"The trends for Walgreens aren’t good - it has closed a thousand stores since 2018, and plans to shut 1,200 more this year. And if you look at the gross operating income of the U.S. retail segment, it is collapsing.

I put these charts together based on data in Walgreen’s annual reports.
What’s going on? Well that’s simple. Margins are falling apart.

Galloway and Elson went back and forth on why Walgreens is flailing. The company hasn’t modernized in the age of Amazon. It has too many stores. Bad management. A dumb acquisition of VillageMD in 2021. Etc. And these would seem like reasonable causes, since lots of other retailers are dying in the face of low price competition.

But the real reason Walgreens, and the pharmacy business in general, is dying, is because of a failure to enforce antitrust laws against unfair business methods and illegal mergers. Elson touched on it when he mentioned lower reimbursement rates, but I don’t think people appreciate the full scope of what happened to Walgreens, and to the full pharmacy business in general. This is not a case of bad management, it’s a case of desperate management."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-real-reason-walgreens-collapsed

#USA #Walgreens #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Pharmacy #Antitrust

Probably the only acceptable choice made by Trump until now...:

"Among the loyalists selected by Donald Trump to staff his second administration, Gail Slater stands out for a different reason: she unites right and left with a sceptical view of big business.

While the US president’s other nominees tend to be traditional conservative free market advocates, Slater, his pick to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is expected to maintain the Biden administration’s vigorous approach to enforcement — much to Wall Street’s chagrin.

In public remarks and written submissions to lawmakers, the 53-year-old Oxford graduate has expressed concern about market concentration and said enforcement should be focused on technology and sectors with a direct impact on Americans’ pocketbooks.

Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives helmed by vice-president JD Vance, who has called for the break-up of Google."

https://www.ft.com/content/769709d5-f897-497d-a8f2-ce15a3c977ed

#USA #Trump #Antitrust #DoJ #BigBusiness #Competition #Monopolies #Oligopolies

"These companies already rank among the richest and most powerful in history and need little help from Trump. The independent research firm Arete forecasts that five of them — Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — will this year collectively increase their revenue to more than $2tn. In spite of laying out $300bn on capital expenditure, Arete predicts they will still record profit margins and generate free cash flow of $430bn.
Yet three things may yet check their dominance. The first is that competition is intensifying between the biggest tech companies themselves as they all make colossal bets on AI and try to disrupt each others’ business models. “Big Tech can no longer deliver growth by staying in their respective lanes,” says Richard Kramer, Arete’s founder. “We expect more Hunger Games-style competition between Big Tech, attacking each other’s ‘core’ business, in consumer tech hardware, cloud services, content and ecommerce.”

That competition is also increasingly acquiring a legal dimension as tech companies attack each other in court. Musk is suing OpenAI and Altman claiming that he, and others, were duped into investing in the AI start-up because of its “fake humanitarian mission”. He also trolled the Stargate announcement this week, posting on X: “They don’t actually have the money.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/ffcd84d1-822c-492c-94e2-07785cfe3524

#USA #Trump #BigTech #Antitrust #Oligopolies #Competition

"So I feel the issues here are ultimately systemic policy problems that need to be fixed with regulation (such as enact national right to repair laws, de-fang the DMCA, implement US national privacy protections, somehow limit the massive seemingly untouchable influence of big tech companies, and probably tax down tech billionaires).

That’s a big ask that feels insurmountable at this moment, but it’s a movement can start now with people who are fed up with our current de facto abusive tech business models. I think eventually we will get there anyway, because the I am not sure the current extractive model is sustainable without encountering massive social unrest within the next decade. The alternative to change, if taken to an extreme, may be the collapse of personal liberty for everyone.

In the meantime, while these lofty goals simmer and take shape, you can also continue to take personal steps to preserve your own tech liberty. Support nonprofits like the EFF that fight for privacy and user rights, strong encryption, open source, use local storage, and so on. I highly encourage it.

Ultimately I hope these thoughts can be a starting point for others to pick up the torch and build off of. I will also be thinking of constructive solutions for a future follow-up."

