You have the Granger movement, which was this group of farmers with their pitchforks basically demanding that state legislators and governors and ultimately Washington do something about it because of their input cost, because of the cost of rail, because of the cost of seeds and the like, and then you had the union movement, of course, coming up against the trusts all over the country, which makes that really poignant point that this is also about wages and workers, because if you don't have competitive companies to sell your wares or your skills to, that hurts wages. KLOBUCHAR: Exactly, Karen, and so that was why I thought I'm the good person to write it, that all when you go back in time-Teddy Roosevelt, of course, wasn't from the Midwest, but he spent a lot of time in North Dakota hunting and had a lot of his political support grounded there, William Jennings Bryan from the Midwest. I got interested because of my family history with my grandpa working for monopolists his whole life down in the mines, basically not even getting a high school degree because his family needed him. It's just at a certain point in this country-and I had a front-row seat to this when I represented MCI as they took on the Bell operating monopolies many, many years ago when I was in private practice. There's all kinds of examples of how as they grow, they develop new products. Monopolies stand in the way of that, and it isn't to say that monopolies don't have good ideas and give us great things. But I don't think that that is a substitute for a 9/11-type, -style commission.īut, in any case, I wanted to write this book because I think this issue has been boiling up now for decades, and if you wonder why your cable rates are so high or why we don't have proper privacy protections on social media platforms or why you don't get the good deal that you wanted to get on travel or the like, you got to look at antitrust because our country has been basically asleep at the wheel when it comes to antitrust, whereas in past decades and past centuries, actually, this was a major cause to reduce income inequality to make it easier for innovation and for new ideas and for small businesses. So that rather lengthy report is coming out. Our report is focused on what changes can we make immediately to the way the Capitol Police board is structured, to the way we have intelligence sharing and what's happening with the Defense Department, because we felt it was important to get something out relatively quickly so that decisions can be made. So, we're actually putting our report out as well, but that's different than the 9/11 commission. So, Roy and Rob Portman and Gary Peters and I combined our two committees and did some very public hearings on this and then followed up with many interviews of different key witnesses. While that's going on-and I know we're going to have a vote on this soon, and we seem so close to getting it done-we have had another investigation that's bipartisan with Senator Blunt, who is actually the chair of the Rules Committee, leading into the inauguration, and he and I worked together on the inauguration.
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