes up and they say things like, oh, but if you raise taxes then landlords will, you know, will raise the price of housing. And the thing that people don't understand is that, you know, that may be true for the in-town folks who live in the building or, don't have a lot of, you know, money in the bank in case their tenants leave. So they keep their rents low. But like all of these corporate owners who own like thousands of units, they raise the price as much as they can. Like that's their, their purpose is profit. So they raise the price as much as they can. If they can raise the price, they do and it is independent of their costs. That is not what, what makes it go up. And so what you're talking about is they don't just raise it as much as they think they can get, then they're, they get to help them and you know, computers, algorithms to help them figure out how much they actually can raise it. And not just them, but everyone else and to increase the price of housing regionally and across the country. And man, if that ain't bad news for us, I don't know what.

JORDAN
It's just, it's not just, I'll just say really quickly. It's not, it's not just like how much they can. It's that what it does is, is it creates. It's the reason why we've made this illegal because we, there's no place else for us to, for people to go. So what happens is it's like when you do it across the board for everyone, takes away the thing capitalism promises, which is that the market will fix itself. The market literally can't fix itself. If, if I, if you're not in competition with your, with the landlord next door, right? Like if, if there's no competition, then they can just endlessly raise it until people are destitute or on the street or they sort of hit the breaking point, which is just, you know, so you get this, you know, you get. In the housing market, for example, you know, ideally people are spending about 30% of their money on housing. In California, every single county, people are spending over 55, 50 to 55% of their housing of their money on housing. Every county in California, most of the West Coast, most of the East Coast. Like that is what happens when you have price-fixing. Like this is what's happening and it was happening informally in some places. You'll hear, I'm a small landlord, I own my 3 decker, I have other people and I go to these events and they'll talk to each other about it, right? Like they'll literally say, how much are you raising? Like they'll do it informally already, but like they are, but now. But with this things, they can do it so that everyone does it together, thus absolutely creating an end to the sort of like competition.

PAT
Absolutely, Jordan. That's exactly where I was going to go. There's like two insidious things that these tools help you accomplish. One is exactly as you said, cutting off any competitive pressure that may exist. The whole point is that, you know, everyone else is on the platform and that your competitor is not going to undercut you because the algorithm prevents them from doing that. Then the second thing is these algorithms inform landlords to keep units off the market in the name of keeping prices high, to actually keep units empty. That it is in their economic interest to restrict supply. And the interesting thing about the debate on that is when we go into legislative committee hearings on these types of bills, the first question is always, well, isn't this just capitalism? Yes and no. Econ101 says that you need the government, the formation of cartels, right? That a cartel will naturally form under Econ101 if it's allowed to.

ANNA
And that it destroys the market.

PAT
Right.

ANNA
That it Destroys capitalism, right?

PAT
Yeah.

ANNA
In fact, Adam Smith, his whole concept of a free market meant something completely different from what we mean by free market. Like what he meant by free market was a market free of monopolies. And what we mean by a free market is people free to make monopolies.

JONATHAN
It's interesting the point as well, particularly the way of like that kind of landlord incentive with creating artificial scarcity. It reminds me of something like, and I think I associate this with Andrew Cuomo, who thankfully lost in the recent New York mayoral race of this combination of pro, this like pro landlord NIMBYism that kind of was modeled by kind of Andrew Cuomo, where you can have different things, like things that are often described as being at odds, kind of uniting when it comes about, like who a market is being worked or like who a market is designed to serve the interests of, that can have, that can scramble what people, the kind of ways that people typically understand a landscape of it.

JORDAN
So I think it's also. Oh, go ahead.

