Welcome to Monopoly in Minnesota

A newsletter about the fight against corporate power in the North Star State

This is Monopoly in Minnesota, a newsletter about how monopolies impact Minnesota and what we can do about it.

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.

Minnesota was where the Antimonopoly Party pushed state legislators in the 1870s to confront grain and rail monopolists. Floyd B. Olson became Minnesota’s first Farmer-Labor Party governor while pledging to curb the power of chain stores. And the Happy Warrior, Hubert Humphrey, championed the New Deal’s focus on breaking up concentrated power. Fighting monopoly power has been central to the story of our great state, but we’ve lost the language and policy tools we once had. This newsletter is about how to get them back.