Mark Dunkelman

The way that people used the levers available within the government made it so that we could not replace something like 700,000 cars worth of carbon into the atmosphere through old fossil fuel generation with clean hydropower coming from Canada.

Like, that's not a problem about corporate power.

That's a problem with can government make an expeditious decision?

This is a conversation, this conversation among progressives, between the populists and the abundance nicks, or whatever we're called, that is more than a century old.

At the turn of the 20th century, and I go through this in my book, the turn of the 20th century, the railroads have completely remade the American economy.

Power is accumulating, and the people who are concerned about these monopolies have two wildly different ideas about what to do about it.

One idea is anti-monopoly.

It's Brandeisian.

It's big is bad, small is beautiful.

How do we carve these things up so that the old sort of 19th century kind of...

capitalism that Louis Brandeis had seen on the streets of Louisville, Kentucky as we've grown up could be reestablished.

But there was a second idea, which was we should build up what was then like just a shadow of a government so that it could accurately and powerfully regulate

With centralized power, Theodore Roosevelt proposed a Bureau of Corporations.

We eventually get the Federal Trade Commission.

Before that, we have the Interstate Commerce Commission, which is a big bureaucracy designed to regulate the railroads.

That's a different idea.

That is taking power as it is and pushing it up into some big, powerful, competent government bureaucracy that will do the things that ordinary people can't do for themselves.

And I think sort of the misunderstanding here is that those who say, you know, we need to attack corporate power are just taking the Brandeisian notion of it.

And that the abundance ethos harkens back to the old ideas that existed from the turn of the 20th century through the 1960s, that we should be building up government power so that government is capable of

of taking on these corporations, that we have people in government who can make discretionary decisions about where we're going to build transmission lines, how we're going to improve transit, where we're going to build housing, how we're going to regulate this and that.