Washington, D.C. — Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Chris Murphy and other leading lights of the anti-monopoly movement concluded a jam-packed day of keynote speeches, conversations, and interactive panels at the 2024 Anti-Monopoly Summit with rousing calls to action, demanding we build an economy that benefits working families and small businessowners over large corporations.

Throughout the afternoon, speakers discussed how to make the anti-monopoly movement’s victories stick, advocating for strong remedies after successful legal challenges as well as better funding antitrust enforcers, or institutionalizing a government-wide approach to promoting competition.

“The more you can show you can fight back, and make government work, that’s what gets it going,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “These agencies [FTC, DOJ, CFPB, etc.] are doing work that is important to our economy, important to our competitiveness, and important to the financial health of America, and they ought to be fully funded to do that work,”

“Economic inputs just don’t match economic outputs because the rules are rigged to protect the status quo and concentrated economic power,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT). “People on the right and the left get this and aren’t satisfied with solutions that don’t speak to economic power, where it is and where it isn’t.”

“Both the right and the left are also exhausted by this relentless commercialization of everything that’s not tied down,” added Senator Murphy. “The erasure of everything that matters to us — healthcare, education, electricity, to the common space…Today, citizenship is just consumerism. To be a good American, all you have to do is just buy things—and that’s exhausting people.”

“There has been an unfortunate tendency to get too wimpy about remedies…If people see the law isn’t working for them, they start to distrust it,” said Tim Wu, Former Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition. “If we end up with our big remedy as users clicking on a bunch of stuff, we failed. Let’s have the confidence for the government to take action that is self-executing and and opens up this market.”

After the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger in 2010, the “behavioral remedy was the only thing they put in place. That’s failed, miserably. The truth is structural remedies are the only way to solve for it,” said Cris Miller, Chief Business Officer at StubHub. “If you can think about remedies in the way where you ask when this is going to stop, where is this going to be in the future, and what does the future look like so that the consumer is ultimately going to benefit from it — you have to introduce ways that’s going to force competition on it.”

“Corporations are too damn big, have too much power, and are tricking and trapping American consumers,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “The folks that understand this best are not the people live in Washington. It’s the folks who live everywhere else, and they live with it every single day.”

“Imposing conduct remedies is a bit of a fool’s errand,” said Bill Baer, Former Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, advocating for preferencing structural remedies. “We are trained in law enforcement, not to oversee conduct. By the time we find out [about violations], tremendous harm can have occurred.”

“Anyone who buys food and medication should oppose the proposed megamerger of Kroger and Albertsons,” said Jessica Crowley, UFCW Local 770 member and pharmacist at  the Albertsons-owned Pavilions. “Not only will it negatively impact retail workers, smaller suppliers, independent chains and businesses, and lower-income communities already facing challenges with food and healthcare access, the companies’ planned divestiture of over 500 stores to C&S Wholesale Grocers is highly unlikely to succeed, given C&S’s limited experience in retail pharmacy.”

“At the NEC, we looked at inflation in industries that were highly concentrated,” said Bharat Ramamurti, Senior Advisor for Economic Strategy at the American Economic Liberties Project. “We saw an enormous spike in prices among the more concentrated industries.”

Watch the full 2024 Anti-Monopoly Summit here.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.