By Zachary Hagen-Smith & Luis Fernando Chavez
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.
Meta Agrees to $18 Billion & Changes to Settle States’ Child Endangerment Case
Meta has agreed to an $18 billion settlement in a case brought by 29 bipartisan state attorneys general accusing the Big Tech giant of downplaying and concealing the mental health harms its platforms cause children. That’s not all: as part of the settlement Meta has committed to establishing major safeguards for U.S.-based teenage users, including default two-hour daily limits, non-algorithmic feeds, enhanced age assurance measures, and more — though the safeguard mandate is set to expire after ten years.
This is undoubtedly a loss for Meta. Just last week, Trump’s Department of Justice settled similar charges against TikTok for barely 2% of this amount. The state attorneys general behind this win — especially the case’s co-leaders California AG Rob Bonta, Colorado’s Phil Weiser, New Jersey’s Jennifer Davenport, and Kentucky’s Russell Coleman — should be commended for sticking to their guns. At the same time, this is far from an absolute victory. The settlement cut short an unwinnable trial that Mark Zuckerberg was expected to take the stand in, for a payout — while sizable — that is still only a rounding error in Meta’s $1.45 trillion market cap. The protections Meta will have to implement meanwhile are temporary and restricted to just minors. Not only should everyone have access the same digital safeguards, but these age-verification measures potentially risk serious privacy and freedom of expression overreach. The settlement also leaves Meta’s structural incentives intact. As Research Director Matt Stoller put it, “You can put all the limits you want in a legal document, but if Meta makes money from kids using their product, Meta is going to find ways of getting kids to use their product.”
This settlement is nonetheless a step in the right direction, acknowledging that digital platforms like Meta are public utilities and need to be overseen as such. More in this case may also be in store. Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier rejected the settlement terms as a “weak payoff attempt” and plans to take Meta to trial. The Big Tech giant is also still on the hook for criminal liability. But don’t forget the bigger picture: Congress needs to resist newly reported political spending from Meta and other tech giants, and instead take the clear, direct action to rein in Big Tech that Americans of all political stripes have been demanding for years.
For Healthy Patients & Healthy Wallets, America Must Break Up Big Medicine
Why is U.S. healthcare so expensive? Since 2005, the annual cost of employer-sponsored family coverage has nearly tripled, and the U.S. now spends roughly $15,000 per person on health care, more than double other high-income countries despite Americans living shorter lives than their peers.
As Economic Liberties lays out in a new report, this is the direct consequence of health care consolidation: today, 90% of hospital beds are controlled by large hospital systems while 80% of prescriptions are processed by just three pharmacy benefit managers. For patients, this hasn’t just meant higher costs, but also physician and drug shortages, longer wait times, growing care deserts, and higher denial rates. The report lays out a comprehensive agenda to fight back, ranging from breaking up vertically integrated health care giants, to capping health care and prescription drug prices, to investing in local providers and domestic pharmaceutical supply chains, and more. The agenda would save America roughly $795 billion a year, more than $6,000 per household.
As Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and ACA subsidies drive America’s uninsured population to distressing heights, the report reiterates that in addition to improving access, America must also tackle costs’ root cause in consolidation, “otherwise,” as Senior Fellow Emma Freer told The American Prospect, “we end up with something like Medicare Advantage for All, which would be disastrous.” Economic Liberties isn’t alone: Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico and Mark Cuban launched a similar plan to break up health care monopolies. Americans get it. Recent polling found that 71% of voters (including 70% of Republicans) back federal legislation to break up vertically integrated health conglomerates.
U.S.-Canada Trade Fight Pits Trump’s Narcissism Against Carney’s Ego
Despite breathless media coverage, the U.S.-Canada trade fight is not actually that big a deal financially so far. The new U.S. tariffs on Canadian imports cover less than half of a percent of all U.S. goods imports, while Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, slated to start September 8, cover barely 6% of U.S. exports to Canada and mere 3% of all Canadian goods imports. But the trade skirmish could escalate into real money if the countries expand tariffs to more goods, or if they delay or derail the needed renegotiation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) now underway.
The current trade fight revolves around two key facts: President Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney dislike each other — a lot — and, politically, neither can be seen as backing down. Carney, a former Goldman Sachs banker who previously led not just Canada’s central bank but also the UK’s, ran on one message — he would stand up to Trump. Indeed, his Davos speech attacking Trump won global acclaim, but a careful listen reveals he is a dogmatic elitist. Carney’s anti-Trump show is a public distraction from his own “Maple Leaf DOGE” agenda — privatizing Canadian federal airports and national ports, handing Big Oil federal cash for new pipelines, and gutting food safety and environmental safeguards. Trump, for his part, faces a cratering economy and an Iran War quagmire. Picking a trade fight with Canada, a country with which we have balanced trade, is likewise a distraction for him. Trump generates press with the usual tantrums — this week renaming Ontario “Lake America” — while quietly caving to Chinese trade demands despite major U.S. job loss related to a this bilateral trade deficit.