PAT
That was, that was actually a good segue because I thought it was really interesting that a bunch of the candidates on Tuesday talked about this specific problem and candidates who are not actually usually associated with that sort of rhetoric, like you saw Representative Sherrill in New Jersey, who won the gubernatorial race, literally talk about this problem, landlord collusion, as part of her kind of air quote, affordability agenda. And it's interesting to me that this practice, which I think is emblematic of a lot of the rot in our economy has cracked where even this kind of milquetoast center of the road, nothing special, you know, pretty corporate Democrat at least, feels compelled to talk about this problem. And again, I think it's, I think it's really symbolic and emblematic of a lot of the sort of corporate abuses that we have allowed to fester. We just have not kept up with the power these monopolies have, the tactics that they use, and actually this is the thing we always pitch to state legislatures is you have to eliminate these tactics as a whole. There are just some business practices that should not be allowed. And this is one of them. Because even if you can come up with some merit for them. Right. The harm is such that they just need to be thrown out. This also makes me think of something we were all chatting about a little earlier. I live in Washington D.C. the obviously perfect place to do state based policy from. And our attorney general reached recently launched a case against a crypto kiosk company and his allegation is that 90% of the transactions that occur through these kiosks are scams. People being duped into giving their money to the company that's running these things. And we just simply should not tolerate that. Even if you can come up with some innovation competition, here's the future nonsense argument for that. Like, absolutely not. We should be unplugging those machines, throwing them in the Potomac River, because there is no, There is no benefit to something that 90% of the time is scamming you. And I put a lot of the tactics that corporations use these days, particularly on the pricing side and in that bucket.

ANNA
And, man, scamming you, like, let's be clear, like, it's illegal fraud. So we're talking about crime committed by corporations called innovation. And this is the way that our whole society, I mean, in 2008, all it was, you know, financial innovation is what it was called until it crashed the entire economy and destroyed hundreds of thousands of people's lives. So one person, you know, scamming gets thrown in jail, and a giant corporation scamming people is rewarded by our government.

JONATHAN
Yeah, Jordan, go.

JORDAN
Yeah, I want to go back because I want to go. I want to talk about, like, a lot of these things are not. The technology hides the fact that these are not actually new ideas. These are old scams. They're all old scams. So cartels were, you know, when you, when, when Anna, when you talk about, like, Adam Smith is literally reacting to cartels, he's literally reacting to the very thing that we're approaching today in which he's like, it doesn't help that you have all of these people who can't compete with prices with each other. And we're allowing that to happen under the guise of the same thing. Right? Like free market. But like, the person who created this, this idea is. Is reacting to the very thing that's getting created. So there's nothing new about this idea. And so you're seeing price fixing and landlords is a real problem because we all need to live someplace. And we're seeing it also with food, right? So you're seeing across the country, supermarkets are figuring out how to price fix. So all areas, the prices are going up and they can make profits. That's not a new idea. That's a crime that got outlawed in America because it used to happen all the time. And people who are long since dead were like, you know, we should probably fix this because we're elected representatives and this is hurting the people we're elected to represent. I think that's my frustration. Is everyone in, you know, Democrats and Republicans today, politicians act like they're price, like they are helpless to the realities of these large corporations. But like there were bigger corporations with bigger power with actual violence. People who sat in their seats, who were elected officials were like, no, but we're here to help people and we're going to put some laws in place imperfectly to try to at least tackle it. And so technology hides that a lot of these things are just old fashioned crimes that other people have tried and really gotten rid of. And we could do the same today and we should be asking our politicians and state governments to tackle it.

PAT
One of the motivating factors of the California price fixing law according to the sponsor's office was the like French fry cartel. There's like a frozen potato cartel. It's like four companies control something like 85% of the market. And on grocery prices in particular. And I think this is really indicative of this sort of stuff that we're talking about. Right. There is a federal law on the books. It's called the Robinson-Patman Act that was passed to prevent large grocery chains from getting better deals from suppliers than little bodegas and independent grocers. It was meant to address the economic power, the buyer power that an entity at the time was A and P could exert on suppliers, saying because I'm your biggest buyer, you need to give me a much better deal and foist costs onto our independent competitors. That was, that was outlawed federally and the law never changed. It is on the books today in the form that it has been for decades. Literally just the government made a decision on the enforcement side and on the judicial side that it was outdated and they just weren't going to enforce it. And so it's still sitting there. And so someone can and actually Lina Khan did take it out and blow the dust off it and try and use it in a couple of cases. But to now come back around the circle, states can do the same thing. You can enforce that. Or many states have their own mini versions of the Robinson-Patman Act. And actually in New York there was just introduced last week a bill to beef up their state-level Robinson-Patman equivalent, specifically in the grocery sector because that's one of those areas where we're really, really seeing it. You just Walmart and the other large grocers at they've been allowed to merge and merge and merge and merge. So you're really talking about a handful of corporations. Even though the names on the stores are different, they exert their power to box small independent grocers out by simply demanding better prices. They can put on the shelf a product for cheaper than the independent grocer can buy it from the distributor. That's how great their economic power is. And so this stuff exists, you just have to use it or in the, you know, the case of a state legislator, make it better and ensure that your AG will use it.

