Review of Amy Klobuchar’s Antitrust…
Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age. Amy Klobuchar, author. (Knopf, 2021, ISBN 978-0-525-65489-6) Monopolies are just one tool of many America’s fascist plutocracy employs to enrich itself at the cost of the rest of us. Here the author, a prominent senator, tells the story of monopolies and trust-busting in America (or the lack thereof). Often centering things on her home state of Minnesota or America’s Midwest, she follows monopolies from colonial times to the present. Traditionally we don’t call US monopolists fascists, but they always have been deserving of that moniker, even though the word wasn’t part of the world’s lexicon until just before World War II.
Fascism (the -ism doesn’t make it an ideology, of course, just like authoritarianism isn’t an ideology) has plagued human societies since pre-Roman times; and fascists, often hiding their autocratic leanings in populism, have been the clubs plutocracies and oligarchies wield to maintain their power. The US is no exception. It is in a downward spiral into the cesspool of fascism like the one that consumed 1930s Germany. Super-strong and abusive monopolies are only the visible wounds fascist plutocrats inflict.
I won’t split semantical hairs in this review of Senator Klobuchar’s tome. It doesn’t mention fascism per se, but that’s what she describes—a sordid piece of American history involving abuses perpetrated by America’s plutocracy…and it continues today. And this history is honest and well-written otherwise, so why should I complain?
The Devil’s in the details, of course. The senator earns her credentials as an historian, but what about her treatment of today’s monopolistic problems, exacerbated now by the tech and pharmaceutical industries as well as other mega-multinational corporations, where America and the world marches rapidly toward what I imagined in book one of my Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection? This threatens to destroy the world as we know it. The senator does a fine job, though, as she analyzes today’s challenges and possible solutions in the last two chapters before the conclusion,. I was happy to see that she even considered Amazon’s monopolistic policies, including their nefarious influence on the publishing industry. Very few authors can make a living writing now, bookstores are closing, and Amazon is mostly responsible for this bad situation, even competing with traditional publishers, leading to takeovers and the destruction of small presses.
But there’s more. Big Pharma and Big Tech are shown to be worse than most people think; they’re the new monopolistic ogres on the block. Their CEOs generally are scurrilous plutocrats. That movie about how Zuckerberg took over Facebook is fact, not fiction. The Sackler family (Purdue Pharma) are essentially mass murderers. Etc. Etc. And today these are the people who are giving us politicians like Trump, McConnell, McCarthy, Gaetz, Jordan, and others who are willing to do the fascist plutocrats’ bidding. (The senator mostly only mentions the companies, not their CEOs’ names, but we all know their names.) This is powerful writing as the senator spins her yarn about the fall of the American empire.
There are two flaws that caught my eye here, though: First, there’s very little mention of the military-industrial complex. It’s now controlled by only a few companies, and it is probably partially responsible for many of the wars America has fought since World War II. (Recall that after that war Eisenhower warned about how it might become all-powerful and distort our politics. Military might is a fascist favorite, as exhibited by Trump’s desire for a military parade like the one he saw in France. The fascist plutocrats of the military-industrial complex are undoubtedly the most dangerous.)
The second flaw is that the senator is a bit naive. She’s optimistic about the future. I’m not. I think we’ve gone beyond a tipping point for the American experiment, and she describes one of the reasons. Maybe she’s right to be optimistic. I sure hope so.
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Comments are always welcome.
“The Last Humans” series. I wrote the first novel in this series, The Last Humans, before the real Covid pandemic. The plague here is bioengineered by an American enemy and is delivered to the West Coast of the US via missile. But we all know from the experiences with those California wildfires that small particles, here the virus, can be carried across the US and to the rest of the world by prevailing winds. Penny Castro, forensic diver for the LA County Sheriff’s department, dives to recover a corpse and emerges to find apocalyptic desolation. The first novel is her story of survival. The second, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, is the story of a US-sponsored revenge mission that goes terribly wrong for Penny. (Fair warning: The idiotic Amazon bots—or the idiots who program them?—confused these two novels, so I’d recommend buying the two books elsewhere. Barnes & Noble, for example, where the links take you, kept them straight. The first novel was a bestseller from Black Opal Books at B&N for a bit, in fact.)
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
