You're Probably Getting Screwed by The Rockefellers
The Antimonopoly Legacy of Paul Wellstone and What it Means Today
Welcome to You’re Probably Getting Screwed, a weekly newsletter and video series from J.D. Scholten and Justin Stofferahn about the Second Gilded Age and the ways economic concentration is putting politics and profits over working people.
“I’m for the little feller, not the Rockefellers.” - Paul Wellstone.
Last week JD talked about new polling in battleground states showing a populist economic message resonates with wide swaths of Americans and highlighted several Democratic candidates running on that message. I wanted to build off that by discussing a political hero of ours, the late Senator Wellstone who was killed in a plane crash 22 years ago last week, and why his legacy is as relevant as ever.
Wellstone is most often remembered for his grassroots politics from organizing the rural poor to his scrappy but victorious 1990 Senate campaign where he was outspent 7 to 1. While the grassroots tactics Wellstone embraced have been shared with advocates around the country (including Governor Tim Walz), it is his legacy of confronting corporate monopolies that was central to this organizing strategy and is most instructive to the economic and political challenges we currently face.
In the 1990s Wellstone wasn’t just going against the interests of deep-pocketed lobbyists, but a pro-monopoly consensus that had taken over both parties. Democrats had abandoned prairie populism Wellstone said, because of “a set of shared assumptions about what is necessary these days for survival in a global economy.” It sounds a lot like billionaire Mark Cuban who has argued that the efforts by Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to rein in Big Tech monopolists threatens America’s ability to compete globally on artificial intelligence.
Despite this Washington Consensus, Wellstone built a robust record of standing up to corporate concentration in the Senate. He defended the rules that checked the power of dominant corporations in the livestock industry and was often the lone voice speaking out against mega-mergers like CBS-Viacom. He was one of the few Democrats that voted against removing constraints on consolidation in the telecommunication and financial industries including voting against the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which had kept investment and commercial banks separate. In a speech on the Senate floor Wellstone warned repeal would remove a key safeguard in banking and lead to financial conglomerates that would expose Americans to great risk. He said this roughly a decade before the financial crisis.
In his signature style, Wellstone viewed confronting monopoly power as part of a grassroots political project. While considering a run for the White House in 2000 he plotted out a populist campaign placing corporate power front and center. “There are a bunch of issues I want to put back on the table dealing with concentration of power. I think I’m going to be a Teddy Roosevelt Democrat talking about trust-busting,” he told the Associated Press in 1998. Wellstone even laid out a three-point plan for taking on corporate monopolies that both candidates and antimonopoly advocates could learn from today: concrete and popular proposals, organizing around those proposals, and making monopoly power an issue up and down the ballot.
Wellstone was part of a long legacy in Minnesota of grassroots-fueled populist opposition to consolidated power. In the 1870s farmers in Minnesota came together in the Grange movement to elect leaders that passed state legislation to crack down on rail monopolists. In the 1930s small retailers across the state organized and garnered the support of Floyd B. Olson - the state’s first Farmer-Labor governor - for an anti-chain store tax to protect small businesses. These movements were fueled by everyday people, like the farmers I work for that have prioritized challenging monopoly power in rural communities or the independent pharmacists in Minnesota organizing to take on pharmacy benefit managers. These folks, like most Americans, have grown increasingly frustrated with the size and power of major corporations.
We not only need more politicians that can harness this frustration through an inclusive populist economic message in their campaigns as JD laid out. We need the antimonopoly movement itself to do the same.
There are a number of incredible national organizations and thought leaders this newsletter highlights every week that make up the modern antimonopoly movement, but beating back today’s Rockefellers will require a movement that embodies Wellstone. One that not only agitates in the halls of Congress, but state legislatures and city halls as well. A movement not just for attorneys, economists and policy wonks, but one that inspires the workers, small business owners, farmers and families being squeezed by the extreme consolidation all around us to stand up and reclaim our economy and democracy. Fighting monopoly power is for all of us because it impacts all of us. Or, as Wellstone said, “We all do better, when we all do better.”
Make sure you get out and vote on Tuesday!
YOU’RE PROBABLY (ALSO) GETTING SCREWED BY:
Billionaires Influencing Elections…again
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. His current net worth is $204.8 billion dollars a fortune generated by building the Big Tech monopolist Amazon.
In the "Democracy Dies in Daylight” category of things, the Washington Post's editorial staff was prepared to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris before Bezos nixed that idea. I don’t think people were waiting for the WaPo endorsement before deciding who to vote for but no individual should have all of that power…
Ultra Wealthy
The ultra-wealthy can’t cheat death, but they can use death to cheat taxes.
Billionaires Rigging the Economy
Elon Musk wants to tank the economy. If Donald Trump wins next week’s election, Musk will lead a government commission dedicated to chipping away at federal spending in his potential administration with Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick and, potentially, former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who has become widely regarded as a conspiracy theorist.
So a billionaire, a CEO and a conspiracy theorist walk into a bar… Ugh.
Plant Closure
Retirement
Fortune magazine has quite the headline “Baby boomers say they don’t need to retire now that they can work from home—and they’ve got side hustles on top of their 9-to-5s”
Maybe Fortune will have a follow up story about all of the folks who can’t afford to retire.
SOME GOOD NEWS
Wealth Tax is Popular
State AGs Fight Pharmaceutical Price-Fixing
BEFORE YOU GO
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Break ‘Em Up,
Justin Stofferahn
Wellstone was a brilliant Progressive/Populist.
Good read