What is Monopoly in Minnesota?
There are a bunch of issues I want to put back on the table dealing with concentration of power. I think I’m going to be a Teddy Roosevelt Democrat talking about trust-busting. - U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone (D - Minnesota).
Minnesota has a rich history of populist trustbusting from Ignatius Donnelly helping inspire passage of protections against rail and grain monopolists (Granger Laws) in the 1880s, to Governor Samuel Van Sant battling JP Morgan and James J. Hill’s rail monopoly in the early 1900s to Governor Floyd B. Olson’s battles against chain stores to Senator Hubert Humphrey’s fight to preserve fair trade laws and protect local retailers to Senator Paul Wellstone standing up to banking and telecom monopolists long before it was popular to do so again.
Yet despite this rich history, the fight against corporate power does not get the attention in our politics that it once did. This newsletter is an attempt to begin and change that, by analyzing the way unchecked corporate monopolies are harming Minnesotans.
Who Am I?
Justin Stofferahn, the Antimonopoly Director for the Minnesota Farmers Union. However, that is relatively new gig, before that I was a citizen activist trying to get policymakers and Minnesotans to pay attention to our growing monopoly crisis.
Over the past several years I have had the opportunity to write about the impact of monopoly power in Minnesota. It started with a research piece for Growth & Justice about the impact the financial crisis had on small businesses and new business formation and since then I’ve written about a range of ways monopoly power impacts our state, often with a focus on what state policymakers can do to reclaim democratic control of our economy for workers, families and entrepreneurs.
I ran for the Minnesota State Senate in 2020, which provided me a unique look at how lacking our economic policy discussions are at a state level. The concentration of corporate power is at the root of so many of the challenges we face as a state, but you would never know it from the debates that take place in St. Paul. Fortunately that is beginning to change and my goal here is to help continue that momentum so that a new generation of policymakers can be ready to fight corporate power in our state.
