The Capitol Forum Podcast

Shahid Naeem is a policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project and the author of a memo calling for the Department of Justice and Department of Transportation to block the merger between Spirit and Frontier.

Ted Tatos is Managing Director of EconOne and co-author of the recent report, “Protecting the U.S. Postal Service from Amazon’s Anticompetitive Assault.” In the conversation, we get into a lot of different aspects of Amazon’s ongoing effort to dominate the postal service.

A quick note: Ted’s report was funded by a conservative group called The Family Business Coalition, which includes small family-owned businesses that ship parcels. For the report, Ted also interviewed a couple of prominent voices in the antimonopoly movement whom we’ve had on the show before—Matt Stoller from the American economic liberties project and Stacy Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self Reliance.

Matthew Jinoo Buck is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and a first-year student at Yale Law School.

His article in the American Prospect, “How America’s Supply Chains Got Railroaded” tells the history of how deregulation and consolidation gave us a railroad industry that is now a weak link in our supply chain. He also tells how the industry is more dangerous for workers and less reliable for customers even as it produces outsized profits for investors.

Jeff Horwitz is a Wall Street Journal technology reporter who covers Facebook. He is the lead reporter on the groundbreaking series of articles titled The Facebook Files. The conversation covers myriad issues facing Facebook and we ask Jeff why, when facing choices between the public interest and growth on the platform, Mark Zuckerberg always chooses growth.

Stacy Mitchell is Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a research and advocacy organization that challenges concentrated corporate power and works to build thriving, equitable communities. ILSR has been a pioneering leader in the growing anti-monopoly movement and has a long track record of working alongside grassroots groups to develop better alternatives, from community-owned broadband, to independent businesses, to distributed solar.

Stacy recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times titled The Real Reason Your Groceries are Getting More Expensive, and has advocated for the FTC revitalizing the anti chain store legislation known as the Robinson Patman Act.

Stacy has also produced pivotal research and reporting on the policies driving the decline of small businesses and the economic and political consequences of monopoly power. In 2020, she was profiled by the New York Times for her analysis of Amazon’s power and her leadership in building a broad coalition to counter it. Her reports and articles about the tech giant have drawn a wide and influential readership. The House Judiciary Committee cited her research extensively in its “Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets.” In 2022, political strategy firm Baron named her an “Antitrust Super Influencer” for her role in shaping the policy debate.