ICYMI: Economic Liberties’ Sarah Miller and Matt Stoller Featured on Washington’s 2021 Most Influential People List
Washington, D.C. — Washingtonian Magazine’s list of the 250 most influential people in Washington features Economic Liberties’ Executive Director Sarah Miller and Research Director Matt Stoller, highlighting their role as leaders in the modern antitrust movement.
A profile of Sarah Miller is excerpted below and available here:
When Sarah Miller began working on monopoly issues in 2015, she became an expert in what blank stares look like. “Itwas hard to get meetings with congressional staffers,” she recalls, laughing. When a friend learned she was studying monopoly power, he replied: “I haven’t heard the word ‘monopoly’ since the Microsoft case.”
Miller has come far since then—and so has her cause. Once considered a crusty policy backwater, corporate concentration and monopoly power are now pressing economic issues. Just ask Facebook or Google, both of which face cases from the federal government. The public support for those federal interventions got a big boost from Miller, whose previous work under Washingtonian Influencer Barry Lynn included leading a campaign called Freedom From Facebook, which argued that the Menlo Park tech giant should be broken up years before the idea would reach the policy mainstream.
But Miller, whose time in Washington has seen her ascend into a series of elite policy circles, is hunting larger game than just Big Tech. Her concern is how corporate concentration affects all sectors of American life. “The incredible amounts of economic and political power that now sit on the top of virtually every industry in our economy,” Miller charges, have effectively become “engines of inequality.”
She senses this might be the movement’s moment. Miller wants Congress to expand its work around Big Tech into finance, agriculture, telecoms, and healthcare. “It’s a chance that I don’t know we get again if we fail,” she says. “We’re feeling very ambitious.”
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Economic Liberties 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.