High-End Donors Target an Antitrust Champion

We’ve recently learned about Project 2025, the GOP’s scheme to let corporate agents take over our government. But there’s also a less visible effort by some donors to also make Democrats install corporate-subservient officials to expand their monopoly power.

High-finance finaglers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are quietly demanding that Kamala Harris commit to appointing their designated toadies to oversee America’s so-called “free-enterprise” structure. Their primary target is the Federal Trade Commission, a little-known agency meant to protect and extend economic competition.

The FTC is now headed by Lina Khan, a tenacious opponent of anti-consumer, anti-worker mergers and takeovers. She rightly recognizes that the “free” in free enterprise is not an adjective but a verb, requiring aggressive public action to free up the enterprise of people who are now routinely shut out of the market by monopolistic giants.

If we really want free markets, Khan says, then let’s free them.

Oh, how the money vultures screeched! “She’s a dope,” raged takeover bully Barry Diller in a dopey fury.

Since many of the monopolistic titans who are offended by Khan’s otherwise very popular progressive populism are from the high-dollar donor class, they have undue clout. Thus they are bluntly demanding Khan’s head as their price for financially backing Harris’s presidential run. Commissioner Khan, they exclaim, simply does not understand “the way the Washington game is played.

Oh yes she does — and she’s flat out rejecting it. Khan is the first real antitrust champion America has had in years. But will leading Democrats have the guts and integrity to defend her? Or will the business-as-usual powers be ushered back in?

The answer to that will be an early measure of Harris’s commitment to economic democracy.

This piece was originally published on OtherWords.org.