The Facebook co-founder who has called for the destruction of the behemoth he helped create is putting his money where his mouth is.
Hughes co-chairs the Economic Security Project, an organization dedicated to reorienting the economy in favor of people over corporations. Thursday, they announced a new target in that fight: corporate monopolies in tech, healthcare, agriculture, finance, and beyond.
“Americans understand corporate power has gotten out of control,” Hughes told the Washington Post, “and a lot of [groups] are interested in organizing to push back against them.”
Hughes, along with several high-profile foundations, is committing $10 million to research and advocacy work in anti-trust law and policy through 2021. The specific recipients of the funds have yet to be announced.
In May, Hughes penned an op-ed in the New York Times stating that it was “time to break up Facebook.” He also explicitly criticized Mark Zuckerberg for the massive power he wields over the company, country, and democracy itself.
“Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can,” Hughes wrote in May. “The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.”
That’s what Hughes is hoping to accomplish — with Facebook, tech, and other industries — as he told the Post Thursday. Hughes hopes that work produced by recipients of the fund will demonstrate how corporate consolidation hurts Americans and the economy as a whole.
“You don’t need a degree in economics to know corporations and the wealthy have had a heavy hand in setting a lot of economic [policy] over the past several decades,” Hughes told the Post.
The fund is meant to energize and capitalize on the growing sentiment among lawmakers that Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are corporate monopolies that require scrutiny, and potentially government intervention to break them up. But Hughes thinks that the monopoly problem extends far beyond the tech industry and into healthcare, where hospital consolidation makes healthcare more expensive, as well as with agriculture giant practices that hurt small farmers and a finance industry that we’ve already seen has become “too big to fail.”
Of course, as the Post points out, $10 million is a drop in the massive, $1.7 billion bucket of corporate lobbying cash. Still, the commitments will provide capital to researchers, wonks, and advocates who sorely need it in their fight against well-funded corporate America.