The Urge to Merge: Reclaiming Competition in an Economy of Giants w/ Alvaro Bedoya

Those at the top all know each other. The workers fighting the same fights against them and their monopolies, from taxi drivers to farmers to filmmakers, rarely meet. This episode’s guest thinks that’s why corporate power keeps winning.

More like this: The Gig is Up: How Uber Ruined Wage Labor with Veena Dubal

In this episode, Alvaro Bedoya, former FTC Commissioner, explains how spending his travel budget meeting with farmers, small business owners, and union members turned him into an economic populist. He makes the case for rebuilding the Farmers Alliance model of cross-industry coalitions, explains how an Iowa farmer’s Facebook post connected the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger to the fight against consolidation agriculture, and argues that the Ellisons’ media empire and the AI boom are both bets made by people with too much power and too little judgment.

Further reading & resources

• How I Became a Populist — Alvaro Bedoya, The New Republic
• The Workers Who Defy Gravity — Alvaro Bedoya, Washington Monthly
• Billionaires could ruin the movie industry — and people are FURIOUS — More Perfect Union

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout