August 14, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

In a landmark case brought by federal antitrust regulators, a U.S. district court judge has ruled that Google has established an illegal monopoly in online search. Google, judge Amit Mehta found last week, shelled out billions to cut deals that have made it the default search on web browsers and smartphones.

Google’s monopoly status, the court found, has artificially crowded out potential competitors and let the Silicon Valley giant dictate higher ad prices.

The solution for this situation? The Justice Department is reportedly considering an excellent one: break up Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Steps like spinning off AdWords, Google's search ad program, or forcing Google to divest from its Chrome web browser would weaken the search giant’s iron grip on the internet and let new and probably cheaper alternatives flourish.

Judge Mehta still has to okay any remedy for ending Google’s monopoly. But the mere consideration of a step as bold as breaking up Alphabet represents a major shift back to a time when breaking up trusts to weaken corporate profiteering — and undermine plutocratic fortunes — amounted to just what regulators did.

Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

Dealing with Dobbs: Keeping a Fundamental Right Alive

This week’s frontline face: Eleanor Grano, the communications manager for the Chicago Abortion Fund.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Grano's organization has only become more important since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling opened the floodgates for restrictive abortion laws. Abortions have become much more expensive now that many patients have to travel outside their home states for reproductive services, a reality that is tying a basic right to income level.

Funds like Grano’s are working to help lower-income women afford the post-Dobbs abortion landscape, but, Grano stresses, we need state and federal action to enshrine the right for an abortion for everyone, regardless of income.

What makes this fight so important: “I understand that it’s hard not to get depressed about the current state of abortion access in America, and sometimes it feels like we’re fighting a losing battle,” Grano notes on Inequality.org. “But until we get some national protection to abortion access back, we have to do whatever we can to help one another.”

How About Four Days for Work, Three for Everything Else?

The standard five-day, 40-hour workweek became our nation’s law of the land with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. What had seemed simply unthinkable would soon become a standard Americans took for granted. Do we now need another seismic shift in how long every week we work?

Earlier this year, Senator Bernie Sanders (Vt.) introduced legislation to shorten our basic workweek down to 32 hours spread over four days and without a reduction in pay. A move that bold would not be unprecedented. Many companies and countries have already begun experimenting with shortened workweeks. The results? Participants feel — no surprise — less burned out and more productive.

Unions in the United States led the fight for a five-day, 40-hour week, and now unions are driving the campaign for a four-day, 32-hour work. The United Auto Workers brought up the notion of a shortened workweek schedule in their most recent auto industry contract fight. Expect a big fight on that proposal in the next auto industry bargaining cycle. We have more below.

The latest UBS Global Wealth Report shows that the richest 1.5 percent in the world last year owned over 3.6 times more wealth than the bottom 82 percent. That elite group of just 58 million at the top are sitting on nearly 48 percent of the world’s wealth while the 3.1 billion individuals with less than $100,000 hold just 1 percent. For an interactive chart and more on global inequality check out the link below: 

Could the Rich People-Friendly Tax Tide Now Be Turning?

In the mid-20th century, amid growing economic equality, public financial support for America’s public schools expanded mightily. The impressive result: By 1970, graduation rates from U.S. high schools had quadrupled over 1920 levels. But that era of growing equality and expanding public education started fading in the 1970s. In the 2020s, a new U.S. Senate report notes, that fade has intensified.

Has the momentum behind privatizing public education now become too strong to stop? Maybe not. The governor of the state most boldly advancing public education has just ascended onto the national political stage. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

Ho Chi Minh Never Envisioned This Level of Corporate Conniving

This week’s dour deep pocket: The Vietnamese billionaire Trinh Van Quyet, the 49-year-old chairman and founder of the FLC Group, a corporate empire that owns the discount Bamboo Airways and major holdings in assorted hotels, resorts, and golf courses.

What has Quyet sour: His conviction last week for falsely inflating the value of one of his business empire’s subsidiaries before that company’s shares went up for sale on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange. The move defrauded an estimated $144 million from about 30,000 shareholders.

“I never intended,” Quyet told judges in the case, “to steal money from investors.”

But Quyet did admit that his empire’s backroom maneuvering before the public offering began had ballooned the value of his subsidiary’s shares, on paper, from $59,000 to $170 million.

The last word: Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam’s top politician, died at age 80 three days before Quyet’s trial started, but not before vowing that his administration’s campaign against Vietnam’s massive corruption would be a “blazing furnace” where no one would be untouchable. 

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