"The trends for Walgreens aren’t good - it has closed a thousand stores since 2018, and plans to shut 1,200 more this year. And if you look at the gross operating income of the U.S. retail segment, it is collapsing.

I put these charts together based on data in Walgreen’s annual reports.
What’s going on? Well that’s simple. Margins are falling apart.

Galloway and Elson went back and forth on why Walgreens is flailing. The company hasn’t modernized in the age of Amazon. It has too many stores. Bad management. A dumb acquisition of VillageMD in 2021. Etc. And these would seem like reasonable causes, since lots of other retailers are dying in the face of low price competition.

But the real reason Walgreens, and the pharmacy business in general, is dying, is because of a failure to enforce antitrust laws against unfair business methods and illegal mergers. Elson touched on it when he mentioned lower reimbursement rates, but I don’t think people appreciate the full scope of what happened to Walgreens, and to the full pharmacy business in general. This is not a case of bad management, it’s a case of desperate management."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-real-reason-walgreens-collapsed

"The American Economic Liberties Project today released new research showing that at least 326 U.S. pharmacies have closed since Dec. 19, 2024, when Congress abandoned bipartisan, bicameral PBM reforms as part of a stopgap spending bill. The new data comes ahead of a vote in Congress tomorrow on a continuing resolution to fund the government, where the policymakers could include much-needed structural PBM reform.

“Despite later admitting that he does not know what a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) is, Elon Musk successfully tanked PBM reforms with nearly unanimous House support late last year,” said Emma Freer, Senior Policy Analyst for Healthcare at the Economic Liberties Project. “As predicted, without Congressional intervention, the Big Three PBMs have continued to abuse their market power, squeezing at least 326 pharmacies – 237 of them independent – out of business in fewer than 10 weeks and stranding their most vulnerable patients in pharmacy deserts without access to lifesaving care. Given these high stakes, it is critical that Congress stand up to these healthcare monopolist middlemen and pass structural PBM reforms that will save their constituents’ time, money, and lives.”

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/326-pharmacies-have-closed-since-elon-musk-tanked-pbm-reform/

#USA Musk #DOGE #PBMs #BigPharma #Healthcare #Oligopolies #Competition #Antitrust

Probably the only acceptable choice made by Trump until now...:

"Among the loyalists selected by Donald Trump to staff his second administration, Gail Slater stands out for a different reason: she unites right and left with a sceptical view of big business.

While the US president’s other nominees tend to be traditional conservative free market advocates, Slater, his pick to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is expected to maintain the Biden administration’s vigorous approach to enforcement — much to Wall Street’s chagrin.

In public remarks and written submissions to lawmakers, the 53-year-old Oxford graduate has expressed concern about market concentration and said enforcement should be focused on technology and sectors with a direct impact on Americans’ pocketbooks.

Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives helmed by vice-president JD Vance, who has called for the break-up of Google."

https://www.ft.com/content/769709d5-f897-497d-a8f2-ce15a3c977ed

"I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

"Requiring AI developers to get authorization from rightsholders before training models on copyrighted works would limit competition to companies that have their own trove of training data, or the means to strike a deal with such a company. This would result in all the usual harms of limited competition—higher costs, worse service, and heightened security risks—as well as reducing the variety of expression used to train such tools and the expression allowed to users seeking to express themselves with the aid of AI. As the Federal Trade Commission recently explained, if a handful of companies control AI training data, “they may be able to leverage their control to dampen or distort competition in generative AI markets” and “wield outsized influence over a significant swath of economic activity.”

Legacy gatekeepers have already used copyright to stifle access to information and the creation of new tools for understanding it. Consider, for example, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, widely considered to be the first lawsuit over AI training rights ever filed."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/ai-and-copyright-expanding-copyright-hurts-everyone-heres-what-do-instead

"On a firm-by-firm basis, small businesses score an easy win, according to beautifully detailed Census Bureau data — the invaluable Business Dynamics Statistics — built from government records drawn from just about every private sector employer in the country. About 60 percent of American businesses have fewer than five employees, and 98 percent have fewer than 100 employees.

But we’re not sure about the utility of a measure that counts Goldman Sachs and Tariq’s #1 Halal Food equally — even if we can all agree that Tariq makes the superior chicken biryani.

If we weigh America’s businesses instead by the number of their employees, we see the trend Texas Pete feared: Before the Great Recession, most Americans worked for businesses with fewer than 500 employees. Today, it’s reversed, with 53 percent of us working for businesses with 500 or more workers.

