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1. Ah, the old chestnut of applying anti-monopoly language to democratic institutions... There is something very important in what ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is saying, however.
2. Institutions like Goldman Sachs are not businesses. They are *private governments.* There is a fight, and there has always been a fight, between the sovereign power of Wall Street and the sovereign power of democratic institutions. It goes back to Hamilton vs Jefferson.
3. Here's Mark Zuckerberg making the point explicitly. “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”
Yup.
Yup.
4. Thomas Jefferson wanted an anti-monopoly provision in the Constitution and was very afraid of private banks as rivaling powers to the government. Hamilton wanted a private national bank as a way to stop democratic government.
5. Here's FDR's attorney general in 1944: “When the industrial life of a country passes into the hands of a few individuals, their power over the direction of public affairs exceeds the power confided by the people to their elected representatives in the government itself.”
6. James Landis, a key New Dealer at the SEC, wrote of U.S. Steel and other big businesses that they “possess a coercive force and effect that government even with its threat of incarceration cannot equal."
7. Wyoming Senator Joseph O’Mahoney in 1934 said, “Many of the modern corporations engaged in interstate commerce are greater and more powerful than most of our sovereign states.”
8. In recent hearings, @SenJohnKennedy said of today's tech giants, "These aren't companies, they are countries."
@SenJohnKennedy 9. In every era, there is a place from which the public accepts action. In the 1930s, they expected their government to act. Today they situate legitimacy in the hands of big banks and monopolies. Blankfein truly does not believe he is constrained by law. He makes the law.
@SenJohnKennedy 10. It is why men like @tonywest of Uber make 'counter-offers' to California instead of following the law the state legislature passed. Uber sees itself as a rival government. It is a private taxicab regulator. This is a crisis of who governs.
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 11. Concentrated markets are *private governments* over those markets. Wall Street is the federal structure that brings all them all together and regulates. That's what J.P. Morgan did in the late 19th century. It is what Goldman and Google do today.
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 12. It goes the other way too. Antitrust is just mergers and acquisitions done by the public. Public regulations are just organizing industries efficiently on behalf of public goals instead of on behalf of financiers (who different from businessmen).
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 13. The legitimacy is on the side of banks and monopolies. It's why the burden of proof is insanely high for antitrust enforcers, but AT&T can stupidly buy Time Warner without any internal hurdles. But that is changing. The people won't accept it anymore. We want to be free.
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 14. I wrote this piece two years ago on the history of this battle, and why Democrats fought against concentrated power until the 1970s, and then fought for it after the 1970s. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 15. In a month, my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, will be out. It is a much broader story of these fights. This is not a left-right thing. It is commerce vs finance, the people vs concentrated power. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 16. Also, as an aside, I focused in the writing very hard on telling a fun story, not writing a memo. Business and financial institutions are run by people and act on people, and people are weird and crazy and fun to talk about. And power is fascinating. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 17. One of the reasons we're seeing Trump-types rising all over the world is because Trump doesn't make the artificial distinction between private and public governing power. He's just a boss dealing with other bosses. And people get intuitively that there's something to that.
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 18. Breaking Congress's ability to act, delegitimizing Congress, is key to centering power among private actors. After all, if the body politic dismissively scoffs at their *own elected officials,* who is left to act? This is a battle, and our minds are part of the battlefield.
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 19. Another key propaganda win is to push the people away from business and banking. Make these subjects intentionally boring and technical and difficult, instead of full of passion and blood and power. Direct all the money in the world?!? Yawn. No thanks. I'll clean up a river.
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest 20. The real rival to Blankfein is @BernieSanders and @ewarren, and not because of the redistribution of money. That's just accounting. It's because Bernie and Warren both believe that the locus of governing should be in democratic institutions, not concentrated finance.
@SenJohnKennedy @tonywest @BernieSanders @ewarren 21. Or, to be put the way Wright Patman did, "We have had more trouble from the few acres of land comprising Wall Street since this Government was established than we have had from any similar land area in any part of the world."
