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(47,151 posts) Wed Jan 8, 2025, 08:53 AM Wednesday

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan's exit interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin for CNBC

CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin sits down with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to discuss the Biden administration's achievements, expectations for the Trump agenda, and more.

We Found Corporate America’s Biggest Enemy

Billionaire CEOs and political donors want to get Lina Khan fired. As chair of the FTC, she’s taken on Amazon, Kroger, Microsoft, Meta, Airbnb, and more. She’s challenging powerful corporations like never before — and they’re terrified.
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The End and Beginning of the Lina Khan Era

The FTC chair lost her job on the same day she added another legal victory. The neo-Brandeisian efforts to convince judges to revive antitrust could have staying power.

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-12-12-end-and-beginning-lina-khan-era-antitrust/

On Tuesday, a U.S. district court judge in Oregon, after a three-week trial, ruled for the Federal Trade Commission that the proposed $25 billion merger between Kroger and Albertsons should be blocked. Less than an hour later, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intent to depose FTC chair Lina Khan in favor of a fairly bog-standard Republican, former Mitch McConnell chief counsel and current FTC commissioner Andrew Ferguson. While Ferguson is expected to maintain an aggressive posture toward large tech platforms, the rest of his agenda would likely fit comfortably if presented in a paper from the Chamber of Commerce.

Yet these twin events say something important about the staying power of the viewpoints Khan and her fellow New Brandeis adherents brought during the Biden administration. The new approach will endure despite the federal changeover, precisely because the one segment of the government thought to be impregnably conservative and pro-business—the judiciary—has become quite accepting of neo-Brandeisian arguments.

The Sherman Act and other antitrust laws were uniquely constructed for state attorneys general and private litigants to use. Those cases will continue, armed with the backing of arguments and procedures put forth by Khan and Jonathan Kanter, her counterpart in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The fact that judges have moved in Khan and Kanter’s direction suggests a revival of long-dormant laws restraining the power of corporations to dominate American life. That will not be suppressed.

I don’t want to overcomplicate the picture: During Donald Trump’s second term, merger booms, selective prosecutions, and a general backsliding on most forms of corporate concentration are most certainly ahead. But the cause of reversing these harms will live on, because the intellectual argument is being won in courtroom after courtroom.

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