He’s Fighting Corporate America’s Monopolists. Congress Is Trying To Defund Him.

What the DoJ's antitrust enforcer Jonathan Kanter understands about America's economy, and you should too.

In an interview with More Perfect Union, Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter said, “I’m coming into this job at a time there’s a public awareness that concentration of power and violations of antitrust laws don’t just threaten our wallets, which they do, but they also threaten our way of life.”

Kanter is a man on a mission, who has been quite busy earning the ire of Wall Street and many corporate titans. CNBC’s Jim Cramer has called him “dangerous” both because he’s eminently qualified for the role and because he's significantly changing the business decisions of corporate executives.

Kanter and his ideological ally FTC Chair Lina Khan are amassing quite a track record of taking on the most powerful actors in our economy.

Right now, Kanter is litigating against Google’s search and ad tech monopolies in court; he’s reportedly preparing a “sweeping” antitrust case against Apple and a separate case against Ticketmaster’s monopoly. Kanter’s also successfully won a major court fight to disrupt the potential JetBlue-Spirit merger, the first victory against airline consolidation in decades. He squashed a potential merger between book publishers Penguin Random House and Simon & Shuster. He’s tackled the systemic problem of interlocking boards and directorates and compelled the resignation of more than a dozen board members to reduce collusion within industries. A few days ago, Kanter announced an investigation of UnitedHealth’s market power over the healthcare industry. And on top of that, he’s also focused on the labor harms of non-competes, and he has defended workers in a variety of spaces including hospitals, e-sports, and the farming industry.

“It’s truly David vs. Goliath,” Kanter told us of going up against powerful and well-resourced companies. “We’re over 250 fewer people today than we were in 1979. But the people I work with here, they are not afraid…and we are not intimidated.” Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic congressional leaders are trying to make Kanter’s job more difficult by proposing severe cuts to the Antitrust Division’s budget, which could hinder Kanter’s ongoing investigations of Ticketmaster and Apple.

The current proposal would cut the Antitrust Division’s 2024 budget by roughly 20 percent ($45 million). More importantly, it would undo a funding mechanism in place since 1989 that allows the Antitrust Division to keep part of the fees that corporations pay when they apply for a merger (so that the division’s budget grows when more mergers are happening). A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to congressional negotiators yesterday expressing “strong opposition” to the funding cuts. (You can write your members of Congress about it here.)

Kanter and FTC Chair Khan are bringing back a proud period of American history when government leaders saw their roles as aggressively standing up on behalf of the American public against corporate power, exploitation, and cheating. At the turn of the 20^th century, Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed his concern that “great corporations known as trusts” were proving “hurtful to the general welfare.” With even more gumption a few decades later, FDR proclaimed a war against “economic royalists.”

But by the 1980s, a new ideological movement took hold—one that believed corporations needed fewer restraints and that government’s job was primarily to incentivize their growth, fuel their international trade practices, and take their side in labor disputes. Ronald Reagan defended corporate special interests by telling host Johnny Carson, “I don’t know anyone with less influence in government than business; they’re just a convenient whipping boy.” Thus followed decades and decades of harmful corporate mergers with lax government oversight and an economy increasingly dominated and rigged by powerful corporate actors across industries.

Enter Joe Biden in 2020, an understated advocate for taking a bolder approach to antitrust and bringing back the proud tradition of challenging corporate power. Biden, who frequently expresses his belief that “capitalism without competition is exploitation,” appointed Khan, Kanter, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra, and a host of other public servants throughout government with the charge of making the economy more competitive.

Kanter told us that one of his “key areas of focus” has been an investigation of the new incarnation of “gatekeepers” to emerge in today’s modern economy. Who are they? These are the largely unknown “middlemen” who in Kanter’s words “sit between the person who makes something and the person who buys something.”

Kanter is referring to the emergence of algorithmic price-fixers who use big data to increase profit maximization for some of the biggest industry players in America. His lawsuits against RealPage and AgriStats highlight two such examples in the fields of housing and meat consumption, where unseen middlemen are increasing costs for small businesses, farmers, renters, and consumers while increasing the profits of the market dominators.

These middlemen, Kanter said, “have become faceless in many instances, and more money is being gobbled up by those intermediaries. If you look at a lot of, not all of them, but if you look at a lot of our cases, they're focused on those intermediaries and making sure that they are not becoming chokepoints in our economy.”

Watch our full interview here:

Just this week, Biden selected Kanter and Khan to co-lead a “task force” on unfair and illegal pricing practices by corporate America, focusing squarely on this rising scourge of the quiet, lurking algorithmic price fixers.