Matt Stoller discusses the current ideological shift in antitrust law, relating it to lax enforcement of antitrust and the resulting radical concentration of corporate power over the last forty years. (Concurrences)

In the crises of the 1930s, one of the great investigations in American history was done by a pugnacious working-class lawyer, Ferdinand Pecora, who embarrassed the lords of Wall Street in 1933 as the lead counsel for the Senate Banking Committee. A few years later, as a judge, Pecora observed why countries all over the world were taking the road to fascism or Communism. “In other lands democratic government has abdicated to dictatorship,” he said, “not because men no longer wished to be free, but because democratic governments become impotent to deal with economic problems.”