Joe Biden's FTC Chair Lina Khan Showed What 'F*ck The Broligarchy' Looks Like

Lina Khan Lina Khan lemme rock you Lina Khan!

FTC Chair Lina Khan at a 2024 panel on antitrust enforcement. Photo: Brookings Institution, Creative Commons License 2.0.

Yesterday, Jake Tapper asked Bernie Sanders a question about Joe Biden’s Wednesday night farewell address, in which our outgoing president warned about the dangers of the rising broligarchy. (Biden didn’t say “broligarchy,” that’s ours.)

“[Biden] in his farewell address last night warned against oligarchs and extreme wealth. I’m just wondering: Do you have, have you seen any evidence of Biden doing anything about the oligarchy during his four years of presidency?” Tapper asked. Tapper’s question was at best misguided, since Biden did not bring any oligarchs in to literally run the government, as Donald Trump is about to, so what would he have anything to “do about”? Sanders answered, correctly, that domestically (big emphasis) Biden has been the most progressive president since FDR.

But there were a few things that Sanders left out. For example: Under Joe Biden and with the support of his Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS actually started getting billions in tax receipts from the extremely wealthy who had previously been using their thousand dollar bills to wipe their asses rather than send The People their cut for schools, roads, bridges, and cleaning up whatever Starlink’s befouling.

On its way out the door, the Biden administration is still doing solid work for the American people, like such as the lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau against repeat corporate offender Capital One. CFPB alleges the banking giant cheated customers out of some $2 billion in interest payments in a bait-and-switch scheme that advertised a high rate of return, but actually froze interest rates well below the market rates that should have given customers a higher return. That right there is the Biden administration going after oily garchs in its last week in office, Jake.

And we couldn’t ever forget Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, which has been enraging the oligarchs for four years (minus a week) now.

We’d been meaning to write a mash note to FTC head Lina Khan before she leaves the building — this, this is what progressive government LOOKS like! — so thank you, Jake, for the push!

On Wednesday, the FTC (see, this is a Lina Khan mash note now) joined the states of Illinois and Minnesota in filing a lawsuit against agricultural equipment giant John Deere over its anti-consumer repair monopoly. The suit argues that onboard software “locks” in every Deere tractor, combine, and Horseless Plow forces farmers to pay big money for repairs exclusively from Deere dealerships, often harming their bottom lines by delaying planting and harvesting. The software also prevents competition and enforces a repair monopoly that not only excludes non-Deere repair companies, but prevents owners from making even simple repairs to their own equipment.

It’s not only the latest in a string of lawsuits against Deere over the “right to repair” stuff that’s allegedly owned by consumers. It’s also a little gift to the incoming Trump administration, which will face pressure from farmers to keep the lawsuit going. (Even if Trump’s FTC drops its participation in the suit, the two states will nevertheless persist.)

In a formal comment explaining the FTC’s decision to join the suit, Khan wrote that Deere & Company “has illegally restricted the ability of farmers and independent technicians to repair Deere equipment, including tractors and combines.”

So let’s take a moment to thank Lina Khan for being — like so many people in the Biden administration — a true public servant, someone dedicated to giving Americans a little leverage against the megabusinesses that want to monetize every last thing they can think of, and for bringing back a real commitment to antitrust regulation.

Under Khan, the FTC has successfully sued to block mergers that would have created big bad monopolies, most notably the proposed merger of grocery chains Albertsons and Kroger, which in many cities are already the only two grocers in town. The merger could absolutely would have driven up grocery prices and forced store workers out of jobs, and in December, a federal court agreed with the FTC and put a stop to the sale. In the course of the lawsuit, a Kroger executive admitted that the company had jacked up prices well beyond the cost of inflation, because it could get away with it, and isn’t that what America is all about?

Together with the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, which handles the criminal side of antitrust law while the FTC uses civil and regulatory actions, the two agencies completed a long-overdue modernization of merger guidelines, with the goal of making sure illegal mergers don’t go forward in the first place. While it’s possible that the Trump administration will reverse that progress, it would require a long process and careful coordination between both agencies, so at the very least it won’t be one of those “first day” things.

The FTC has also been an enthusiastic partner in Joe Biden’s war on junk fees, proposing rules that will let people drop subscriptions with recurring monthly charges as easily as they join them, so that the gym you joined by clicking on a website can’t make you send a notarized letter from God to let you out of the deal. Another FTC lawsuit went after a real estate app that effectively enables price-fixing by landlords, making the rent too damn high.

Not surprisingly in a federal court system infested with Trump appointees, not all of the FTC’s rules have survived court challenges. Courts struck down a rule barring companies from forcing workers to sign non-compete agreements, even for minimum-wage fast food jobs where nobody is ever going to reveal “trade secrets,” but where a worker might get a better offer from another restaurant.

For her efforts to restrain the worst monopolistic tendencies in capitalism and to make sure the free market actually includes some goddamn competition, Khan was accused of leading an “unhinged FTC” by the greedheads at the ironically named “Competitive Enterprise Institute,” which insisted that market consolidation is good for you, so eat up. She also earned the enmity of the corporate tools at the Manhattan Institute, which accused the FTC of “colluding” with European regulators in trying to rein in abuses by tech monopolies. Her efforts to rein in monopolistic practices in Big Tech also made Elon Musk mad; shortly before the election, the billionaire brat tweeted that Khan “will be fired soon,” possibly believing (and possibly correctly) he’d be the one making the decision. In mere reality, Khan’s term expired in September, but in accordance with the law, she’s staying on as chair until a replacement is confirmed by the Senate.

And then there’s the creepy dweeb Trump has chosen to succeed Khan, Andrew Ferguson, who’s already a sitting member of the commission and seems to think that regulating trade has little to do with preventing monopolistic practices and more with ending what he considers “wokeness,” like diversity programs and efforts to counter disinformation. He’s particularly keen on siccing the government’s regulatory power on providers of healthcare for transgender people, which is obviously a higher priority than curbing capitalism’s worst excesses, because nothing capitalism does is ever wrong.

Khan said earlier this month that the increasing chumminess of Donald Trump and tech moguls is a genuine cause for concern, saying in a CNBC interview that

“It is true that the FTC has been very successful, including in its ongoing litigations against Amazon and Facebook.

“And so it’s only going to be natural that those companies are going to want to come in and see, can they get some type of sweetheart deal, right? […]

“Can they get some type of settlement that’s cheap, that settles for pennies on the dollar and ... lets them escape from a liability finding in court?”

She added that she hoped that wouldn’t come to pass, but that she wouldn’t “predict what future people in my position are going to do,” which is polite interview-speak for saying she already sees the semiliterate misspelled writing on the wall. And indeed, both companies have actively gotten far worse in just the last week, giving the finger to LGBTQ+ folks (including their own workers, hello lawsuits) and generally catering to the Right’s culture war agenda.

If you know a progressive who’s forgotten what Joe Biden has done about “the oligarchy,” send them this post. We had four brief years of kick-ass. We hope they’ll come again.

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[404 Media / Common Dreams / CBS News / CNBC]

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