The Systemic Cost of Surrender: Why Antitrust Matters and How We Fight Back

Published: July 14, 2026

Sometimes what is happening in our government can make it incredibly hard to find optimism. Prices are completely out of control. Everyday stuff feels cheaper, yet somehow costs more. Meanwhile, massive corporate giants don’t care about the communities they bleed for profit. When the federal agencies tasked with protecting us give up, optimism is hard to find. But cynicism is passive, it accepts a broken system as reality. Optimism requires us to look past the frustration, dig into the mechanics of the system, and find out exactly where the pressure leaks are occurring so we can start patching them.

Our Current Situation: Retreat at the DOJ

To understand why the system is getting worse we have to look at what has been happening inside the Department of Justice. Antitrust laws aren’t some new progressive experiment; they’ve served as the basic operating system for American economic fairness for over a hundred years. They are the guardrails meant to prevent monopolies, price-fixing, and force businesses to compete fairly. But under the current DOJ leadership of Todd Blanch, the department has pulled back on the rules meant to keep us from getting ripped off.¹.

Top career antitrust enforcers who refuse to rubber-stamp massive corporate mergers are being overruled and forced out of the agency. Look at Gail Slater, the Assistant Attorney General who was pushed out in February 2026. Tensions originally spiked when the DOJ chose to fold and settle the massive Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper Networks merger instead of actually going to trial to block it.²

Shortly after, Slater wanted to launch an investigation into the $1.6 billion merger of Compass and Anywhere Real Estate³ (the country’s two largest residential brokerages). Compass bypassed Slater, appealing directly to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who overrode her and cleared the deal. Lobbyist Mike Davis was reportedly heavily involved in pushing these deals through.⁴

Now, Stanley Woodward—who took over the Antitrust Division—has defended this hands-off approach. He has privately referred to merger reviews as a “tax on dealmaking” and argued that blocking corporate mergers could violate a company’s constitutionally protected due process rights.¹

To put it plainly, that is a complete crock of shit. When a regulatory body views protecting the public as an unfair burden on corporate wealth, the vital boundary between fair governance and total corporate capture vanishes entirely. When the government surrenders its duty to regulate monopolies, we the people pay the price in ways that go far deeper than our immediate wallets.

A Brief History of Trust-Busting

This isn’t the first time the American economy has faced a monopoly crisis. The late 19th and early 20th centuries was the era of the original “Robber Barons” with companies like Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel. They used their immense wealth to swallow up every competitor, cornering entire industries and leaving consumers and workers completely at their mercy.

Politicians from both sides saw the disaster unfolding and passed the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914⁵. These were not anti-capitalist restrictions. They were actually written to save capitalism from its own worst habit: total monopolization.

President Teddy Roosevelt became the ultimate mascot for this movement. As a staunch defender of free enterprise, Roosevelt famously argued that the government’s role was to act as a referee, ensuring a “Square Deal” where small businesses, workers, and everyday citizens could actually compete fairly.⁶ He recognized that when corporations become more powerful than the government meant to regulate them, democracy itself is in serious trouble. Teddy remains one of my favorites for this very reason.

Failure Modes of Consolidation

As a software engineer, I look at these unchecked corporate mergers and see massive, systemic engineering failures built right into our economy. In a healthy capitalistic structure, competition is the engine of optimization. When that engine is choked out by consolidation, the failure modes ripple across every single sector of society.

Let’s look at what happens to labor. When massive companies merge, they don’t just consolidate who they sell to - they consolidate who they hire. When two dominant companies in an industry become a single entity, workers instantly lose their leverage to negotiate for better pay, benefits, or safer working conditions because there’s nowhere else to go. They own the market, so they set your wages. Period.

Unchecked corporate scale also strangles small businesses. True innovation relies on the guy building something out of his garage. Or opening a local storefront. But when a mega-corporation can just deploy an infinite pool of capital to buy out or crush anyone showing promise, the ecosystem dies. It’s hard to get ahead when the game is rigged.

This consolidation has another side effect: fragility. When entire sectors of our economy are controlled by just a few suppliers, it makes us vulnerable to single points of failure. A single factory shutdown can now trigger a nationwide shortage. This is a problem on a global scale too, but that’s a topic for another time.

Campaign Finance and Citizens United

All of this creates a feedback loop: the larger a corporation grows, the more money it can funnel into getting what they want. They use their profits to purchase legislative influence, effectively hiring the lawmakers to write laws beneficial to them, or to put it more simply: legalized bribery.

This got a whole lot worse with the Supreme Court’s unthinkable Citizens United decision in 2010, which granted corporations the same political speech as citizens.⁷ As if a corporation was a person. It transformed our democracy into an auction, allowing dark money to flood our elections.

How to Find Optimism

The game is far from over. A powerful, cross-partisan movement is proving that we can do something about this. Rather than waiting for federal politicians or the Supreme Court to rescue us, individuals and states are taking the fight into their own hands.

A brilliant strategy known as the “Corporate Power Reset” is gaining ground nationwide⁸. Corporations are entities created by state laws, so states can rewrite corporate charters, and some are already doing it.

Hawaii recently became the first to take action by passing Act 11, based on this exact legal theory⁹. Effective July 2027, the law redefines the legal powers of corporations doing business in the state. It clarifies that political spending is not among those powers⁹. Other states, including California and Montana are working on similar bills¹⁰. By redefining what a corporation is legally permitted to do, these states are making Citizens United irrelevant within their borders. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start.

There is however another solution that is looking like it could become reality. 25 states have passed resolutions calling on Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to permanently end big money in politics¹¹. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of their political party, agree that corporate money has entirely corrupted our elections.

Teddy Roosevelt may be rolling over in his grave at the current state of the Department of Justice, but he would recognize this fight instantly. He understood that breaking up monopolies isn’t about destroying big business - it’s about protecting the integrity of our republic. We are undoubtedly facing a steep, uphill battle to rectify the damage done by decades of regulatory neglect and corruption. But we can force the system back into alignment by refusing to give in to cynicism and educating ourselves on the rules of the game. We can also support local and state-level movements actively fighting to reclaim our voice. Organizations like American Promise and Move To Amend are helping with this fight.

We cannot simply hope for things to get better on their own — they won’t. To find optimism, we must look at this completely broken machine, understand exactly why it failed, and roll up our sleeves to fix it. Remember, this is OUR country and it is OUR job to fix it.