We’ve summed up the notion that energy must be focused rather than thrown around indiscriminately with plenty of idioms: “pick your battles,” “this isn’t the hill to die on,” “this requires a scalpel not a hammer,” “barking up the wrong tree,” and so on.
How ever it’s expressed, the idea is that if you throw your strength at everything, you probably won’t accomplish anything. This is a lesson for Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
Khan has made a name for herself as the Biden Administration’s anti-trust attack dog, barking at everything – rather than just the people who need to be barked at. Recently I opined on the folly of her crusade against Amazon, because she criticizes Amazon’s for its diaper-selling policies but buys their diapers herself.
That hypocrisy notwithstanding, it’s great that Democrats have finally found religion on Big Tech anti-trust, after the Obama Administration shrugged its shoulders at Facebook buying up Instagram and What’s App.
However, on one anti-trust issue, Khan could do the right thing – bark up the right tree, as it were.
U.S. Steel is the second-largest steel producer in America, a major supplier for our automotive and defense industries. But right now, one of its competitors, Cleveland Cliffs, wants to buy U.S. Steel. This would create unprecedented consolidation in the domestic steel industry, jeopardize many workers’ livelihoods, and ultimately harm the American consumer.
Indeed, a combined U.S. Steel and Cleveland Cliffs would own 100 percent of iron ore deposits in the country, become the largest steel conglomerate in US history, and control more than half the steel sold to the American auto industry – which is why domestic auto-makers oppose the merger.
More than 75 percent of U.S. industries have experienced an increased consolidation over the last two decades, and it’s “crushing the economy.” Mass consolidation decreases wages while driving up the prices normal people have to pay.
So the Biden Administration has made a lot of noise about federal action to curtail corporate consolidation. In July 2021, President Biden issued an Executive Order on promoting competition, and this year his Justice Department and FTC announced new draft merger guidelines with “comprehensive changes to the way the US government reviews mergers and acquisitions for the first time in more than a decade.”
Now of course, the Biden Administration wouldn’t need to worry as much about Americans’ paying their bills if it weren’t for their disastrous economic policies, but that’s where we are right now.
The domestic steel industry has suffered from consolidations and offshoring for more than 20 years. If Khan wants an anti-trust hill to die on, she should use her regulatory authority to stir the steel industry against this merger.
Critics of Republicans’ longstanding economic policies may say this is just the inevitability of our precious, precious capitalism. But the philosophy of anti-regulation Republicans intervening to protect the free market from a monopoly – only when absolutely necessary – was started by trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt and brought back by Ronald Reagan against “Ma Bell.”
And one of the reasons that Republicans have discarded Romneysian corporatism in favor of Trumpian economic nationalism is because Big Business has abandoned the “America” part of “Corporate America.” Stopping this steel merger isn’t just better for most people economically, national security is at stake.
“All segments of the domestic steel industry contribute to the defense industrial base,” according to the American Iron and Steel Institute. Steel is an essential material for the US Armed Forces’ military assets, including: missiles, virtually all military aircraft, submarines, helicopters, munitions, the bodies and propulsion systems of our naval fleet, and land-based vehicles like the Abrams Tank, MRAP jeeps, and Humvees®.
If something goes wrong with our domestic steel industry, we will be in no position to fight the wars of the 21st Century. In World War II, Bethlehem Steel manufactured one-fifth of the entire US Navy fleet. Now its former HQ is a casino.
We can’t keep doing this to our own industrial base. It’s not just idiomatic on this one; we need to literally need to pick this battle.
Giving one firm such a chokehold on our domestic supply chains and national defense is bad for both our economy and national security. Regulators need to give this proposed merger a close look and Khan and the FTC need to put away their anti-trust hammer and use a scalpel … which are by coincidence usually made of steel.
Jared Whitley is a longtime DC politico, having worked in the US Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult Business School in Dubai.
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