Tomorrow!

Walmart is using its power over suppliers to push grocery prices up. This terrific explainer draws on newly unsealed details from an antitrust case—filed by Lina Khan and dropped by Trump—to show how. I’m proud that @ilsr.bsky.social helped get the case unsealed. And thrilled to help tell the story.

Nearly every city and school district is pouring public dollars into Amazon — even though local suppliers are often cheaper and faster. A few cities have said no to Amazon’s sketchy contracts. This Friday: Learn how they broke free — and how your city can too. Register here:

4. As the Walton family — which owns 50% of Walmart stock — cheers its obscene wealth of over $500 billion, remember that all that loot was stolen from small businesses, workers, and you. You are paying for this monopoly in inflated grocery prices, lower wages, food deserts, and dead main streets.

1. A reminder: Walmart's $1 trillion valuation is the product of decades of unchecked anticompetitive behavior. It's no coincidence that Walmart began its insane growth spurt after the 1980s decision to stop enforcing key antitrust laws. More than others, Walmart recognized what this meant.

Big news out of California. After years of study, the CA Law Revision Commission recommended a major rewrite of state antitrust law — explicitly instructing judges to break with weak federal standards & restore meaningful limits on monopoly power. The legislature often follows the CLRC's guidance.

Localized, community-rooted, small-scale economic power matters. For decades, we've pretended like it doesn't — and even used policy to aggressively eradicate it.

1. We have a new tool for exploring how corporate concentration has hollowed out grocery access in your region: an interactive map that shows food deserts along with the location of every grocery store in the US by type — independent, small chain, large chain, or megachain like Walmart or Kroger.

1. Cities and states should outlaw Amazon’s latest assault on small businesses — an AI tool that scrapes their websites and creates listings of their products within the Amazon app without their consent. It’s causing huge, costly problems. This can and should be banned.

Join us for a great, practical workshop! Learn how to find out whether your city or school district is buying from Amazon — and how to shift that spending to local suppliers instead. You’ll get step-by-step tools and hear inspiring stories from cities that have made the change.

Thinking of all my friends and colleagues in Minnesota as thousands gather in Minneapolis. This is a state that has a long and deep history of organizing for justice.

Important study. Essentially it finds a straight line between the pro-corporate concentration policies of Reagan/Clinton/Thatcher/Blair and the decline of democracy. Interestingly, the mechanism is not income inequality but the raw power the biggest corps wield over government.

The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/

In 1952, there were 104 grocery stores in Dubuque (!). Today there are 12. Walmart & Hy-Vee split the market. The Telegraph Herald has an in-depth look at the state of local grocery stores across Iowa & how the demise of Robinson-Patman enforcement fueled consolidation & food deserts.

There’s a debate about whether to focus on lowering prices or saving democracy. But both crises flow from the extreme concentration of economic power. The solution is to shift that power back into people’s hands — through strong public institutions, worker rights, and thriving small businesses.

There’s a lot to consider here for all American cities.

Wishing everyone peace and joy. See you in 2026.

New York’s affordability crisis flows from a deeper problem: essential systems — groceries, energy, Internet, banking, healthcare — have consolidated in the hands of distant corporations. Today, ILSR sent the Mamdani team a memo laying out policies to reclaim local control. ilsr.org/articles/mem...

Amazon is hoodwinking public schools to grab their cash. I love this piece from @naomibethune.bsky.social, which shows how cash-strapped districts are sold on the “ease” of buying from Amazon — only to deepen their financial squeeze. Appreciate the deep dive into our new report!

Thinking about which good-gov't orgs to support financially is a little overwhelming rn. Environmental, human rights, arts, democracy itself are all under siege. But the corporate takeover of our economy seems like the hub to this wheel, which is why the work of @ilsr.bsky.social is so vital.

1. New York’s affordability crisis flows from a deeper problem: essential systems — groceries, energy, Internet, banking, healthcare — have consolidated in the hands of distant corporations. Today, ILSR sent the Mamdani team a memo laying out policies to reclaim local control.

Here's a great, quick explainer on how Pepsi schemed with Walmart to raise grocery prices, from @ronmknox.bsky.social and @dannycaine.com www.tiktok.com/@ilsr_org/vi...

You can find the full investigation — plus our guide to how to tell if your local government is being hoodwinked by Amazon, and what to do about it — here:

Everybody needs to see this blatant price collusion, and how there’s been no accountability for it. I hope the other retailers bring suit.

Back in the late 90s I lived with a guy who worked for Nestle and he told me that WalMart routinely got huge deals by just... not paying invoices on time, and unlike their competitors Nestle wouldn't charge them late fees because they were the 900lb gorilla.

Trump's FTC leaders bad-mouthed Lina Khan when they dropped this lawsuit, claiming that they were cleaning up her mess. Now that it's been unsealed, we can see that was a total lie. This was a coverup to protect Pepsi and Walmart.