JONATHAN
So I'm gonna chime in with two quick things. One, Jordan, you're talking about kind of what Adam Smith had warned about years ago also just made me think of like you would the kind of back in the day, that time where you did have like the King Charter chartering corporations. And that kind of fusion of monarchical power and large corporate power is like very much so where the US is headed at this moment. If you look at DC if you look at like the Trump-Silicon Valley connection is very much so. Replay that. But also one thing that Pat, that you had noted before about how with Lina Khan talking about the kind of other harms that monopoly can cause, I think is such an important one because that like the years of bipartisan belief that, well, maybe monopolies are actually good is based on this idea that, well, they keep prices low. And then the monopoly is actually part of our affordability strategy of all allowing these like massive mergers and massive takeovers. And what we've seen is not only does that mean often, not only does that mean that you're actually having extraction happening somewhere else, whether it is because they are kept, whether it is in terms of workers suffering, other competitors suffering privacy abuses or other things, that their ultimate goal is never to keep prices low. The purpose of a monopoly is to have full control of the market and full price setting power for the market, not, not low prices.

ANNA
So I want us to turn a little bit and think about the economy generally and how much like I know I've been hearing about how like the majority of the reason that we do not are not currently in a recession is just because of AI and data centers. And if it weren't for them, we would be in a recession right now, like every other part of the economy is in recession. And I want us to talk a little bit about that aspect of the economy. The fact that economy is doing very poorly. If we take out that one piece and how that affected the elections on Tuesday. We had some really giant shifts towards the Democrats, whether progressive or not. But also I think the fact that affordability has been so strong and such an ability for Zohran, especially Zohran Mamdani in New York City to be able to have a truly remarkable win and remarkable voter turnout that it seems like the other Democrats are catching up on that idea and are beginning to talk about that as well. That's a big topic. But Pat, if you can talk a little bit about those things, that would be great.

PAT
I thought it was really interesting, the experience, extent to which almost all of the candidates felt compelled to talk to specific costs and specific corporate actors that were causing those costs to go up, calling out specifically utility companies, calling out specifically corporate landlords, calling out specifically healthcare middlemen. Abigail Spanberger has this, one of her main campaign planks, getting pharmacy benefit managers, which are mostly useless healthcare middlemen, out of the state's healthcare programs. Like, that's really interesting again, for someone who kind of has a reputation as this like milquetoast corporate Democrat, like not a whole lot, not a real firebrand in the, you know, the mold of a, of a Mamdani. So it was interesting to me that she felt the need to go there too. And I wrote a piece about this on my organization's Substack. It's called the Economic Populist about it's going to be really important that all of these Democrats keep those promises now because I think Biden fell into the trap of calling out high costs and then doing a bunch of stuff that wasn't felt immediately. It took, if it's implemented at all, which most of it is not yet it was not implemented fast enough to actually feel. Trump called out a lot of specific costs and as we've been talking about, has just decided to like sell all of those agencies who would do anything about it to the highest bidder. So it's now really, really important for the Democrats who won on Tuesday to do things in the short term. Like so like Mamdani had a bunch of stuff on grocery prices and on freeze the rent. Like you got to do those. Cheryl had a freeze utility rates, declare a state of emergency and freeze utility rates. Like you got to do that. An interesting under the radar thing for me on Tuesday was that the Democrats won two Public Service Commission seats in the state of Georgia, ousting two of their five Republican utilities regulators. I really, really think utility costs, and this ties into your question about AI and data centers are one of the next big things in our politics. Everyone is experiencing utility costs rising. The mass expansion of data centers is only going to make that worse. There was a study, I can't remember if it was earlier this year or late last year, but within the last 12 months in Virginia, which I'm not too far from Northern Virginia. There's an area there called Data Center Alley where it's just nothing but data centers, it’s like the data center epicenter of the universe. The Virginia legislature did an audit saying that every Virginia ratepayers bill is going to go up by $400 in the coming years simply because of the data centers that are already in the pipeline. So like that's real money and that's happening everywhere. You're seeing opposition to these facilities in Minnesota, in Ohio, in Missouri, in Arizona. So this is like one of those next big things. And I think if Democrats don't follow through and don't do something about it in the short term, they're gonna. All of the promise that they have firm today for 26, 28, 30 and beyond is gonna go poof and disappear. Like you said it and now you have to do it and prove it.

