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The pernicious impact of monopolies in the U.S.

The New Republic – The One Issue the Left and Right Can Agree On – “In November, not long after Amazon announced that it would build its second headquarters in New York City and northern Virginia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newly elected representative from Queens and the Bronx, tweeted that she’d been getting calls from residents all day. “The community’s response?” she wrote. “Outrage.” Amazon, as legal scholars were quick to point out, had become a monopoly so powerful it was using its economic heft to exploit not only competitors and suppliers, but entire states. New York and Virginia had agreed to subsidize helipads for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos; Virginia even promised to help the company fight Freedom of Information Act requests.

…Opposition to monopoly also brings the left and the center together with unlikely allies. Perhaps the most power­ful critique of corporate concentration in recent months has come from The Economist, which has attacked the American antitrust establishment for laxness. And when Ocasio-Cortez spoke out against the Amazon deal, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and the National Review both praised her. “I hate to admit it, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a very good point,” said Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. “It’s hard to argue with the internal logic…. The richest man in the world just got $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. How does that work?”..”

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