California Attorney General Rob Bonta cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger after weeks of publicly demanding structural concessions, and antitrust researcher Matt Stoller says the about-face was as unexplained as it was predictable. In an interview with The Daily Wire, Stoller argued that the outcome itself wasn’t shocking — the Trump administration and powerful Hollywood players wanted the deal to go through — but that Bonta’s reversal, with no attempt at explanation, was.
“You don’t typically expect someone to just blatantly lie and not try to explain it,” Stoller told The Daily Wire. “It’s just a weird thing to do. It’s the equivalent of talking to someone and, all of a sudden, just starting to sing.”
‘It’s All Fake’
Stoller, research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, described the final agreement as containing no real concessions. “Yes, he just cleared the merger. There’s no real concessions here. It’s all fake,” he said.
He compared Bonta and other California officials to actors playing doctors on television who are then asked to perform surgery. “You can try to calculate whatever you want, but these people don’t know how to do anything,” Stoller said. “They don’t know the law. They don’t understand how to wield power. They’re just not interested in the real world. Fundamentally, they are only interested in what other insiders think of them.”
The Daily Wire’s Ben Domenech noted that many observers covering the deal immediately speculated that Governor Gavin Newsom and others had pressured Bonta to accept terms that fell far short of his earlier talk of mandating a structural solution. Stoller said that while Newsom’s pressure was part of the picture, the deeper problem was that officials lacked the competence or inclination to wield power on behalf of their constituents.
Two AGs Refused to Sign On
Under the agreement, an oversight board with no exit provision was set up — an arrangement Domenech said made him laugh when he first heard it. Stoller agreed it was “so dumb,” and pointed out that two attorneys general — Phil Weiser of Colorado and Nick Brown of Washington — refused to sign on to that portion, reasoning that they did not want the government engaged in speech control.
Even so, Stoller argued that something significant did happen: an antitrust case was filed, which he said had never occurred before in this context. A grassroots outpouring and industry figures willing to risk their careers, he said, blocked the deal for a year.
“My guess is that if we hadn’t done that, you probably would’ve had multiple successive mergers going on by now,” Stoller told The Daily Wire. He added that any CEO thinking about merging now has to weigh whether to put their head “through the meat grinder that Ellison just did.”
Democrats Noticed This Time
Stoller drew a contrast with the Obama-era foreclosure crisis, when he said Democratic leaders were able to persuade their voters they were fighting hard even as the crisis accelerated. “The difference is this time everybody noticed,” he said.
“The moment he said, ‘This is a great deal,’ people stopped listening because they knew it was bullsh*t,” Stoller said of Bonta. Had Bonta simply said he wasn’t willing to risk the economic fate of Los Angeles on an antitrust case — even one he believed was illegal — voters would have accepted that, Stoller argued. “He could have caved the same way; he just would’ve had to be straightforward. But instead, he just lied.”
Stoller suggested Bonta, like the proverbial TV doctor, didn’t even know he was lying. “He literally doesn’t know anything,” he said.
The Companies Leaving California
Domenech asked whether the threat of companies leaving California weighed on Democrats in an election year, feeding a narrative that businesses are fleeing the state. Stoller said Democrats would have been angry, but he rejected the narrative itself as one controlled by wealthy and powerful interests.
He pointed to the Penske media conglomerate, which he said controls all the Hollywood trade publications. “It’s amazing that we don’t talk about that more,” Domenech replied. Stoller noted two outlets Penske doesn’t own: The Ankler and Puck. He said Paramount was caught advertising to The Ankler during the merger fight, and that Puck is funded by Redbird Capital — the same firm backing the Paramount merger — at an outlandish valuation.
Stoller argued that Democratic legislators and policymakers often don’t see it as their job to intervene in the economy, pricing, private equity, or mergers at all. When asked to act, he said, they get upset if a billionaire threatens to move a company and lack any framework to evaluate the claim.
“Their view is just, ‘Well, it’s inappropriate to even do anything about the economy, so why are you putting this on me?'” Stoller said. That disconnect, he added, is why Democratic voters are enraged — they want leaders willing to wield power on their behalf.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-democrats-caved-to-david-ellisons-megadeal