Last week, Economic Liberties and a diverse group of national and state anti-monopoly partners were lucky to sit down virtually with FTC Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter, to break down the antitrust agencies’ draft merger guidelines. Together, with 3,000 people live across our platforms, we heard from writers, farmers, pharmacists, small business owners, grocery store workers, and advocates as they shared their firsthand challenges with monopoly power and offered support and feedback for the agencies proposed merger framework.
This event reached more than 20,000 people on social media and also earned substantive coverage from CNBC and the New York Times’ DealBook. It’s easy to see why. The draft merger guidelines mark an important milestone in the continued fight against concentrated corporate power and will influence the work of the agencies and how judges view challenges to large mergers.
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As Chair Khan and AAG Kanter said, public engagement is an important part of the process: “A key goal of ours is to begin to make sure that we're hearing directly from people, because at the end of the day, which mergers go through and which ones do not, can be hugely consequential for people's lives.”
Since the FTC and DOJ announced the draft guidelines, they’ve already heard from hundreds of healthcare workers, writers, farmers, and others who have been affected by big corporate mergers. We recently launched ShareYourMergerStory.org, a brand-new site, so that you can also tell the FTC and DOJ what you think about the new guidelines. We hope you share it with your network and encourage anyone affected by corporate consolidation to submit their feedback on the draft guidelines by September 18th.
You can watch the full event and hear what speakers like Vons employee and UFCW 770 member Grace Garcia, Writers Guild of America West’s Laura Blum-Smith, Anne Schwagerl from Minnesota Farmers Union, and others had to share here.
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