Heilman & Haver - Episode 78 (Guest Matt Stoller)

Welcome to Heilman & Haver - Episode 78.  We hope you enjoy the show!

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The Hollywood strike has now passed the 100 day mark with no end in sight. Just one week ago, on August 4, Writers Guild of America negotiators met for the very first time in three months with representatives of the major studios to discuss whether contract talks can resume.  According to Bloomberg reporter Lucas Shaw, they “made zero progress. The two sides are no closer than they were at the start of the strike. They can’t even agree on how to resume negotiations.”

With much of the strike centered on the power imbalance between the major studios and their writers and the consolidation and lack of transparency among the streaming giants, we reached out to an expert on the issues of monopoly and corporate power in America for his take.

Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project.  He is the author of “Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy”, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” Stoller is a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee and he also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the financial crisis. 

Matt's 2012 law review article on the foreclosure crisis, “The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship”, predicted the rise of autocratic political forces, and his 2016 Atlantic article, “How the Democrats Killed their Populist Soul”, helped inspire the new anti-monopoly movement. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fast Company, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, Vice, The American Conservative, and the Baffler and Matt writes the monopoly-focused newsletter “BIG” with tens of thousands of subscribers.  You can follow Matt on Twitter at @matthewstoller.