Administration Plans To Toughen Up Anti-Trust Actions
Here's some good news for a Monday:
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s top antitrust official this week plans to restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share.
The new enforcement policy would reverse the Bush administration’s approach, which strongly favored defendants against antitrust claims. It would restore a policy that led to the landmark antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Intel in the 1990s.
The head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Christine A. Varney, is to announce the policy reversal in a speech she will give on Monday before the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy research organization. She will deliver the same speech on Tuesday to the United States Chamber of Commerce.
The speeches were described by people who have consulted with her about the policy shift. The administration is hoping to encourage smaller companies in an array of industries to bring their complaints to the Justice Department about potentially improper business practices by their larger rivals. Some of the biggest antitrust cases were initiated by complaints taken to the Justice Department.
Ms. Varney is expected to say that the administration rejects the impulse to go easy on antitrust enforcement during weak economic times.
She will assert instead that severe recessions can provide dangerous incentives for large and dominating companies to engage in predatory behavior that harms consumers and weakens competition. The announcement is aimed at making sure that no court or party to a lawsuit can cite the Bush administration policy as the government’s official view in any pending cases.
In the speeches, Ms. Varney is expected to explicitly warn judges and litigants in antitrust lawsuits not involving the government to ignore the Bush administration’s policies, which were formally outlined in a report by the Justice Department last year. The report applied legal standards that made it difficult to bring new cases involving monopoly and predatory practices.
As a result of the Bush administration’s interpretation of antitrust laws, the enforcement pipeline for major monopoly cases — which can take years for prosecutors to develop — is thin. During the Bush administration, the Justice Department did not file a single case against a dominant firm for violating the antimonopoly law.
We ought to be using the existing anti-trust laws—or writing more if needed—to bust up these "too big to fail" financial megaconglomerates!
are getting bailed out while we have to cut our losses that they created and STILL are expected to fork out for these guys.
but what part of 'too big to fail' don't you get?
/snark off
If you're too big too fail, you're too big too rationally or safely be permitted to exist.
are to many politicians who will do everything in their power to prevent any of these solutions becoming reality. Even though they were elected to look out for the best interests their humans constituents, the money in their bank accounts will help them get over it.
...there's only so far they can attempt to interfere before they become criminally liable for tampering or obstruction. That's why the DoJ is the proper venue for these kinds of actions.
is that he thinks that big Corporations ... are going to SELF-CORRECT with just a slight nudge from the Federal Government.
I don't think that Obama's going to give them a 'slight nudge'. In fact, I don't think that there will be anything 'slight' about it.
These monopolies have to be broken up, for the good of our economy.
..I'm going to take back much of my prior excoriating comments about his corporatist loyalties. Will even help myself to a heaping helping or two of crow. We'll see.
this is indeed good news. But I'll wait to see it actually in action before I'm going to believe it. As Evet points out the corporations have Congress on a short lead.
The problem still being saying what ones going to do and actually doing it are two different things.
the GOP will try to spin this as anti-small business in 5... 4... 3... 2...
hahahahahahahahahahahaha
ahem…
that's a good one…
next you will try to tell us they are not permitting lobbying by the Oligarchs
or accepting their campaign contributions
the laughs never stop
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
America is back! No more "bully economics". No more of the fortune 500's stealing the money from the SBA. Now, "if they're too big"....we break them up into smaller business's so they can grow again. Finally,no more "fat cat corporation" suppressing the imagination of the new market idea. Finally, America is a "free trade market" again, not a monopolistic-trade market. Finally. Doing this is how America became strong in the first place. Finally, someone brought a can of "Raid" to clean out the house and kill the cockroach corporations. This will work. Just like Teddy Roosevelt said: "you gotta prune the tree back if you want the tree to grow larger"(or something like that). Finally! It's been years. Finally!
Big Daddy
Especially Old Dirty Rupert Murdock.
