It seems the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division is finding her seat a little hotter than expected because she actually intends to enforce the antitrust laws of this country. The surprise is that the heat is coming from within the Obama administration, itself.
President Obama’s top antitrust official and some senior Democratic lawmakers are preparing to rein in a host of major industries, including airline and railroad giants, moving so aggressively that they are finding some resistance from officials within the administration.
The official, Christine A. Varney, the antitrust chief at the Justice Department, has begun examining complaints by the phone companies Verizon and AT&T that their rivals — major cable operators like Cablevision and Cox Communications — improperly prevent them from buying sports shows and other programs that the cable companies produce, industry lawyers said. […]
Ms. Varney has also challenged agreements that the Federal Trade Commission and consumer groups say discourage pharmaceutical companies from marketing more generic drugs. And she is examining a settlement between Google and book publishers and authors to make more books available online.
The more aggressive antitrust policy was described in interviews with officials at the White House, the Justice Department, other agencies and Congress. It is a major policy reversal from the Bush administration, which did not prosecute cases in which some dominant companies engaged in potentially anticompetitive behavior, often because those officials maintained such behavior was not harmful to consumers.
In some cases, though, the new approach is being opposed by administration officials. Some fear that the crackdown is coming at a bad time, as corporate America reels from the recession. Other officials embrace the Bush administration’s view that larger companies and industry alliances can provide consumer benefits by making their businesses more efficient.
My I call horse manure? What the hell did we elect Obama for? Change, you say? Well than what the hell is anyone in his administration doing claiming that the Bush administration’s policies should be kept in place on anything, but especially the see no evil, hear no evil approach Bush took to antitrust enforcement? This frankly has the odor of intense multinational corporate lobbying efforts wafting up from the corrupt carcass of DLC Democrats embedded in the Obama administration.
“The struggles between the expert agencies and the Justice Department get to the heart and soul of exactly what the competition policy of the Obama administration will be,” said Mark Cooper, an antitrust expert and director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, an advocacy group.
He added: “Now you have an antitrust division that cares about competition, and it is running up against the expert agencies that haven’t changed their attitudes yet.”
That’s what happens when some of the most prominent members of a President’s economic team are firmly in the pockets of Wall Street and big business.
