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.”

Republicans in Congress are dealing big blows to small businesses right now. One looming one is the dramatic increase in health insurance costs for those who buy through the ACA marketplaces. Half— half! — of people under 65 using the marketplaces are small business owners and employees.

1. The Trump Administration has disqualified thousands of rural communities from receiving expected funding to build broadband networks. "There’s going to be a lot of frustration with these changes and the way it walked back from what was going to be a very promising outcome.”

Under Biden, dominant corporations used supply chain issues as a cover story to increase profits, driving inflation. Now tariffs seem to be providing the new cover story as wholesale prices soar. Of course, the underlying problem is insufficient competition in too many markets.

Boeing, Redwood & Mercedes-Benz have received $1.5 billion in subsidies to build in South Carolina—and they're not even meeting their job targets. What if those dollars went to local businesses instead? Nice op-ed by Charleston resident Brady Quirk-Garvan: www.postandcourier.com/opinion/comm...

The head of antitrust at DOJ, Gail Slater, may be serious about enforcement, but monopolists like Real Page, Live Nation, and AmEx are just going over her head and lobbying Bondi and Trump to sidestep the law. www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

With monopoly electric utilities price-gouging & blocking renewables, there's growing interest in converting them to publicly owned utilities. ILSR has a new guide for how to do that. Check out the Handbook for Public Power Campaigns. ilsr.org/articles/pub...

Last night, my hometown of Portland, Maine stood up to Live Nation. Amid strong grassroots opposition, the city council voted 6-3 for a moratorium — a key step in stopping this monopolist from building a large venue and taking control of live music in our city. www.pressherald.com/2025/08/11/p...

1. Today, ILSR filed a motion in federal court to unseal the FTC’s antitrust complaint against PepsiCo. The case bears directly on high grocery prices and food deserts — and would've marked a crucial revival of the long-neglected Robinson-Patman Act. But the public may never get to see it.

For Prime Day: My thoughts on the need to break up with Amazon and BREAK UP Amazon. mailchi.mp/smallbusines...

"It’s easy to think of food deserts as a natural consequence of poverty. But...the real reason food deserts emerged...is because of a major shift in one federal policy." The 99% Percent Invisible podcast has a great new episode on the hidden history of the Robinson-Patman Act.

Complaining about process is a way to sidestep having to take a stand and use your position to fight for a simple, obvious, and popular rule that would help Americans save money and avoid being taken advantage of.

Shoppers have fewer options for groceries after waves of supermarket mergers, and, writes Ron Knox, they get nickled and dimed at the stores that remain. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

I have no problem with public grocery stores. But we should be clear-eyed about why food deserts exist. It's not poverty or lack of demand. In fact, food deserts only emerged in the late 1980s. They’re the result of a specific policy choice — one we need to reverse.

Local grocers have to pay much higher prices for their products than Dollar General & Walmart. Last month the FTC quietly killed a case to level the playing field. It's huge blow to small businesses & will further devastate rural America. @ronmknox.bsky.social has a terrific explainer:

What ever you think of @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social's plan to create city-run markets with fresh foods in food deserts at reasonable prices, one cannot deny that Public policy affects how well many people eat.

The decision to drop a price discrimination lawsuit against Pepsi may signal Trump’s embrace of corporate bullies. From @ronmknox.bsky.social‬: washingtonmonthly.com/2025/06/25/h...

With many people talking about how Mamdani has embraced small businesses as a crucial & obvious part of a progressive coalition of working people, I wanted to re-up this piece from a few years ago: ilsr.org/articles/in-...

Feels like ranked choice was absolutely decisive in this race—not because of the vote count, but because of how it changed the incentives from zero-sum to cooperapetitive. It allowed a fractured left field to align organically through co-endorsements instead of falling into a circular firing squad.

A spate of telecom mergers—one already approved by the FTC—threatens to further raise the cost of internet access. We don't have to stand for this: Many communities have built their own fiber networks & provide better service at much lower cost, writes ILSR's Sean Gonsalves in this great piece.

The small town of Wrightsville, Ark., once had 3 grocery stores. They're all gone. The nearest supermarket is more than 10 miles away with no transit. So people shop for groceries at Dollar General. Now, Dollar General is closing.