The rule applies across the economy — the smaller the business, the slower the growth. But the real drivers of this economy-wide shift sit at the extremes: Businesses with fewer than 100 employees have steadily lost ground while business with more than 10,000 employees have gained."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/31/is-america-still-nation-small-businesses/

"Google on Tuesday updated its ethical guidelines around artificial intelligence, removing commitments not to apply the technology to weapons or surveillance.

The company’s AI principles previously included a section listing four “Applications we will not pursue.” As recently as Thursday, that included weapons, surveillance, technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” and use cases contravening principles of international law and human rights, according to a copy hosted by the Internet Archive.

A spokesperson for Google declined to answer specific questions about its policies on weapons and surveillance, but referred to a blog post published Tuesday by the company’s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, and its senior vice president for technology and society, James Manyika.

The executives wrote that Google was updating its AI principles because the technology had become much more widespread and there was a need for companies based in democratic countries to serve government and national security clients."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/04/google-ai-policies-weapons-harm/

"At the Federal Trade Commission, I argued that in the arena of artificial intelligence, developers should release enough information about their models to allow smaller players and upstarts to bring their ideas to market without being beholden to dominant firms’ pricing or access restrictions. Competition and openness, not centralization, drive innovation.

In the coming weeks and months, U.S. tech giants may renew their calls for the government to grant them special protections that close off markets and lock in their dominance. Indeed, top executives from these firms appear eager to curry favor and cut deals, which could include asking the federal government to pare back sensible efforts to require adequate testing of models before they are released to the public, or to look the other way when a dominant firm seeks to acquire an upstart competitor.

Enforcers and policymakers should be wary. During the first Trump and then the Biden administrations, antitrust enforcers brought major monopolization lawsuits against those same companies — making the case that by unlawfully buying up or excluding their rivals, these companies had undermined innovation and deprived America of the benefits that free and fair competition delivers. Reversing course would be a mistake. The best way for the United States to stay ahead globally is by promoting competition at home."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/opinion/deepseek-ai-big-tech.html

Journalist Nora Loreto sounds the alarm on the possibility of #Canadian capitalists using the Trump tariffs as an excuse to jack up prices and profiteer as they did during the pandemic.

We are going to need action against tariff profiteering by corporations.

#Canada #CanadianPolitics #cdnpoli #profiteering #monopolies #oligopolies

https://noraloreto.substack.com/p/ok-but-what-about-profiteering

"If Musk wanted to run DOGE as a force for waste-elimination, he wouldn't be attacking the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS (whose budget accounts for 0.012% of federal spending). He wouldn't be attacking federal fiber subsidies (he's mad that he can't get more subsidies for his dead-end satellite service that caps out at one ten-millionth of the speed of fiber). He wouldn't be attacking high-speed rail (which competes with his Tesla swasticars). He wouldn't be fighting with the SEC (which defends the public from costly stock swindles, which is why they've been investigating Musk for seven years).

He could, instead, go after private sector Medicare waste. 33 million seniors have been suckered into switching from federally provided Medicare to privately provided Medicare Advantage. Overbilling from Medicare Advantage (whose doctors are ordered to "upcode" patients to generate additional bills) costs the public $83b/year:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/27/beltway-bandits/#henhouse-foxes

"This is just #pricefixing, with an app. The fact that they don't sit around a table and openly discuss pricing doesn't keep this from being price-fixing.
What's more, they admit it. A director at McCain said that "higher ups" forbade anyone in the company from competing on price…they'd "never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry." Lamb Weston's CEO attributed a 111% increase in net income to "pricing actions.""

#Oligopolies #Inflation

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

"Lina Khan has warned of “catastrophic consequences” for America if Donald Trump’s antitrust officials fail to scrutinise private equity groups that are buying up chunks of the US economy.

The recently resigned chair of the US Federal Trade Commission told the Financial Times that private equity groups posed a threat to the country’s healthcare system.

Given “the stakes of our healthcare markets, it’s extraordinarily important that we are staying vigilant here”, said Khan.

