Washington, D.C. — The kick-off remarks at the American Economic Liberties Project’s 2023 Anti-Monopoly Summit were punctuated by aggressive speeches from a series of government regulators and enforcers who pledged to rekindle their authority to forcefully take on corporate monopolies.

Throughout the morning session, speakers celebrated the movement’s wins, dissected the challenges ahead, and examined how a range of stakeholders can come together to create an economy built from the bottom up and middle out.

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a champion of robust antitrust legislation in Congress, spoke to the immense opportunity now to rebalance how power is distributed in the economy and ensure a fair playing field for small business owners, entrepreneurs, workers, and communities.

Citing Adam Smith, Senator Klobuchar said “You can only have an economy that works, if the government is willing to take on the standing army of monopolists.”

On building bipartisan support for this work in the face of a lobbying blitz by corporate monopolies, Senator Klobuchar said “If you want to have an economic system that works for everyone, you got to have true competition from whatever of the aisle or ideology you come from…You have monopolies, using their own platforms to target at officials to keep their monopolies in place.”

Director of the National Economic Council Lael Brainard spoke to how the Biden Administration is reshaping highly concentrated markets to ensure competition unlock the full potential of our economy. “Competition is a fundamental American value at the beating heart of capitalism,” said Director Brainard. “It’s a key pillar of our economic agenda – it has to be.”

“Competitive market structures mean a more resilient economy, so that shocks don’t paralyze the entire system when a few suppliers or middlemen become choke points,” continued Director Brainard.

During a fireside conversation with the New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter spoke to how the antitrust agencies are enforcing the law to protect working Americans from corporate monopolies.  

“In sector after sector for the last 40 years, we’ve seen consolidation,” said FTC Chair Lina Khan. “And that consolidation is leading to higher prices for consumers, and declining rates of innovation and entrepreneurship…We are fully activating the tools and the laws that Congress charged us with administrating.”

“Antitrust and antimonopoly is about people – about making people’s lives better, making democratic and capitalist society more productive, more fair, more open, more accessible,” said AAG Jonathan Kanter. 

“In terms of unfinished business?” Kanter closed, “All of it.”

Highlighting the importance of labor in the anti-monopoly movement along with cross-agency collaboration in the fight against corporate power, National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said “We’ve developed really critical partnerships with the FTC, DOJ Antitrust, CFPB – our goals are the same: to stop deceptive and unfair practices, to address misclassification, to address employment structures that restrain competition.”

During a mainstage conversation on challenging corporate power from the ground up, anti-monopoly champion Rep. Summer Lee, spoke to how the anti-monopoly fight is a personal one. “I came to this, not as an expert but as someone with a necessity – from a region that has known its fair share of robber barons.”

New York State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris similarly emphasized the role of local communities in battling corporate power, stating “Market power is power – not just in the market, but in everything else. It becomes political power, and exercises itself in a lot of facets of our lives.”

And on a panel on promoting American business dynamism and innovation, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said “Can you imagine playing a basketball game where a referee has their whistle taken away from them and the rules are no longer there?…We need the referees and we need those rules enforced.”

On that same panel, business owner Shirley Modlin emphasized the importance of leveling the playing field for small businesses, stating “We can’t grow our business, we can’t get together with our colleagues, because they’re dropping like flies, because they can’t afford to stay in the game. It’s really not level at all.”

You can catch the second half of the day’s mainstage remarks and conversations, which kick off at 3PM ET, here. 

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.

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The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.