Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age by Am

Description: FREE SHIPPING UK WIDE Antitrust by Amy Klobuchar "This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description NATIONAL BESTSELLER . Antitrust enforcement is one of the most pressing issues facing America today-and Amy Klobuchar, the widely respected senior senator from Minnesota, is leading the charge. This fascinating history of the antitrust movement shows us what led to the present moment and offers achievable solutions to prevent monopolies, promote business competition, and encourage innovation.In a world where Google reportedly controls 90 percent of the search engine market and Big Pharmas drug price hikes impact healthcare accessibility, monopolies can hurt consumers and cause marketplace stagnation. Klobuchar-the much-admired former candidate for president of the United States-argues for swift, sweeping reform in economic, legislative, social welfare, and human rights policies, and describes plans, ideas, and legislative proposals designed to strengthen antitrust laws and antitrust enforcement.Klobuchar writes of the historic and current fights against monopolies in America, from Standard Oil and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to the Progressive Eras trust-busters; from the breakup of Ma Bell (formerly the worlds biggest company and largest private telephone system) to the pricing monopoly of Big Pharma and the future of the giant tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google.She begins with the Gilded Age (1870s-1900), when builders of fortunes and rapacious robber barons such as J. P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt were reaping vast fortunes as industrialization swept across the American landscape, with the rich getting vastly richer and the poor, poorer. She discusses President Theodore Roosevelt, who, during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920), "busted" the trusts, breaking up monopolies; the Clayton Act of 1914; the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914; and the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950, which it strengthened the Clayton Act. She explores todays Big Pharma and its price-gouging; and tech, television, content, and agriculture communities and how a marketplace with few players, or one in which one company dominates distribution, can hurt consumer prices and stifle innovation.As the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, Klobuchar provides a fascinating exploration of antitrust in America and offers a way forward to protect all Americans from the dangers of curtailed competition, and from vast information gathering, through monopolies. Author Biography AMY KLOBUCHAR is the senior senator from Minnesota, the first woman from that state to be elected to the U.S. Senate. She was born in Plymouth, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University and the University of Chicago Law School. She lives in Minneapolis, MN. Review "An impressive work of scholarship, deeply researched . . . highly informative and surprisingly readable in the bargain."—Liaquat Ahamed, The New York Times Book Review "Senators rarely write books, and when they do, they tend to be political memoirs. But Klobuchars Antitrust is a serious and important contribution that will help build momentum for reform . . . Throughout, she references her own proposed legislation on the topic. And as Klobuchar is chair of the Judiciary Committees subcommittee on competition policy, antitrust, and consumer rights, her proposals are likely to be one of the starting points for reform."—The New Republic "Methodical . . . Klobuchar furnishes an overview of the evolution of U.S. anti-monopoly law and a call for rebalancing the relationship between capital and labor. She condemns corporate consolidation and wealth concentration, and views lax antitrust enforcement as antithetical to democracy."—The Guardian "A thorough history of trustbusting in America and an urgent plea for stricter enforcement . . . a diligently researched history lesson and a well thought out plan, meticulously delineated . . . staggeringly detailed . . . solid, sharp, articulate work."—Kirkus (starred review) "Klobuchar reviews past monopolies, starting with a certain tea party, and continuing through the Gilded Age and the Sherman Act to current day, providing plenty of social, political, and legislative context . . . She argues for swift, sweeping reform in economic, legislative, social welfare, and human rights policies. A steady stream of period political cartoons help keep things lively, and her style is engaging and energetic."—Booklist (starred review) Review Quote "A thorough history of trustbusting in America and an urgent plea for stricter enforcement . . . a diligently researched history lesson and a well thought out plan, meticulously delineated . . . staggeringly detailed . . . solid, sharp, articulate work."-- Kirkus (starred review) "Klobuchar reviews past monopolies, starting with a certain tea party, and continuing through the Gilded Age and the Sherman Act to current day, providing plenty of social, political, and legislative context . . . She argues for swift, sweeping reform in economic, legislative, social welfare, and human rights policies. A steady stream of period political cartoons help keep things lively, and her style is engaging and energetic."