JORDAN
It's just generally fits into this thing. I say all the time that there is a large coalition. It's not necessarily ideological, although I think progressives have answers for it to tackling corporate power. And people don't even know that it's tackling corporate power. But if you are upset about rising prices, you need to know that corporations are whopping you and the government used to at least try to stop that from happening in some places and no longer in any form is stopping you from being robbed by corporations. And the extent to which Democrats actually follow through with taking on people who are going to be mad at them and not give them money, but are actually in opposition to their goals is their willingness to do that is going to be their willingness to succeed like it is. You know, it is a reminder that in Massachusetts, for example, we had a quote unquote energy bill written by National Grid at Eversource and then, and it made it illegal for, for solar and then they had to go back and rewrite it because they didn't even know what was in this bill. They just let these corporate hacks write it. And then it turned out that it was really bad. It was really bad. And so they had to go back and fix it. And like these cor. You know, you know, utility companies, which shouldn't exist because they're just using public money for public things. They are, they, they are just extracting profit from a public-built system for the public where there's no, where there's no competition. You know, like unless you are willing to take them on directly and say you will not make profit, then utility prices are going to go up. It's just as simple like and. And direct them to things that actually like. The other piece that's making prices go up is Trump dismantling the money subsidies for green energy and green technology and green. And so like you have this buy thing where you have like giving free money for AI so you're giving people free money to be put out of jobs. At the same time, you're rising costs by taking away subsidies for greener things, which were also just not subsidies for greener things, but just subsidies for the cost of electricity. And so you're sort of like these twofold things. And if Democrats. But if any party is interested in tackling that with the pipe for thing across the economy as a whole, there is a large portion of votes out there to tackle this problem. But you have to be, you have to be willing to take on corporate power and corporate money and corporate and corporate communications unabashedly.

PAT
Yeah, you said it often this, like, hands off, oh, it's just capitalism. There's nothing we can do about it. Right. But what you're talking about is asserting the government's role over industrial policy, basically saying that we have a role as the public through our elected officials in deciding what the American economy looks like and is based on. And instead of it being based on seven companies passing fake money around to each other and building, you know, that just steal markets and authors and turn it into slop. Right. We can choose to direct investment elsewhere and we're letting a bunch of tech CEO sociopaths decide the path of the American economy. And we just like, don't have to. This is one of the things I say all the time when I'm working with, with state legislators is anything that was done can be undone.

JONATHAN
Right?

PAT
Like, you can undo decisions that were made and then you can just simply, like, you can simply do things. You can simply ban the bad stuff. Right. You can make different decisions. You can just. The role of the government in this instance is to decide what the economy is supposed to look like, what rules corporations are supposed to play under, what the market structure is supposed to be. And then you let all of those capitalist forces happen kind of underneath that. But there's a, there's an assertiveness there that we have been quite deliberately not using for decades.

ANNA
We have been, I'd say, in Massachusetts.

PAT
More than other places.

JONATHAN
I say like no kind of a framework of understanding that if there's ultimately a game happens, somebody sets the rules of the game. If somebody is setting the rules of the game, they can change those. They can tighten the rules of the game. They can, they can do different, they can do different things about it. The game does not play on its play on its own.

JORDAN
And it's not. And I think it's always important because people like, yes, it's industrial policy, yes it's things. But it's basically saying like, are we going to have an economy where lots of people have opportunities to succeed and the government is going to put money into allowing that to happen, or are you going to have a not-market where just, there's just a. Where there's just a bunch of rich people deciding how much they can get away with stealing from you before you get upset? Like, that's not actually marketplace. That's not the thing that Americans pretend to want. That's actually just a form of autocratic non like dystopian nightmare. But it's not like it's not an actual marketplace. Like a marketplace would be hundreds of people competing for your business to make the combination of the best product at the best price. But you're not getting that. You're getting a crappy product for prices you can't afford, right? Food tastes less, there's less of it. Your housing is good. Like I always think about like we put a ton of money into our home to try to make it nicer. Across the street from us is a corporate landlord owner who is charging almost three times as much in rent as we charge and the building is falling apart. Like that's your choice, right? Like you get a corporate entity who owns most of the block in my neighborhood who does not care or you. Or do you want a bunch of small people like myself who are like, I'm going to try and make this thing that I made as best as possible. And like that's actually in large part what's happening is you are, it's not a marketplace. They're not, they're not competing for your business. These are just corporations that are so big that are just telling you, “F you, we’ll do whatever we want,” and our elected officials are giving them our tax money to do it, which is just should not happen and does not need to happen. We could be investing in lots of corporations that do. Like we could be creating an incubator that could be creating lots of competition and we could be funding the free money we're giving these corporations. We're giving to that by contrast.

