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Pete Buttigieg on Corporations
Democratic Presidential Challenger; IN Mayor
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Anti-trust law must go beyond pricing to deal with high tech
There's issues with the sheer glomeration of different business interests into single corporations. This is the basis of antitrust law. Antitrust law as we know it has begun to hit its limits with regulating tech companies. It was based around the idea
that the reason you got to stop monopolies from happening is that when they happen, they start to jack up prices. It's not designed to handle some of these tech companies where there's actually no price at all.
The product is made free, or at least it's free on its face. We've learned, in part because of the way our data are used by these companies, that nothing is actually free.
We need to empower the FTC to be able to intervene, including blocking or reversing mergers, in cases where there's anticompetitive behavior by tech companies, even if it can't directly be applied to pricing.
Source: CNN Town Hall 2020 Democratic primary
, Apr 22, 2019
Capitalism is good, but it must be subject to rules
America is a capitalist society. But it's got to be democratic capitalism. When you have capitalism capturing democracy, where powerful corporations are able to arrange the rules for their benefit, that's not real capitalism.
If you want to see what happens when you have capitalism without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia. It turns into crony capitalism. And that turns into oligarchy.
Source: Meet the Press 2019 interview of 2020 presidential hopefuls
, Apr 7, 2019
Companies are not persons; should not have religious rights
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act said that "a governmental entity may not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion." But "person" was defined to include companies, building on the legal theory of the 2014 Supreme Court Hobby Lobby case,
which interpreted federal law as giving corporations the same religious rights as people. Effectively this meant that any place of business, from a restaurant to an auto shop, could refuse an LGBT individual or couple, provided its owner cited
religion as the motivation for discriminating. It could even be interpreted to protect a physician denying care to a gay patient. And it would wipe out South Bend's own local ordinance, passed in 2012, which prohibited workplace discrimination against
LGBT residents. Despite the name, its purpose was not to "restore" religious freedom--after all, religious freedom is already guaranteed in the Constitution. The bill's actual purpose, its sponsors would later reveal, was to legalize discrimination.
Source: Shortest Way Home, by Pete Buttigieg, p.209-10
, Feb 12, 2019
Supported 2008 auto bailout, to save workers and communities
In December 2008, President Bush boldly initiated a $17.4 billion bailout package, saying, "Bankruptcy now would lead to a disorderly liquidation of American auto companies." To me, "disorderly liquidation" sounded like a cartoon whirlpool, with cars
and workers waving their arms for help in the downward spiral toward the drain. A simpler way to put it was that millions of lives and hundreds of communities stood to be ruined. Yet the move to prevent this disaster was clearly not a political winner--
something about the word "bailout" makes voters allergic--and the Senate was loath to vote for the package. When Congress refused to authorize funds, Bush acted unilaterally, rewiring money that Congress had authorized, with other purposes in mind,
as part of the TARP bank rescue. The new Democratic administration planned to continue the unpopular policy, but as President Obama took office in January 2009. By 2012, this once-unpopular policy had come to be seen as a clear win.
Source: Shortest Way Home, by Pete Buttigieg, p. 82-3
, Feb 12, 2019
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