You're going to hear his pundits screaming out this on the news. I can guarantee it!
I think that this is great news.
in the stampede over the Wanda Sykes transgression story. Give it two hours and count the comments.
“Why would anyone with a functioning brain believe this guy?”
Some guy with an eating disorder
the financial elites talk a big game about pure Darwinian Capitalism/competition/free market BUT behind
closed doors they try to PRICE fix and NOT allow the competition to compete. my favorite example of this is john d. rockefeller standard oil. he hated competition it interferred with price fixing and inventory.
I hope that those being looked at include the handful of corporations that together makeup the MSM cartel. The cartel has monopoly powers and is using it to abuse the public. Divestiture is called for.
fired 10,000 air traffic controllers and destroyed their union? Some of the best, the brightest, the most skilled and dedicated workers in America in high stress critical jobs. And now we are throwing money at CEO's, Executive Staff members, Wall Street high rollers, AIG default swap crap shooters, and into the pockets of shareholders (many of which happen to be the CEO's and Executive Staff and all those people rolling in stock-options.
great, but how about if the DOJ dismiss all charges against John Stagliano? while we're at it, how many among us even know who the fuck he is? the media has complicity in the fact so few of us know who he is.
your name's Lebowski, Lebowski... and your wife is Bunny
I've been wondering if there'd be any followup to Bush's complete rollover for abusive monopolies.
Microsoft was, after all, judged a predatory monopoly under Clinton, and then what happened? Nothing. Let's not overlook the fact that said nothing resulted in IE5-6 being the dominant web browsers for over half a decade, which if you know anything about web technology flat-out held the world that bloggers inhabit back. Still is, really.
They got their monopoly and once Netscape folded their incentive to improve on the single most important tool for information desemination in the 21st century went to zero in nothing flat. Hence, said product--something vitally important to pretty much everything we do today--stagnated with essentially zero real improvements until a combination of Firefox and Web2.0 architect outrage finally forced some modest improvement.
Alternately, look at their Office or Windows Client divisions--net profits on the order of 80%. Meaning when you (or your employer) pay $200 for a copy of Office, you're really paying for about $50 of R&D, marketing, employees, etc. The other $150 is the monopoly tax, because, hey, it's Office--everybody needs a copy. Same for Windows.
Point being that in an age where computers are EVERYTHING, having a convicted predatory monopoly in charge of the OS that runs them and fully willing to use its monopoly-supplied massive profits to prevent further competition and extend its monopoly into other areas is a BAD thing.
Really, it should have been a Ma Bell situation, were it not for Bush promptly folding to a boatload of political donations once MS got nervous.
Boy, do I hope the new administration does something about this. They won't, but I can hope.
Microsoft was not a monopoly- what was their crime, offering a free browser with their operating system Windows? Netscape sucked back then- and if they wanted to compete with microsoft they shoulda come out with a better and more appealing operating system and browser. How can you say that Microsoft had a monopoly but at the same time they didn't when FireFox became popular? FireFox's success proved that Netscape's claims were garbage- they were a losing company that couldn't provide a good product so they had to cry to Uncle Sam to try and finish Microsoft.
Microsoft is no monopoly and hasn't been. So what if their net profits are 80% from Office and Windows client divisions? Why is this an evil thing? Have you ever thought that the reason the majority of people buy Windows is because they like it? Those that don't are free to buy the numerous operating systems that are out there if they want. Windows is what people like- release something that they like better and it will do well. Monopolies can never ever work without government intervention- the only monopoly microsoft has is in the "Microsoft Windows" market because of the patent office. Meaning it is illegal for you to program an operating system identical to Windows- call it Windows and sell it.
Anyone is free to bring any OS they want to the market- and if people like it they will use it. Especially these days where you aren't limited to buying what is at a brick and mortar store- these nonsense complaints about Microsoft hold no weight and never did.
When Obama starts channeling Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and starts ripping trusts apart.
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