“If enforcers want to decide that they want to look the other way, that’s going to have, I fear, catastrophic consequences for Americans.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/ed2ad30a-1e24-4f78-9f1d-4cfc8c170cba

"These companies have been hiking prices for years, but really started to turn the screws during the post-covid inflationary period. One of Schwenk's sources is Josh Saltzman, owner of the DC sports bar Ivy and Coney. Ten years ago, Saltzman charged $3 for fries; now it's $6 – and Saltzman's margins have declined. Saltzman has a limited number of suppliers, and they all get their potatoes from Big Potato, and they bundle those potato orders with their other supplies, making it effectively impossible for Saltzman to buy his potatoes from anyone else.

Big Potato controls 97% of the frozen potato market, and any sector that large and concentrated is going to be pretty cozy. The execs at these companies all meet at industry associations, lobbying bodies, and as they job-hop between companies in the cartel. But they don't have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give "advice" to the cartel members about "optimal pricing."

This is just price-fixing, with an app. The fact that they don't sit around a table and openly discuss pricing doesn't keep this from being price-fixing. What's more, they admit it. A director at McCain said that "higher ups" forbade anyone in the company from competing on price. A Lamb Weston exec described the arrangement as everyone "behaving themselves," chortling that they'd "never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry." Lamb Weston's CEO attributed a 111% increase in net income to "pricing actions.""

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

"These companies already rank among the richest and most powerful in history and need little help from Trump. The independent research firm Arete forecasts that five of them — Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — will this year collectively increase their revenue to more than $2tn. In spite of laying out $300bn on capital expenditure, Arete predicts they will still record profit margins and generate free cash flow of $430bn.
Yet three things may yet check their dominance. The first is that competition is intensifying between the biggest tech companies themselves as they all make colossal bets on AI and try to disrupt each others’ business models. “Big Tech can no longer deliver growth by staying in their respective lanes,” says Richard Kramer, Arete’s founder. “We expect more Hunger Games-style competition between Big Tech, attacking each other’s ‘core’ business, in consumer tech hardware, cloud services, content and ecommerce.”

That competition is also increasingly acquiring a legal dimension as tech companies attack each other in court. Musk is suing OpenAI and Altman claiming that he, and others, were duped into investing in the AI start-up because of its “fake humanitarian mission”. He also trolled the Stargate announcement this week, posting on X: “They don’t actually have the money.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/ffcd84d1-822c-492c-94e2-07785cfe3524

"So I feel the issues here are ultimately systemic policy problems that need to be fixed with regulation (such as enact national right to repair laws, de-fang the DMCA, implement US national privacy protections, somehow limit the massive seemingly untouchable influence of big tech companies, and probably tax down tech billionaires).

That’s a big ask that feels insurmountable at this moment, but it’s a movement can start now with people who are fed up with our current de facto abusive tech business models. I think eventually we will get there anyway, because the I am not sure the current extractive model is sustainable without encountering massive social unrest within the next decade. The alternative to change, if taken to an extreme, may be the collapse of personal liberty for everyone.

In the meantime, while these lofty goals simmer and take shape, you can also continue to take personal steps to preserve your own tech liberty. Support nonprofits like the EFF that fight for privacy and user rights, strong encryption, open source, use local storage, and so on. I highly encourage it.

Ultimately I hope these thoughts can be a starting point for others to pick up the torch and build off of. I will also be thinking of constructive solutions for a future follow-up."

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3292/the-pc-is-dead-its-time-to-make-computing-personal-again

I don't think I totally agree with this stance. It ignores structural causes such as the rise in the interest rates...

"In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification – not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns. For-profit companies chase profit. The enshittifying changes to Facebook and Twitter are cruel, but the cruelty isn't the point: the point is profits. If the fines – or criminal charges – Facebook faced for invading our privacy exceeded the ad-targeting revenue it makes by doing so, it would stop spying on us. Facebook wouldn't like it. Zuck would hate it. But he'd do it, because he spies on us to make money, not because he's a voyeur.

To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive – it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.

This is not to defend capitalism. I'm not saying there's a "real capitalism" that's good, and a "crony capitalism" or "monopoly capitalism" that's bad. All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism, and they have different winners and losers. Capitalists who want to sell apps on the App Store or reach customers through Facebook are technofeudalism's losers, while Apple, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies are technofeudalism's great winners.

Smart leftism pays attention to these differences, because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

"When Zuckerberg rebranded the company as Meta in 2021, it was not just to distract people from the leaks by former employee Frances Haugen. In a short video before the Facebook Connect keynote where he laid out his vision for the metaverse, he expressed a defiant tone. He claimed that for many people, namely his critics, there will never “be a good time to focus on the future.” The real heroes in society, he claimed, were “those who are willing to stand up and say, ‘This is the future we want and I’m going to keep pushing and giving everything I’ve got to make this happen.’”