-- Booklist (starred review) Excerpt from Book 1 Monopoly--Its Not Just a Game The Roots of Americas Antimonopolist Movement A Trip Down Monopoly Lane: The Game, the Colonists, and the Boston Tea Party My favorite game growing up was Monopoly. While my dad, then a journalist with The Minneapolis Star, would sometimes convince my sister and me to play Scrabble, and the neighborhood kids loved our home version of Jeopardy! (complete with little metal clickers to take the place of the TV buzzer), Monopoly was in a class of its own. For one, it was endless, with weekend marathons at my friends houses, especially when it rained. For another it had weird tokens like a thimble and a wheelbarrow (now sadly replaced by the games "updated" tokens, which include a rubber ducky and T. rex). With Monopoly, you could collect hotels and houses. You could moan when you paid exorbitant rents for landing on the superchic Park Place, and rejoice when you missed the dreaded Income Tax square. The basic concept was this: the more you owned, the more you controlled, the more you made, the more you squeezed your opponents out of existence. This was assumed to be the true--and the one and only--model of American capitalism. If you managed to monopolize the board by buying up multiple properties of the same color and covering them in rent-producing real estate, you took your opponents out of the game. Whole corners of the game board became debt traps, and with each roll of the dice and trip around the board your opponents would sell off more and more of their meager holdings just to afford your escalating rents. It was all about winning with monopolies, and there were no competing "antitrust enforcement" cards to get you out of the soup (line). When I first started running that thimble token around the Monopoly board at the kitchen table of my best friend Amy Scherbers family cabin, I never imagined I would end up as one of the two U.S. senators heading up the committee dealing with antitrust policy for our country. Yet when people ask me as a senator what monopolies and antitrust policy have to do with their lives, the answer I give now is the same one I gave back then as I raked in the Monopoly money rent on my railroads. Everything. The answer is everything. Antitrust and monopolies have everything to do with our economy, the prices we pay, and the way we live. The freedom to buy and sell goods and succeed on your own merit has long been at the core of American antitrust policy. But more important, a century before antitrust laws were even considered, the freedom to participate in a competitive economic market was a central guiding tenet of the American economy. It was one of the major reasons our country was founded in the first place when a ragtag group of settlers and colonists decided to start a new life in a new land. They were fiercely independent and entrepreneurial. And they wanted nothing to do with monopolies--especially government-controlled monopolies--dictating their economic choices. The American colonists were well aware of the dangers of monopoly power. At the time of Americas birth as a nation, most of its people were farmers, many of them immigrants or descendants of immigrants whod fled Europe to get a new beginning. Theyd purposefully come to a country where they could practice their religion, politics, and entrepreneurship without rules and regulations and without a king telling them what to buy and whom to buy it from. While the European nations financed American exploration and settlements to expand their land acquisitions and trading markets, the actual people who settled America had a different plan in mind. They wanted liberty. American colonists, as best exemplified by Benjamin Franklin, prized new inventions, but they despised monopoly power. The 1641 laws of colonial Massachusetts, known as "The Body of Liberties," contain an audacious expression of the early Americans aversion to monopolies: "No monopolies shall be granted or allowed amongst us, but of such new Inventions that are profitable to the Countrie, and that for a short time." Marylands first constitution, adopted in November 1776, just a few months after the Second Continental Congresss issuance of the Declaration of Independence, specifically recited in its Declaration of Rights, "That monopolies are odious, contrary to the spirit of a free government, and the principles of commerce; and ought not to be suffered." North Carolinas constitution of December 1776 similarly asserted in its Declaration of Rights that "monopolies are contrary to the genius of a free state, and ought not to be allowed." In England, monopolies were technically illegal, except there was one gaping hole in English law: Parliament itself had the right to grant monopolies. In Darcy v. Allen (1602), which came to be known as "The Case of Monopolies," the Court of the Kings Bench ruled that while members of the royal family could not grant monopolies to individual subjects, Parliament had free rein to do so. In that case, Edward Darcy (no relation to the fictional Mr. Darcy of Jane Austens novel Pride and Prejudice) had received from Queen Elizabeth an exclusive right to import, make, and sell playing cards. The queen felt that playing cards were too popular among