JONATHAN
And one thing I think just to kind of underscore and build off of that a bit as well as the point the path that you're noting about the need to deliver is that showing that you can deliver for people on small things is how you can build up goodwill for anything that either if it takes longer to achieve, if it's a more ambitious thing, because if people think that you're going to promise something and then nothing will change and whatever problem is, gets worse causes them to be either just like disillusioned to like maybe they stay home, maybe they vote for, for somebody else, but and, or maybe they just simply like yeah, or kind of that you, you lose that fundamental goodwill that you can do by by identifying the clear harms that people can face on a day to day basis with that have clear tangible causes and addressing them. Which should be something that's straightforward in politics more than it sometimes is.

ANNA
So I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up. I'm going to ask everybody for your final thoughts. Pat, you'll be last. I'm going to go first and I'm going to say if you're a voter, you need to think about your local, your state and your federal levels, all of them. Vote for people who are going to rein in corporate power and make an even playing field so that you know, we're not crushed by these gigantic monopolies. And if you are an elected official, the moral of the story from today is you better do these things. You can't just talk about them, right? So you get into office, you win on these ideas and you, you have to enact them. You have to do them as fast as possible with change that is going to hit people's pocketbooks right away. That's my final word here. I'm going to pass it to, let's see, I can have Jonathan and then Jordan and then Pat. So Jonathan, go ahead to tag back.

JONATHAN
Onto something I mentioned before when I was talking about that one kind of recent Oxfam piece about the growing wealth of billionaires. Basically the kind of policy recommendations that ultimate had fell into four buckets of: One, that you need to rein in corporate power over the economic and political system. Two, that you need to start taxing the rich much more especially getting at their wealth. Three, that you need to strengthen the social safety net in general social infrastructure. And four, empower unions and basically anything that for us to have a better, more equitable economy and with that a stronger democracy because of the way in which kind of, let's say monarchy and autocracy in the kind of economic sphere gets into the democratic sphere, we'll need to be pushing forward on all on all four of those, I'll just say.

JORDAN
That the affordability thing, there is a huge demographic out there to win votes. And that also means something that I think progressives could do more of which is just supporting small businesses. The idea of people creating jobs. Five at a time, four at a time. We could be having policies that we could be pushing our legislators to support that. We could be having policies that support it. We could be, you know, there is a, you know, all of these large business organizations, all of these landlord organizations, they are representing the interests of large corporations and large people. And there is an opportunity to speak to people who are actually struggling on a day-to-day who are also, you know, the majority of small business owners are renters as an example. And so they care about rising rental prices because they're also getting priced out of the things that they're trying to do. And so there is just an opportunity to really, if we, if we really base our policies on dispersed, on regular people who are trying to make a living, trying to get a good buy, trying to get a job making things less expensive for them and attacking these large corporations, there are huge opportunities out there to speak to that, to win elections, to do that. And so I just think that that's the fight of the future.

ANNA
Pat Garofalo, take us home.

PAT
First off, just thank you so much for having me on the show today. It's been a blast. You all are awesome. Keep doing what you're doing. For me, when I talk to state legislators all over the country, even well-meaning ones have this sense of a lot of the stuff we've talked out about today, it's inevitable, the direction we're going is inevitable and therefore I'm just desperate to get my slice of the slop, like give my community its piece of the garbage pie. And I will be happy with that. And I really just want to send the message that there is a different way, there's a better path, there's policy being worked on all over the country. It may be three states away, it may be three time zones away, but there is a better way. And people are experimenting and trying stuff. And there are folks who will back you, voters, advocates, whoever, small business owners, if you decide to try something different. So look out there, you can reach out to me, the American Economic Liberties Project to get some of those ideas. But there's a whole world of folks working on this stuff. So please, please, please use a little imagination. It is not inevitable. And you can unmake some of the decisions that have been made to get us here.

ANNA
Fantastic. Thank you so much. What a pleasure having you on, Pat. And thanks, as always to our listeners. Feel free to forward the show. Feel free to donate to the show, and we look forward to seeing you all next week.