The future Zuckerberg wants is one where tech billionaires like himself can play in the gated world of suburban tech campuses and Hawaiian compounds without criticism or accountability while telling the rest of us that toys like VR headsets and the metaverse will save their lives. It doesn’t matter that their tech ambitions are little more than sci-fi fantasies. Silicon Valley’s alliance with the extreme right will allow them to keep preaching how much tech will save the world for a little longer — all while they continue to degrade life for everyone."

https://jacobin.com/2025/01/mark-zuckerberg-meta-trump-tech

"The Federal Trade Commission today issued a staff report on the corporate partnerships and investments formed between the largest cloud service providers (CSPs)—Alphabet, Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., and Microsoft, Corp.—and two of the most prominent generative AI developers—Anthropic PBC and OpenAI OpCo, LLC.

The report details key aspects regarding the structure of the CSP and AI developer partnerships, such as the equity and revenue-sharing rights retained by CSPs in these partnerships and certain consultation, control, and exclusivity rights CSPs gained through their investments with AI developers.

The report outlines some potential competition implications, including that: the partnerships may impact access to certain inputs, such as computing resources and engineering talent; the partnerships may increase switching costs for the AI developer partners; and the partnerships provide CSP partners access to sensitive technical and business information that may be unavailable to others."

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-issues-staff-report-ai-partnerships-investments-study

"As it stands, Democrats, with a few exceptions, have generally declined to meaningfully contest the tech giants’ rise to power—and in many cases, they’ve helped hit the gas.

Elon Musk and his companies have been showered with subsidies, tax breaks, and incentives since at least the first Obama term, when Tesla received $465 million in DOE loans as part of the 2009 stimulus package. (In an argument redolent of the ones made by OpenAI and others today, Musk appealed to Obama by claiming that Tesla simply needed more capital than the enormous amount already sunk into the company to be successful, and would go under without it.) Obama declined to have his FTC investigate whether Google was violating antitrust laws, and was a strong supporter of Airbnb and gig work companies like Uber. Speaking of Uber, city government after city government, many Democrat-led, rolled over when the gig app giant broke local taxi laws in a bid to shore up market share, impoverishing taxi and livery cab drivers in the process.

The Democratic schmoozing of big tech is still going strong today: When Chuck Schumer convened a closed door Senate hearing on AI policy in 2023, he invited Silicon Valley CEOs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to take the lead. Biden’s Treasury bailed out Silicon Valley Bank after it collapsed in the wake of deeply irresponsible risk management practices and VCs demanded cash to save it. Last year, star Democrat Gavin Newsom sided with Google over working journalists and threatened a veto that doomed a bill that would have required tech giants to pay newspapers a small share of the ad revenue for hosting news on their platforms. The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna argued on CNN that Democrats have simply been *too hard* on Elon Musk, not showering him with enough praise and thus driving him into Republicans’ arms."

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-tech-oligarchy-has-been-here

"The Federal Trade Commission today published a second interim staff report on the prescription drug middleman industry, which focuses on pharmacy benefit managers’ (PBMs) influence over specialty generic drugs, including significant price markups by PBMs for cancer, HIV, and a variety of other critical drugs.

Staff’s latest report found that the ‘Big 3 PBMs’—Caremark Rx, LLC (CVS), Express Scripts, Inc. (ESI), and OptumRx, Inc. (OptumRx)—marked up numerous specialty generic drugs dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies by thousands of percent, and many others by hundreds of percent. Such significant markups allowed the Big 3 PBMs and their affiliated specialty pharmacies to generate more than $7.3 billion in revenue from dispensing drugs in excess of the drugs’ estimated acquisition costs from 2017-2022. The Big 3 PBMs netted such significant revenues all while patient, employer, and other health care plan sponsor payments for drugs steadily increased annually, according to the staff report.

“The FTC staff’s second interim report finds that the three major pharmacy benefit managers hiked costs for a wide range of lifesaving drugs, including medications to treat heart disease and cancer,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC should keep using its tools to investigate practices that may inflate drug costs, squeeze independent pharmacies, and deprive Americans of affordable, accessible healthcare—and should act swiftly to stop any illegal conduct.”"

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-releases-second-interim-staff-report-prescription-drug-middlemen