This opens space for "MAGA influencer lobbyists" whose boozy back-Broom deals with antitrust targets like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks swap legal immunity for personal "consulting" payments in the millions of dollars:

unherd.com/2025/07/the-antitru…

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The antitrust war inside MAGA

^{Sohrab Ahmari (UnHerd)}

But here's the thing: even though the fish rots from the head down, the *world* rises from the bottom up. The global wave of antitrust vigor (which swept up federal enforcers in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the EU and China) did not *start* with government enforcers.

4/

Rather, these enforcers were driven forward by an unstoppable current of popular fury over corporate power. That fury is ubiquitous, and it's growing. Federal enforcement was the channel that current was forced into, but merely damming up that channel does not cause the current to abate.

Right now, that rage is finding vent in municipal politics, which makes sense if you think about it, because corporate power is most vividly felt at the local level.

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When a billionaire rains flaming space-junk down on your home, or poisons your water with fracking, or jack's up your electricity and water bills by building a data-center, that's because a local politician has been captured by an oligarch. Very few of us are personally familiar with America's oligarch class, but a hell of a lot of us know where the mayor lives.

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Writing in *The American Prospect*, Ron Knox documents the rising wave of successful local mobilizations against corporate power:

prospect.org/economy/2025-09-0…

In Portland, Maine, the community has risen up against the monopolist Live Nation/Ticketmaster's plan to build a 3,300 seat venue that would have destroyed the local music scene, which pulled of a miracle of mutual aid and survived the covid lockdowns and nursed itself back to health.

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The Shifting Anti-Monopoly Landscape

Fights over data centers and music venues show that resisting corporate power will have to go local in the age of Trump.

^{Ron Knox (The American Prospect)}

The Maine Music Alliance and its allies won the fight by packing town meetings, circulating petitions, and bollocking municipal representatives - you know, the stuff that has totally stopped working federally, but which still moves the needle when it comes to local politics.

The Portland/Live Nation victory is a story of a couple thousand everyday people *thoroughly* trouncing a globe-spanning, rapacious, corporation that grossed *seven billion dollars in the last quarter*.

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Moreover, these everyday people beat Live Nation/Ticketmaster at the same moment as the feds were making noises about dropping their antitrust investigation against the company. Where the feds surrender, the people of Portland fight - and win.

It's just the latest installment in a series of similar victories, including well-known ones (Queens, NY blocking a giant corporate giveaway to build a new Amazon HQ), and quieter ones, like Tuscon rejecting an Amazon data-center.

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Localities are fighting the fire-engine cartel (three companies that control fire-engine production and screw cities on new vehicles and maintenance):

pdfserver.amlaw.com/legalradar…

For a guy who loves to throw his power around, Trump has a very primitive theory of power. He thinks that illegally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board will put a lid on the generationally unprecedented support for unions among American workers.

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But the NLRB doesn't exist to make unions: *unions made the NLRB*. We have labor law because illegal unions fought so hard and terrified their bosses so much that the capital class had to sue for peace. Firing the referee doesn't end the game - it just means we don't have to play by the rules.

Trump has illegally torn up the contracts of a million unionized federal workers. It's "by far the largest single action of union busting in American history":

prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-…

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Trump Celebrates Labor Day as the Most Anti-Union President Ever

His unbound union busting is one front of his war on democracy.

^{Harold Meyerson (The American Prospect)}