Thread. "Inflation" is not a natural economic phenomenon, it's the product of choices--choices made for and not by consumers, choices made in back rooms and hidden meetings.

1. For at least 10 years, Pepsi has conspired with Walmart to force up grocery prices. That’s the shocking evidence made public today in an unsealed FTC lawsuit. The suit was abandoned in May by the Trump FTC just before it was to be un-redacted. We went to court to get it unsealed & won.

1. People are freeing themselves from the myth that only big corporations can make and do things. Here's a story about 19 small towns that built their own high-speed fiber networks. They pay less than most Americans & can get a service rep on the phone no problem. ilsr.org/article/comm...

Growing backlash — It turns out a lot of people are not happy with their local school district and city spending millions with Amazon under sham contracts that specify dynamic pricing and shutout competing local suppliers.

1. Hard to believe, but Amazon has persuaded schools and cities across the country to abandon competitive bidding and fixed price contracts. Instead, they're signing contracts with Amazon that specify dynamic pricing. The result: Paying $37 for 12 pens or $74 for 36 markers.

UPDATE: We went to court to get the antitrust complaint against Pepsi, implicating Walmart, unsealed. (The Trump FTC dropped the case just before it was to be made public.) The judge just ruled in our favor. Pending a potential appeal, we should get a look at the details of the scheme next week.

"School districts....appear to be overpaying for basic supplies because of Amazon contracts that bind them to dynamic pricing... A school district in Denver would have saved about $1m in 2023 had it been able to... lock in the lowest of the platform’s ... changing prices."

1. Amazon has become a major force in how cities, counties & schools buy basic supplies. Our new report finds Amazon is using opaque pricing algorithms to drive up costs and eliminate transparency—while harming competition by pushing out better-performing independent suppliers.

Why believe in the rule of law if government officials for years on end fail to stop Dollar General from routinely violating laws that bar companies from charging higher prices at the register? Stopping a predatory strategy to rip off poor people is basic Democracy 101.

Tricking customers with higher prices at the register is a core strategy of Dollar General & Family Dollar. "Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022." Terrific reporting from @barryyeoman.com @theguardian.com

The @mnfarmersunion.bsky.social is doing incredible work to rekindle the alliance of farmers, small businesses, and working people that built the New Deal and beat back monopoly power. It was an honor to speak at their annual convention last week.

All around you corporations are figuring out how to train AI on your personal data to "optimiz[e] every interaction for maximum value” — i.e., charge you higher prices. Many damning details & good insights, plus a look at the prospects for legislation in this piece [email protected]

Instagram used to be great. Then Meta bought it to eliminate the competition, remaking it into the same shitty experience as Facebook. And TikTok is in no sense whatsoever an alternative. This decision has zero relationship to what Meta did to users — or the harm it caused.

The FTC has lost 30% of the economics staff who support antitrust investigations and litigation. (This doesn't seem to have been covered anywhere outside of small paywalled outlets — in contrast to the intense personnel management scrutiny that Lina Khan got.)

Smart piece by @bharatramamurti.bsky.social on how political leaders can solve the Affordability Conundrum — address immediate voter pain through price controls and increase supply in the long-term through anti-monopoly and industrial policies.

“All the datasets are pointing the same way as far as lower momentum and small businesses doing more with less.”

Thanks to Nate Hagens and The Great Simplification podcast for the great discussion about how breaking up monopolies and decentralizing the economy is crucial to building the resilience and community agency needed to tackle the big challenges ahead.

Good rundown from @ddayen.bsky.social on what all the Ballroom donors—Amazon, Google, Hewlett Packard, Coinbase, Union Pacific, etc.—are buying with their donations. Get-out-of-jail-free cards & big policy favors. (Union Pacific? They want merger approval to dominate rail.)

This is insane — a NY economic dev agency is set to hand Amazon an $80M subsidy for a warehouse. Fortunately, lots of public outcry. Now a state senator is urging a monitor to veto the giveaway.

Kroger is closing a Fred Meyer in Seattle, creating a new food desert. Great to see the city moving to ban covenants, which Kroger has used to block competitors from opening on its old sites. State lawmakers should follow by mandating suppliers give local grocers fair pricing.

Municipal grocery stores work when cities own the building and lease it to a nimble local operator. But they could be transformative if cities also used their authority to secure fair supplier pricing for independent grocers. Great piece from @TheProspect.

Rich people feel pretty good right now. But those making less than $100k and especially those under $50k have nosedived since January. Chart by @tracyalloway.bsky.social

USDA will stop publishing a report on food insecurity that anti-hunger groups say is key to assessing hunger nationwide, making it "difficult to track the impact of tariffs and cuts to food assistance."

A $58M traffic project being billed as economic development is essentially “...prop[ping] up $40.8 million of gas stations, strip malls, and big-box stores," says @clmarohn. "If we’re serious about commerce, let’s invest where the returns are real.”