Ted Tatos is Managing Director of EconOne and co-author of the recent report, “Protecting the U.S. Postal Service from Amazon’s Anticompetitive Assault.”  In the conversation, we get into a lot of different aspects of Amazon’s ongoing effort to dominate the postal service. A quick note: Ted’s report was funded by a conservative group called The Family Business Coalition, which includes small family-owned businesses that ship parcels.  For the report, Ted also interviewed a couple of prominent voices in the antimonopoly movement whom we’ve had on the show before—Matt Stoller from the American economic liberties project and Stacy Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self Reliance.

Matthew Jinoo Buck is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and a first-year student at Yale Law School.His article in the American Prospect, “How America’s Supply Chains Got Railroaded” tells the history of how deregulation and consolidation gave us a railroad industry that is now a weak link in our supply chain.  He also tells how  the industry is more dangerous for workers and less reliable for customers even as it produces outsized profits for investors.

Jeff Horwitz is a Wall Street Journal technology reporter who covers Facebook.  He is the lead reporter on the groundbreaking series of articles titled The Facebook Files.  The conversation covers myriad issues facing Facebook and we ask Jeff why, when facing choices between the public interest and growth on the platform, Mark Zuckerberg always chooses growth.

Evan Starr, an associate professor, delves into the economic benefits of banning non-compete agreements, highlighting the boost to wages and worker mobility. The podcast explores the challenges faced by the FTC in regulating these agreements and the implications for workers and businesses. The discussion also touches on the impact of non-compete agreements on worker mobility and wages, the exemption for lawyers, the ongoing debate on non-compete agreements, and the effect of market concentration on employee salaries.

Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project, discusses the debate around monopoly and inflation.  Matt also shares his predictions for the antimonopoly movement in 2022.

Luke Herrine, author of “The Folklore of Unfairness.” Herrine’s article, published recently in the New York University Law Review, argues that conventional wisdom – which holds that the FTC in the 1970s pursued an expansive notion of its unfairness authority but failed spectacularly – “gets the law and the history wrong.”Instead, argues Herrine, the commission’s actions in the 1970s were quite popular, and the FTC Act’s ban on “unfair…acts and practices” is therefore “more potent than commonly assumed.” That argument could take on new urgency as current FTC Chair Lina Khan seeks to push the boundaries of the commission’s authority.

Stacy Mitchell is co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and directs its Independent Business Initiative, which produces research and designs policy to counter concentrated corporate power and strengthen local economies. ILSR’s new report, Amazon’s Toll road, finds that “Amazon is exploiting its position as a gatekeeper to impose steep and growing fees on third-party sellers” and that “even as these exorbitant fees bankrupt sellers, they are generating huge profits for Amazon, a fact that the tech giant conceals in its financial reports.”

Jeff Hauser is the founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, which is an influential organization that scrutinizes executive branch appointees to ensure they serve the public interest rather than large corporations’ interests. The Revolving Door Project’s newest polling and analysis memo, “Corporate Crackdown” concludes that there is broad, bipartisan support for a President who is willing to stand up to entrenched corporate power and illegal corporate conduct.

Brendan Ballou is a trial attorney at DOJ’s antitrust division and author of “The 'No Collusion' Rule,” published earlier this year in the Stanford Law & Policy Review. In that article, Ballou proposes that the FTC, under its unfair methods of competition authority, should pursue a “no collusion” rulemaking , which would seek to prevent companies from raising prices simply because their competitor has done so.

Barry Lynn has literally written the book on two of the hottest economic and policy topics right now—monopolies and supply chain fragility.  His book on monopoly is called Cornered: the new monopoly capitalism and the economics of destruction and his book on supply chains is called End of the Line. On a previous podcast, former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic said that Barry Lynn’s work on launching the antimonopoly movement is “one of the most successful efforts to develop a new intellectual framework and to get it into the bloodstream of the policymaking process.” In this episode, Barry talks about the importance of the President's executive order on competition and where the antimonopoly movement is headed next.