The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
It’s unclear whether Donald Trump will continue the Biden administration’s focus on antitrust enforcement when he again becomes president on Monday. But advocates and state officials say that regardless of what Trump does, the fight will continue on the state and local levels.
Trump and members of his incoming administration have sent mixed messages when it comes to curbing abuses by huge players in markets for groceries, prescription drugs, rental housing, finance, online retail, farm implements, and even live entertainment.
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance last year praised Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan for the agency’s newly aggressive antitrust enforcement, but Trump then declined to reappoint her.
Trump, in December, slammed pharmacy middlemen just as the toughest regulations of the healthcare giants were built into a bipartisan spending package. But after billionaire allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy criticized the package, Trump threw his support behind a new deal in which the new regulations were stripped out.
The FTC in 2023 sued Amazon, accusing it of “illegally maintaining monopoly power” and squeezing small players out of business. But founder Jeff Bezos this year stopped his Washington Post from endorsing a presidential candidate and Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural. So, the fate of the FTC lawsuit remains to be seen.
In the trenches
Regardless of what Trump and his administration do, there’s plenty to be done in the states and momentum is building, said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.
“One monkey doesn’t stop the circus,” he said Wednesday. “We’re not going to quit no matter what the federal government does. We’re going to keep on going, whether it has to do with Ticketmaster, RealPage or Agri Stats.”
Ellison was referring to Ticketmaster-Live Nation, which is being sued jointly by the U.S. Justice Department, Ellison’s office and other state attorneys general on allegations that it uses monopolistic practices to enrich itself while making artists and their followers poorer. Ellison and other attorneys general have also joined the Justice Department in a suit accusing Agri Stats of assisting big meat processors to collude in setting higher prices.
Ellison was speaking as part of an online event hosted by two antitrust watchdogs: the Institute for Local Self Reliance and the State Innovation Exchange. The focus was on what state and local activists and officials can do to curb unfair practices by giant corporations — with or without the participation of the incoming administration.
“Many of the challenges that people face in their lives today are directly related to unchecked concentration of corporate power, whether it’s rapidly rising rents, sky-high grocery prices, struggling rural communities, pharmacy deserts, grocery deserts, coercion and abuse on the job; all of these things are connected to the concentration of corporate power,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self Reliance.
The renewed focus on antitrust enforcement follows a four-decade lull in which conservative economic thinkers argued that allowing corporations to consolidate would create efficiencies that would be good for consumers.
“It all goes back to the fact that in about 1980, we just stopped doing antitrust,” Ellison said. “We were sold a bill of goods. We were told that economies of scale achieved by really big enterprises were going to lower prices for consumers. What we ended up learning is that they used their size to clear out the market with predatory pricing and then jack everybody up.”
Farmers, renters and politics
Earlier this week, Ellison joined the FTC in a lawsuit alleging another way monopolistic practices feed rising food costs. They sued farm-implement titan John Deere to require it to share its products’ computer codes so farmers can repair their own combines and other equipment. It’s a principle he called “right to repair.”
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes described how she sued nine major apartment landlords in Phoenix and Tucson and software company RealPage, alleging that RealPage enabled the landlords to collude in pushing rents ever upward.
Since 2016, 70% of Phoenix renters have been affected by the arrangement, Mayes said, and rents have gone up by 36%.
“We don’t have a competitive rental market in Arizona anymore,” she said.
The Justice Department in 2023 sued RealPage, but regardless of what the Trump administration does with that suit, Mayes’s suit under Arizona antitrust law can go forward.
Mayes also joined the opposition to the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger, which she said would have expanded Arizona food deserts, especially in rural parts of the state. She added that these fights haven’t only been good policy, they’ve also turned out to be good politics.
“The people have reacted really strongly in favor of what we’ve done out here in Arizona in RealPage and the Kroger-Albertsons merger,” she said.
Iowa state Representative J.D. Scholten said that’s been his experience as well.
Before running for the state House, the former minor league baseball player made two quixotic runs for Congress as a Democrat in the second-most agricultural district in the United States. Because he was such a long shot, that freed him to talk about whatever he wanted as he traveled from one farm community to the next in the northwest corner of the state.
“I talked to voters who would always vote for me, never vote for me and everywhere in between,” he said. “Almost every time, I would bring up corporate greed, or antitrust, and I didn’t get pushback one single time… When you look at the history of antitrust, it was farmers standing up to railroads.”
He added, “When the pandemic happened it put a spotlight on this. We saw farmers being squeezed both on the input side and on the market side. We saw workers being suppressed. And we saw consumers paying the most they ever have for meat. All the while, these huge multinational corporations were making record profits.”
As evidence of the bipartisan potential of the issue, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost started taking on huge pharmacy middlemen long before the FTC came into the fight. In 2023, he sued Express Scripts, Humana and others under Ohio antitrust law and the state’s deceptive practices act.
On Tuesday, the FTC issued a report accusing the companies of essentially forcing people to use their mail-order pharmacies for expensive specialty drugs and marking them up 1,000% or more almost a quarter of the time.
But as possible evidence of how fraught such actions can be politically, Yost led an effort to push through the merger between home-state Kroger and Albertsons.
Food wars
Tammie Hetrick is CEO of the Washington Food Industry Association, which represents independent grocers across the state. Even in the absence of the Kroger-Albertsons merger, suppliers have hosed mom-and-pop grocers in favor of the mega-chains, she said.
During the pandemic, her group’s members were locked out of canning supplies, pet food, propane bottles and many other items.
“We had pictures from our rural stores with just empty shelves, and their owners were panicking,” Hetrick said. “And then you’d go to a local, publicly traded store and their shelves are full. It was very frustrating that we were told we can’t have those supplies because they’re only going to sell them to large-distribution, mass class.”
Now, amid avian influenza, her members can’t get eggs, Hetrick said.
Her comments came after an FTC hearing on Tuesday in which several independent grocers and their suppliers said the big chains were squeezing them out of business. One described how suppliers got around the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act by selling neighboring dollar stores goods in packages that weren’t available to independent grocers — and at prices that were favorable to the massive dollar chains.
Dollar stores are notorious for pushing out full-service grocers, failing to offer healthy food, and even increasing crime.
Ellison, the Minnesota AG, said fighting the corporate consolidation that creates such outcomes is an issue whose time has come.
“Antitrust has the answer to a lot of economic questions that are really bothering people,” he said. “People want to know why are wages stagnant, why do we have disappearing pharmacies around our state, why are grocery prices going up, why are rental prices going up, why are all these economic challenges happening? I think there’s one overriding answer: It’s the consolidation of markets.”
