Weekly Rewind: 7/17/26
States, Workers, & Shareholders Move to Block Paramount-Warner Bros. Deal, and more.
By Zachary Hagen-Smith and Katie Hettinga
Welcome back to The Economic Populist’s Weekly Rewind. Every Friday, we’ll briefly recap the week’s biggest news, updates, and developments in the fight against corporate power.
Here’s what to know this week.
States, Workers, & Shareholders Move to Block Paramount-Warner Bros. Deal
Lights! Camera!… Injunction? After months of Paramount preaching the inevitability of its Warner Bros. acquisition, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general sued in federal court this week to block the mega-merger. The states’ lawsuit reveals that, if completed, the merger would result in Paramount-Warner and Disney monopolizing approximately 60% of both movie theater blockbusters and basic cable stations. This would, in turn, give these two entertainment giants outsized power to dictate financial terms to theaters, distributors, and audiences.
The Writers Guild, in a separate action, also filed to block the deal, alleging Paramount-Warner would control 33% to 40% of key writer labor markets, allowing the combined company to suppress wages, limit opportunities, and exploit its vertical ownership of studios and streaming platforms to reduce writers’ residuals. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and the Public Integrity Project filed yet another lawsuit to block the deal, alleging that Paramount leadership violated its fiduciary duties by promising the Trump administration sweeping editorial changes at CNN in exchange for antitrust approval.
Paramount is pushing back aggressively. They’ve hired a renowned antitrust lawyer; are demanding a special expedited court schedule; and their top lawyer is threatening not just to fight all the way up to the Supreme Court, but to seek to overturn a major precedent in antitrust law. They’ve also been allegedly sliding gifts worth tens of thousands of dollars to the FCC regulators in charge of approving the deal.
Next up in the fight: the federal judge overseeing the states’ case against the merger will decide by next Wednesday whether to grant a temporary restraining order to pause the merger while the case proceeds.
For more information, catch Senior Adviser Alvaro Bedoya breaking down the lawsuit with comedian Adam Connover at the Ankler. Also check out our recent video with More Perfect Union covering the cross-country town halls we held with workers and small businesses against this merger.
Senate Republicans, FTC Say Big Medicine Doesn’t Need to Take Unpleasant Medicine
Senate Republicans on Friday killed a bill that would have ended a Trump administration pilot program that uses private contractors and AI tools to review and deny Medicare services to seniors.
It is, sad to report, the second major win this week for Big Medicine conglomerates.
On Tuesday, the FTC announced a proposed loophole-ridden settlement with CVS Caremark, the nation’s largest pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), allowing them to dodge a trial that may have produced structural remedies, such as a breakup. This follows a similarly toothless settlement earlier this year with Cigna-owned Express Scripts, the second biggest PBM. Complaints against both companies were filed in 2024 when Lina Khan was FTC chair, alleging the “big three” PBMs used their market power to demand bigger rebates from drugmakers in exchange for favorable placement; instead of passing savings on to patients, they kept the discounts, causing the cost of insulin to more than double. These same PBMs squeeze independent pharmacies through opaque contracts and patient steering, contributing to thousands of pharmacy closures nationwide.
Also this week: the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing Wednesday interrogating the Pentagon’s multibillion-dollar TRICARE pharmacy program, which has relied on Express Scripts to manage prescription benefits for military families. The rub: Express Scripts decides which pharmacies participate in TRICARE and their reimbursement rates, while also operating its own pharmacies that directly compete against others in the TRICARE network. As Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, “this seems like a clear conflict of interest.” The hearing examined how these dirty practices have pushed thousands of pharmacies out of the TRICARE network and limited patients’ access to care, affecting 400,000 military families. Senators are now pushing for an independent audit of the program.
For more on the fight to break up Big Medicine, tune in to Senior Healthcare Analyst Emma Freer’s conversation with healthcare advocate Laura Packard.
Tariff “Refunds” Padding Profits While Consumers Struggle
After Trump imposed new tariffs in 2025, companies raised prices — sometimes because costs went up, but sometimes because they could get away with using tariffs as an excuse. Bottom line: consumers paid more. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled many of the tariffs illegal and mandated refunds. The Trump administration launched a refund portal that sends money back to companies.
But that refund money — billions of dollars — may never reach consumers or small businesses who purchased imported goods from wholesalers or relied on shippers like FedEx to handle customs processes. Axios reported this week that several companies, including food and home goods companies, have said refunds will cover business costs and will not be passed down to customers in the form of lower prices.
Amazon, Costco, Ford, and Nike are among companies facing class-action lawsuits in which customers claim they are owed a share of the companies’ refunds because they paid higher prices that the companies justified with tariffs. The outcomes of these lawsuits are unpredictable, but the complaints spotlight the central issue: Trump’s allegiances lie with his billionaire buddies who are invested in or run the biggest corporations, not with regular Americans in their roles as shoppers, workers, small business owners, and farmers.
Reminder: Trump called the very notion that Americans were suffering an affordability crisis a “con job” and said he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation “not even a little bit.”
Quick Hits
The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law last Friday without President Trump’s signature, delivering the most significant federal housing reforms in decades to boost housing construction, increase transparency around institutional investors, and curb Wall Street’s influence in the housing market.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law this week a first-in-the-nation moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, giving state regulators time to address the facilities’ impacts on electricity, natural resources, and local communities while ensuring Big Tech, rather than ratepayers, bears the costs.
Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Chris Deluzio, and Pat Ryan today introduced the House companion to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act (that we hosted the launch of earlier this year) which would break up dominant meatpackers to lower grocery prices and restore competition. For more on why beef prices are so high, check out Rethink Trade’s recent report on how beef monopolies drive up costs and why more imports and lower tariffs don’t help.
The FCC announced an August vote on plans to eliminate the 39% national broadcast ownership cap, a move that would clear the way for Nexstar’s acquisition of Tegna. As FCC commissioner Anna Gomez railed in opposition, this would clear the way for the destruction of local newsrooms, as well as result in higher cable bills for American families.
Delta reported billions in profit last Friday, while executives reaffirmed they have no plans to lower fares despite falling fuel costs, underscoring the airline’s strategy of “no longer competing on price” in the heavily concentrated airlines market.
More than 200 startups, investors, and growth-stage companies launched the Little Tech Association, a new K Street group pushing tougher antitrust enforcement and competition reforms to counter Big Tech.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin sent a letter urging rail regulators to investigate claims that Union Pacific’s CEO threatened customers with higher rates if they opposed its proposed takeover of Norfolk Southern.
Following New York City’s passage last week of a click-to-cancel rule and proposed junk fee ban, Director of State & Local Policy Pat Garofalo joined NPR to discuss how cities and states are cracking down on subscription traps and hidden fees.
Senior Legal Fellow Katherine Van Dyck is in the Capitol Forum this week examining how America’s pay-to-play youth sports system is costing the US a Men’s World Cup win.
Also in the Capitol Forum: Senior Legal Counsel Lee Hepner takes on surveillance pricing bans, digging into why some are effective, while others, like Maryland’s, offer corporate lobbies prolific loopholes — as we’ve covered before.
ICYMI: Senior Communicators Adviser Douglas Farrar on how Trump Accounts subsidizes big business, while leaving kids behind.