Given how much our antitrust enforcers have achieved for the American people in recent years, let’s hope the Maryland governor is wrong about which direction Kamala Harris is trending.
The following opinion piece was published in The Baltimore Sun.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore recently stunned viewers on CNBC by predicting a new Democratic administration would pump the brakes on monopoly enforcement. For three years, through investigations, lawsuits and new regulations, the Biden-Harris administration has been stepping up the pressure on big companies that throw their market weight around — “turning the page on a failed experiment,” per DOJ antitrust head Jonathan Kanter. The big companies are feeling the strain. They’re praying for a policy pivot, and they’re enlisting everyone they can — including public figures like Moore, who’s cozier with big business than you might think — to help make that pivot happen.
In the CNBC interview, journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin noted that “there have been a lot of calls from the donor class” for a pullback under Harris, asking Moore whether we might expect a “shift in … her regulatory views.” Moore took the cue. Harris, he predicted, would prioritize “making it easier for our large industries to be able to compete” over protecting consumers.
Read the rest of the piece here.
Due to space constraints, we weren’t able to mention:
- After leaving Wall Street, Moore helped run an online, for-profit college company — the kind of company that exists solely to squeeze money out of people with big dreams, limited prospects, and access to government loans. (Shortly after he left, the company was hit by a $270,000 fine for misleading veterans, illegally pressuring prospective students, and concealing information in order to get them to sign.)
- Hobnobbing with people like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Blackstone CFO Michael Chae, private-equity investor Mark Bezos (brother of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos), and JP Morgan Asset Management head Mary Callahan Erdoes (net worth $300 million, and floated as a successor to Jamie Dimon), has led Moore to evolve from the military man he once was into someone who will argue the interests of America’s elite ownership class on TV.
Photo by Elvert Barnes is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.