Washington Post: The Finance 202: Liberals extend hot streak by targeting Wall Street in primaries
Fight Corporate Monopolies, a liberal political action committee, officially launched just over a month ago.
But the group of operatives with ties to Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has already claimed its first upset victory: It helped topple Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), chairman of the House Financial Services housing subcommittee, in his Tuesday primary against 44-year-old Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush.
The organization spent $90,000 on an ad portraying Clay as siding with big banks over then-President Obama against the fiduciary rule, the obscure-outside-the-Beltway requirement that financial advisers give retirement savers advice free of conflicts of interest. (Watch the spot above or here.)
And now the PAC is aiming to repeat the coup against an even more powerful figure. It is targeting House Ways and Means Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) by once again highlighting an incumbent Democrat’s Wall Street backers. The group has spent $300,000 on a pair of ads tying Neal to the Blackstone Group, his top source of contributions.
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Liberal activists hope to redeem political victories for legislative ones.
In the case of Fight Corporate Monopolies, its sister organization, the American Economic Liberties Project, is laying the groundwork for an antitrust lobbying offensive. It will push Democratic lawmakers and regulators to break up big businesses the group argues are distorting markets while hurting workers and consumers “in sectors from contact lenses to cat food.”
“There’s a huge list of things we need to do to dig ourselves out of 40 years of deferring to monopolies,” Sarah Miller, executive director of the project and a leader of Fight Corporate Monopolies, tells me.
Miller, a former Obama Treasury Department aide, says the concentration of corporate power has been “supercharged by the pandemic. We’re seeing the largest corporations make out like bandits and get all the support they could ask for, while support for families is time-limited and insufficient to provide stability and security.”
The American Economic Liberties Project is laying out an agenda, shared here for the first time, that calls for a “holistic reorientation of government’s relationship to private power.” While acknowledging there is “no one-size-fits-all solution,” it recommends a number of steps, including:
- creating a public bank along the lines of the Depression-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation to help pandemic-ravaged businesses go through quick reorganizations;
- adopting Warren’s proposal to remake the private equity business model by making firms responsible for the employee pensions and debt obligations of the companies they buy;
- providing for more muscular antitrust enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission;
- directing Congress to conduct a “thorough study of market concentration in the U.S.”;
- and assessing the Federal Reserve’s role in inequality while diversifying the central bank’s leadership.
The group aims to tell a story about how little decisions in Washington can have big consequences.
Antitrust advocates got a boost from the headline-grabbing House Judiciary Committee hearing last week featuring the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook. Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.), who presided over the hearing as chairman of the panel’s antitrust subcommittee, concluded it by declaring it had “made one fact clear to me: These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up.”
Miller argues the effort needs to go beyond Big Tech. Financial interests have figured prominently in the ads Fight Corporate Monopolies has funded so far because “as regulators and policymakers have stepped back from structuring markets, Wall Street has stepped into that role … Wall Street is the entity that’s shaping the structure of commerce in America, and part of our overall goal is to make sure policymakers perform that role and perform it well.”