Whether U.S.-Canada negotiations resume over the next few weeks will likely determine whether Trump’s Canada poke-in-the-eye tariffs and Carney’s retaliation to them remains a political stunt, or become an economic problem for those who can least afford it. For more on this front, catch Rethink Trade Director Lori Wallach on Democracy Now! unpacking the U.S.-Canada trade fight alongside NDP leader Avi Lewis.
Quick Hits
According to new Bureau of Economic Analysis data, pre-tax corporate earnings are now at a record post-WWII share of national income, while employees’ share from wages and benefits is at its lowest level since the 1950s.
Reporting from The Wall Street Journal reveals that Trump directed DOJ to settle its antitrust case with Live Nation-Ticketmaster after repeat meetings with Live Nation’s CEO, even interrupting a negotiations meeting to demand a settlement, which the DOJ agreed to by the end of that meeting.
Chip giant NVIDIA is reportedly making a $12.9 billion bid to acquire Hugging Face, a platform for open-source AI models that rejected an NVIDIA investment last year, potentially allowing the tech giant to steer developers to its own hardware over that of competitors. This comes shortly after NVIDIA’s blockbuster earnings call and its pause on some credit support deals with AI cloud providers.
In other tech news: The Financial Times reports that large banks are experimenting with new financial vehicles to reduce their exposure to data centers. Meanwhile, journalist Ronan Farrow is out with a viral video report revealing that Georgia got back barely 8% of last year’s $474 million sales tax credit investment in data center development. For more on what data centers are costing communities, check out Director of State and Local Policy Pat Garofalo’s conversation with Ali Velshi on MS NOW.
The fight over the Paramount-Warner merger continues this week with California AG Rob Bonta cancelling a Monday meeting with Paramount following the company’s deceptive press leaks while Iowa and Montana are now misguidedly suing the twelve states blocking the deal. Paramount’s pressure campaign for the states to settle also continues, with Gov. Gavin Newsom signaling support for a settlement — but, as Office creator Mike Schur notes, the merger is existential for the entertainment industry, and no concessions can remediate that.
Trump’s Small Business Administration is proposing a dramatic expansion of the definition of a “small business” to allow companies with up to $1 billion in revenue or over 3,000 employees to qualify, more than many publicly traded corporations.
A new Economic Liberties brief breaks down how industry lobbyists are undermining surveillance pricing bans with a repeat set of carveouts and loopholes. Also check out co-author and former FTC chief technologist Stephanie Nguyen’s New York Times op-ed on surveillance pricing.
The FTC settled a case alleging that Zillow paid $100 million for Redfin to stop listing multifamily properties and limit apartment listings to those supplied by Zillow. While the FTC says the terms of the settlement ended the partnership, Zillow announced the partnership will continue.
Also on housing: a class action lawsuit is alleging real giant Compass abused its dominance of NYC’s rental market by pulling listings from public portals to jack up Big Apple rents. For more on how to deal with the rise of private listings, check out Economic Liberties new model legislation.
Travel leagues are making youth sports unaffordable while enriching investors, according New York Magazine’s cover story this week.
In separate letters to federal antitrust enforcers, Sens. Cory Booker and Tammy Baldwin, as well as Reps. Maxwell Frost and Jerry Nadler warn Sysco’s $29.1 billion Restaurant Depot acquisition would give America’s biggest broadline food distributor even more power to raise prices on restaurants and squeeze farmers.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is out with a new video breaking down how for-profit utility monopolies are squeezing customers.
Catch comedian John Oliver taking on subscription traps in his latest Last Week Tonight segment.
Tune in to Rethink Trade Director Lori Wallach’s conversation with Emma Vigeland on The Majority Report where she breaks down Trump’s trade mess and what an alternative would look like.
ICYMI: Is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s public grocery store program the most “compelling and exciting innovation in our food supply” in a generation? Errol Schweizer of The Checkout makes the case that it is.
a strict federal ban on the corporate practice of medicine is the solution. the consolidation is a byproduct of the lack of enforcement of the various states’ laws that ban this as well as the federal gov’t encouraging it (including Obama’s ACA). Then again, the underlying reason for all of the bad public policy is corruption. These weren’t “mistakes” by well-intentioned deliberators who simply ended up being wrong. Case in point, Medicare Advantage was ostensibly created to save the gov’t $ compared to Original Medicare. It has cost much more every year since its introduction. Why didn’t our lawmakers reverse course?….
So, to get a national ban on the corporate practice of medicine, we need to make corruption/bribery illegal again. But every single politician is already used to the corrupt system we have and will never want to change the system that empowered them in the first place…This is the paradox/problem I have yet to solve.