Episode #5: Antitrust on the Campaign Trail with Maggie Goodlander and more
With a week to go before the general election, we talk to several House candidates who are talking about corporate power in their campaigns.
Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on antitrust on the campaign trail on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Everybody is steeling themselves for a tight presidential election. On the Republican side we have the world’s richest man essentially running as a shadow president and the world’s second-richest man submitting to Trump by rejecting an endorsement of his opponent for the news outlet he owns. On the Democratic side we have corporate allies calling for the head of Lina Khan.
But under the surface, candidates are taking on corporations in their campaign pitches. We could see an upset in deep-red Nebraska from an independent candidate named Dan Osborn who has credited Matt’s book Goliath for his political awakening. And this posture from candidates, across the ideological spectrum, is more pronounced that you might think from listening to mainstream-media horse race reporting.
Maggie Goodlander worked in the Biden Justice Department antitrust division, which has helped transform the government’s relationship to corporate power. Now she is running for Congress from New Hampshire by running against monopolies. For this episode of the podcast, we wanted to learn: What’s it like to mount a political campaign built on antitrust, and can you win with that kind of message?
We speak with Maggie and hear from two other candidates in swing districts who taking a similar message to voters.
Listen via Apple:
Or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And you can check out the candidates we spoke to in this episode:
Maggie Goodlander (NH-02): https://maggiefornh.com
Will Rollins (CA-41): https://willrollinsforcongress.com
Monica Tranel (MT-01): https://www.monicatranel.com
Thanks for listening, and let us know how we’re doing in the comments or by responding directly to this email.
-Matt and Dave
(Courtesy Maggie Goodlander for Congress)
I have failed to find a list of candidates for Federal office (any party) who are running on an antitrust plank. They should be running as a group, yes? So it would be easier to make donations and contrast each's approach to antitrust.
Here's an interesting link on the matter. https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/committee-to-support-the-antitrust-laws/C00225177/candidate-recipients/2024
As always, thank you both for your efforts to moving the ball down the floor.
Dick Kaiser, Tucson
This was great. As libertarian/Austrian leaning, please don't conflate over regulation/intervention with good economics. You have to prove price gauging. It's a simple legal statue that violates the fundamental principles of exchange. Not enforce a simple ceiling/floor. Arguably that's the kind of thinking after the GFC that got us here, created too many billionaires, corporate power, burdening everyone's children with debt. I'm not completely against deficit finance but I'm certainly not an MMTer. It's delusional math. Think of it as a huge body of water that gets damned. You are compartmentalizing the flow of money. If done too aggressively you get this huge opaque knot that is difficult to navigate.