After weeks of grocery shortages caused by a tech failure at a single wholesaler (UNFI), antitrust enforcers should take a very skeptical eye to this proposed merger between two giant distributors. We need diversification, not consolidation.

Allowing Amazon & Walmart to issue stablecoins will be disastrous, says @amandalfischer.bsky.social‬. More market power. New forms of too-big-to-fail. Sellers & suppliers forced to use a private currency with fees. Plus, more of our capital channeled to speculation, rather than loans for real stuff.

"I’m tired of...searching in vain for the latest news & finding only Reddit posts. I want a search engine for shopping that trawls the web for the best [goods] rather than [only] sites that list items with Google. I want a search engine that lets me control the amount of AI summaries in my results."

Rather than surrender to private equity, residents of a small town in Wyoming are building their own $37 million hospital, reports @megreenwell, in this great story:

Healthcare exchanges in Nevada, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

When the hospital chain you've allowed to monopolize care for over 1 million people delivers terrible results, then just change the grading criteria. Also withhold the underlying data from the public.

It's astonishing the public subsidies that Amazon continues to pick up — a NY town plans to give the retail monopoly a $102.6 million property tax break. How much will competing independent retailers get? Nothing.

One of the hidden tipping points underway is the loss of wholesalers that supply local retailers. “It is going to hurt us a lot. Right now, we don’t have a milk supplier," said a grocer after a 100yr-old wholesaler said it would close, citing Walmart..

Google is determined to kill news outlets. First it took their ad dollars. Now its AI answers are taking their traffic. "At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero."

Small businesses — diverse in who owns them and what they stand for — are a democratic bulwark against authoritarianism. Meanwhile, big corporations move in lockstep to support and enable the ruling regime.

Small businesses — diverse in who owns them and what they stand for — are a democratic bulwark against authoritarianism. Meanwhile, big corporations move in lockstep to support and enable the ruling regime.

The FTC just voted 3-0 to drop this case — that's effectively an endorsement of the predatory tactics Walmart uses to crush local grocery sores, create food deserts, and drive up prices. This will hit working-class, rural, and Black communities hardest.

The FTC just voted 3-0 to drop this case — that's effectively an endorsement of the predatory tactics Walmart uses to crush local grocery sores, create food deserts, and drive up prices. This will hit working-class, rural, and Black communities hardest.

1. My colleague Ron Knox just published a killer guide to resisting monopolies. It shows that fighting monopoly power isn't just a job for the government — it's something regular people can do every day in their communities and workplaces.

Some of members of Congress like Minnesota's Kelly Morrison are starting to call out the Trump Administration for helping monopolies consolidate more power while small businesses go under.

Cal-Maine, the dominant egg producer, wants to use the monopoly profits it has extracted though inflated egg prices to buy a breakfast food manufacturer. This is a merger that should be blocked. www.fooddive.com/news/cal-mai...

One of the hidden tipping points underway is the loss of wholesalers that supply local retailers. “It is going to hurt us a lot. Right now, we don’t have a milk supplier," said a grocer after a 100yr-old wholesaler said it would close, citing Walmart.. www.seafoodsource.com/news/foodser...

NEW: At least 10 states lose more than $100 million per year in tax revenue to data centers. The loss of revenue is surely worse than we can yet document — of the 32 states with data center tax incentives, 12 fail to disclose even *aggregate* revenue losses. 👇🏾 goodjobsfirst.org/cloudy-with-...

I take seriously my duty to protect hardworking Arizonans against abuses of corporate power. Thanks for the shout out, @ronmknox.bsky.social and @ilsr.bsky.social. Listen to the full episode here: ilsr.org/articles/blp... youtube.com/shorts/qF84I...

Now that Walmart and Wall Street have weighed in, Trump says the China tariffs will come down. Meanwhile 1000s of small businesses are spinning out amid uncertainty and loss of supplies.

Wow. Trump & JD Vance are going to bat for Amazon and Walmart in India, demanding that the gov’t drop its platform separation law. The law bars both companies from selling on their own e-commerce marketplaces, as they do here.

If policymakers weren't so oriented to big corporations, they might realize that small-scale manufacturing could "ramp up quickly and broadly, as it did in response to COVID-19.” The key to this isn't tariffs, but zoning, low-cost capital, and antitrust. www.governing.com/management-a...