servants and apprentices and had reduced productivity. Her solution? She put the entire playing card trade into one persons hands. The beneficiary was Darcy, who held a position in the royal household known as groom of the privy chamber. After Thomas Allen, a representative of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, started making and selling his own line of playing cards, Darcy sued Allen for damages. While Darcy had manufactured "400 grosses of cards" at a cost of 5,000 pounds sterling, Allen, responding to public demand, had produced an additional 180 grosses of playing cards without any royal license to do so. In what is now regarded as a foundational case in antitrust law, the English court ruled that Darcys patent to manufacture and sell playing cards was "utterly void" and constituted a violation of the English common law and acts of Parliament. As the decision was reported by the English jurist Sir Edward Coke, "The queen could not suppress the making of cards within the realm, no more than the making of dice, bowls, balls, hawks hoods, bells, lures, dog-couples, and other the like, which are works of labor and art, although they serve for pleasure, recreation, and pastime, and cannot be suppressed but by Parliament, nor a man restrained from exercising any trade, but by Parliament." The court thus squarely rejected Darcys argument that Queen Elizabeth could--on her own--restrict the production and distribution of playing cards to moderate their use by servants or laborers or for any other reason. But Parliament kept the power to bestow monopolies for itself, later codifying and cementing its sole right to grant monopolies in what was aptly called the Statute of Monopolies (1624). In the British Empire, the monopolies conferred by Parliament were the product of corruption, influence peddling, and outright bribes. By 1621, the year after the Mayflower had brought the Pilgrims to the New World, there were approximately seven hundred British monopolies in operation. As Christopher Hill writes in The Century of Revolution (1961), a typical seventeenth-century Englishman was "living in a house built with monopoly bricks, with windows (if any) of monopoly glass; heated by monopoly coal (in Ireland monopoly timber), burning in a grate made of monopoly iron." As Hill further observed, "He slept on monopoly feathers, did his hair with monopoly brushes and monopoly combs. He washed himself with monopoly soap, his clothes in monopoly starch. He dressed in monopoly lace, monopoly linen, monopoly leather, monopoly gold thread." A mans clothes, Hill wrote of that time, "were held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins," with the mans food "seasoned with monopoly salt, monopoly pepper, monopoly vinegar." Even mice, Hill stressed of royal patents, "were caught in monopoly mousetraps." It makes perfect sense then that a major motivation of those sailing to the New World was to leave their monopoly handcuffs--not to mention their monopoly mousetraps--far behind. Just as the Pilgrims came to America in search of religious freedom, many settlers came to our shores in hopes of gaining economic freedom--the ability to buy land and farm on their own, get a new job and a fresh start. They were rewarded economically when other countries businesses bought their crops and goods, and they, in turn, wanted the freedom to do business with whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted. In Rights of Man (1791), a book dedicated to President George Washington, Thomas Paine--often described as the father of the American Revolution because of his authorship of Common Sense (1776)--lamented that England "is cut up into monopolies." Paines ideal: "That there shall be no monopolies of any kind--that all trades shall be free, and every man free to follow any occupation by which he can procure an honest livelihood, and in any place, town and city throughout the nation." Thus, our countrys Declaration of Independence from England was not only a political Declaration of Independence from a foreign country but also an act of economic rebellion against monopoly power. Back then, colonists who even tried to compete against the British monopoly mercenaries could be fined or imprisoned by the Crowns prosecutors. And when the economy got tough in England, the king--who, at the time of the American Revolution, was George III--would inevitably resort to more demands dictating from whom the colonists could purchase their goods. His purpose? To bring Details ISBN0525654895 Author Amy Klobuchar Short Title Antitrust Language English ISBN-10 0525654895 ISBN-13 9780525654896 Format Hardcover Pages 624 Year 2021 Publication Date 2021-04-27 UK Release Date 2021-04-27 Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2021-04-27 NZ Release Date 2021-04-27 US Release Date 2021-04-27 Place of Publication New York Publisher Alfred A. Knopf Imprint Alfred A. Knopf Subtitle Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age DEWEY 343.73072109 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 30 DAY RETURN POLICY No questions asked, 30 day returns! FREE DELIVERY No matter where you are in the UK, delivery is free. SECURE PAYMENT Peace of mind by paying through PayPal and eBay Buyer Protection TheNile_Item_ID:134975341;

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