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3292/the-pc-is-dead-its-time-to-make-computing-personal-again

#USA #Privacy #BigTech #SurveillanceCapitalism #DMCA #RightToRepair #Oligopolies

"In exchange for mere crumbs of their fortune, this Big Tech fraternity receives three extraordinary gifts: massive public contracts; the removal of regulatory safeguards against the dangers of their methods and products – autonomous vehicles, AI-controlled "bots" and drones, massive increases in electricity consumption; and finally, huge bargaining power, legitimized by the state, in their dealings with workers, suppliers, competitors, and the rest of us."
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/01/04/yanis-varoufakis-former-greek-finance-minister-big-tech-giants-have-moved-into-trump-s-oval-office_6736701_23.html

#USA #Trump #BigTech #Oligopolies

"With Trump’s promise to ramp up mass deportation beyond what he attempted in his last term, and this cohort of loyalists at the fore, expect to see a renewed gold rush in dubious AI-enabled surveillance tech and database systems for tracking migrant workers and dissenters. Palantir was given contracts to handle such work during the last Trump term, Oracle has been helping the Trump team assemble databases of government workers loyal to Trump (presumably to spare in a coming purge), and Musk has already called for Luckey to meet with the White House. In sum, with a rise in Sinophobia, the US invested in wars in two theaters, and promises to execute historic mass deportation, expect the boom that has already begun in defense tech to continue, and an invigorated interest in surveillance and administrative AI—and for the men who most loudly backed Trump’s campaign to benefit.

All of the above will accelerate a trend that had already been underway; big tech companies more aggressively and openly pursuing defense department contracts, and work with agencies their employees may once have deemed unethical, like ICE. As I noted after the election, for many Silicon Valley elites, the days of taking employees’ ethical concerns and protests into account are fading happily into the past. Big tech has been quick to fire dissenting workers already, and now there’s a more explicit authoritarian creep into the sector."

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/tech-under-trump-part-1

#USA #Trump #Oligopolies #Palantir #BigTech #SiliconValley #Musk #WarMachine

"If you don’t believe in the state, or if you don’t associate enlightenment notions with the American project, then rolling back democratic protections for working people simply doesn’t matter. If America itself is immoral, then who cares what the governing apparatus looks like? If all commerce is driven by forces out of our hands, then there’s nothing we can do anyway.

Politics, which is fundamentally the forming of a society, itself becomes immoral. The wielding of authority, which is essential to a democratic polity, is indistinguishable from authoritarian abuse. The New Democrat project of the 1980s, which turned human choices into Gods we called “technology and globalization,” succeeded wildly, because we had been conditioned to believe in them. Markets became monopolies, economists became priests, and cultural attitudes are the only real stakes in elections.

And that brings me back to the learned helplessness of the Democrats. The reason the anti-monopoly movement is interesting is because we are a break from this attitude. It’s not that we are fighting Bork, it’s that we are fighting the whole notion of anti-politics itself, the idea that protest and marginalized communities are the only mechanisms for moral legitimacy. We are saying that morality is shaped by politics through the state itself."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/on-the-democratic-partys-cult-of

#USA #Neoliberalism #DemocraticParty #Antitrust #Capitalism #Monopolies #Oligopolies

"Leaders at top big tech firms rushed to congratulate Donald Trump on his landslide election victory as they sought to rebuild bridges with the president-elect — and his most influential Silicon Valley booster, Elon Musk — ahead of a transformative period for the sector.

The chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft posted supportive messages on social media on Wednesday, which stood in contrast to their more circumspect reaction to the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections. All of their companies have since faced significant regulatory probes and antitrust threats as part of a crackdown by Joe Biden’s Democratic administration.

They now stand to gain much from a more tech- and business-friendly attitude from Trump, if they can win over a mercurial politician who in the past has repeatedly clashed with what he considers a left-leaning constituency that has funded his opponents and censored him."

https://www.ft.com/content/79f87a7f-66b2-454e-8f58-8d5f535cce66

#USA #Trump #BigTech #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Competition #Antitrust