Open Markets Responds to AAG Gail Slater’s Speech
WASHINGTON – Open Markets Institute Executive Director Barry Lynn responded to recent remarks from Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division Gail Slater at University of Notre Dame Law School that focused on how the Justice Department under President Trump intends to enforce America’s antitrust laws and promote fair competition.
“Our team at the Open Markets Institute was happy to see AAG Slater express support for aggressive antitrust enforcement on behalf of the people of the United States, and specifically their right to ‘shape their own economic destinies.’ We were deeply encouraged by the promise to use the DOJ to ensure ‘the protection of individual liberty from both government and corporate tyranny.’
The statement could not have come at a more important moment. The threats to democracy and liberty posed by concentrated corporate power have never been greater in the history of our nation. At the same time, public officials from both parties have demonstrated how they can work together to address these threats in ways that deliver fundamental change in the name of democracy. Both of the recent antitrust victories against Google, and the ongoing antitrust trial against Facebook, were made possible by Republicans and Democrats cooperating closely over the course of more than five years, going back to the first Trump Administration.
We look forward to finding opportunities to work with AAG Slater and her team on these and other fights against antidemocratic concentrations of power and control.
In this same spirit, we call on the Trump Administration to immediately rescind the recent firing of the two Democratic commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. More than a century ago, Congress established the FTC precisely to embody bipartisan, deliberative decision-making in protecting our democracy and liberties from dangerous concentrations of power both in the private corporation and the state. It did so by requiring the Commission have partisan diversity, and by ensuring the independence of the Commission as a whole from interference by the Executive Branch.
The recent firings clearly violate the law established by the American people, working through Congress, as well as the spirit of bipartisanship – in service of the mission of protecting democracy – expressed in that law. Unfortunately, we cannot have faith in the administration’s antitrust agenda until this grave mistake is rectified.”