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| 2020 Election: | Joe Biden's book | Cory Booker's book | Pete Buttigieg's book | Kamala Harris' book | Bernie Sanders' book | Donald Trump's book | 2018 Senate Debates |
Antitrust Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age by Amy Klobuchar  (Click for Amazon book review)
BOOK REVIEW by OnTheIssues.org:
Senator Amy Klobuchar, having recovered from her presidential bid, tackles a big issue in her 2021 book Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age. You can tell she's serious because fully a third of this 607 page volume is given over to extensive notes and sources. And you can tell she doesn't take herself overly seriously because in addition to charts and graphs, the book is illustrated with editorial cartoons, some recent and some dating back more than a century, and among the political and scholarly sources she also includes issue-oriented comedians John Oliver and Jon Stewart. This is no campaign book. It's both a historical reference and a call to action. The first third of the book is concerned with the history of antitrust law before finally getting into the meat of her discussion, which is why a renewed effort into antitrust is important, and why it shouldn't just be a subject in law schools and corporate boardrooms. She makes the case of how, as enforcement has dropped, we have witnessed an unprecedented consolidation in so many industries. For example, she points out how in 1983 fifty companies owned some 90% of American media. By 2011, 90% of US media was owned by only six companies: GE, Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS. If that isn't eyebrow raising enough, she notes that the plethora of online travel companies operating different websites are, in fact, owned by only two businesses, making the notion of competition an illusion. Klobuchar offers a 25-point plan of action which itself can be consolidated into what Congress should do, what the Executive branch--particularly the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department--should do, and what ordinary citizens should do. It's clearly an issue to which Klobuchar has given a great deal of thought, right down to rebranding "antitrust" as being pro-competition. It's not only the negative "anti" that concerns her, but the fact that the historical trust-busting of more than a century ago doesn't resonate today. We're now in an age where the biggest business issues include the outsize power of Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, and the way lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry got Congress to write into law that Medicare is forbidden from negotiating the prices it pays for prescription drugs. While generous with sharing credit--she always notes other sponsors of the bills she's worked on--the book marks Klobuchar staking a claim to being one of the Congressional authorities on these issues. At the end of her acknowledgements, she says that what she'd really like to do down the road is have to write a new epilogue for the book describing a successful pro-competition movement. -- Daniel M. Kimmel, OnTheIssues editor, June 2, 2021
Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age by Amy Klobuchar. Error processing SSI file
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Page last edited: Nov 25, 2021
