When scholars and advocates tell the story of America’s long struggle against monopoly power, the story they often tell is one of big laws and big legal battles, waged over generations. It’s the story of old men in suits standing in the Capitol Building’s congressional chambers and raging against the abusive corporate giants of those days - lawmakers like John Sherman and Wright Patman, who demanded the end of robber barons and predatory chain stores and, in doing so, won crucial protections against unchecked corporate tyranny. It’s the story of Standard Oil and American Tobacco and Ma Bell, the monsters slayed at the hands of the American people in the name of democracy and liberty. Folks like me who spend their days exposing and opposing corporate domination today — we love those stories.
But there are other stories that capture the heart of what I consider to be the broader movement against corporate control. More than a century ago, makeshift coalitions of farmers, working people and shopkeepers rose up together against the big banks, railroads and other giant companies that had come to control so much of their lives. State officials, more naturally attuned to the lives of their citizens than federal lawmakers, heard the rising anger of farmers and workers and passed the first laws against monopolies and their abuses. The same stories abound today, this time in response to a new breed of robber barons trying to strip-mine their communities of their resources and labor, all while killing small businesses, raising their bills and leaving their lives and neighborhoods far worse. People across the country today are rising up and defending their communities against runaway monopoly power, demanding an answer to the question: Who shall rule? The people? Or corporate power? Those are the stories I hope to capture here.
I’ve researched and written about some of those people-powered pockets of resistance to monopoly power over the years. I’ve detailed peanut farmers banding together in a cooperative to break the grip of a peanut shelling monopoly in the American south. I’ve told the story of a collective of musicians, live music venue owners and music fans in Portland, Maine who are fighting to stop music monopolist Live Nation from setting up shop in their city. In a zine published earlier this year by my friends at Microcosm, I told stories of successful fights against monopoly power around the country, from an organized resistance to an Amazon air hub in Newark, New Jersey, to a rural Missouri community’s fight against a corporate farm.
These fights are being waged and won by people who, if you asked them, likely see themselves as very different from one another — yet they’re bound together by a collective demand for freedom from the corporate dictatorships attempting to control lives and land. These are the stories I’ll tell in this substack, along with my thoughts about how these place-based fights speak to our common struggle against corporate domination and the hope those fights should give all of us as we work to chart a new, more prosperous and more equitable way forward as a country. I’ll also weigh in on news about monopolies and corporate power here and there. I won’t bombard your inbox, but expect a few posts a week, large and small.