In Episode 139 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. In this nearly two-hour long conversation, we discuss how monopoly, commercial concentration, and regulatory capture drive outcomes in our economy, markets, and political system and what we can do to take that power back.

This episode was recorded on Friday, May 29th, amidst the riots that have been unfolding across the country in response to the death of George Floyd, a 46-year old African American man who appears to have been suffocated by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin. Neither Matt or Demetri are in any position to provide further insight into what is transpiring in Minneapolis, but they do discuss the response by some members of the media, the White House, as well as the President’s statement that he is going to issue an executive order to roll back Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act with its legal protections for social media companies. 

We also discuss the Joe Rogan-Spotify deal in the context of antitrust regulation and concentration in the podcast industry, the arrest of a CNN crew in Minneapolis, private equity and the regulatory capture of government by the financial sector, and perhaps most importantly a conversation about the future of the Democratic and Republican parties and whether we are living through the early stages of a new political consensus forming in American life.

You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week’s episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 05/29/2020

Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” David Cicilline, Chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, has called Stoller’s work “an inspiration.” Stoller is a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee.

He also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the financial crisis. While a staffer, he wrote a provision of law mandating a third party audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending activities. He also helped cut part of a $20 billion subsidy to large financial institutions. His 2012 law review article on the foreclosure crisis, The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship, predicted the rise of autocratic political forces, and his 2016 Atlantic article, How the Democrats Killed their Populist Soul, helped inspire the new anti-monopoly movement. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fast Company, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, Vice, The American Conservative, and the Baffler. Stoller writes the monopoly-focused newsletter Big with tens of thousands of subscribers, which you can subscribe to here.