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Carol Roth: Lockdowns Helped Five Tech Companies Gain Trillions in Value While Collapsing Main Street

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Government-decreed lockdowns helped Big Tech gain trillions of dollars in company valuations, Carol Roth, author of , noted on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Roth highlighted the arbitrary, inconsistent, and selective application of shutdowns — ostensibly mandated to reduce coronavirus transmission — which broadly exempted big box stores and online retailers such Amazon and Walmart. The world’s most highly valued companies increased their market capitalization while small businesses were forced into closures and bankruptcies.

Roth observed, “The government — over the past 16 months, [and] is continuing to do it again — has been picking winners and losers, and they’re doing it not based on data and science, but they’re doing it based on political clout and connections.”

“This has facilitated the greatest wealth transfer that we’ve ever seen in history from Main Street to Wall Street,” she added.

Government and leftist claims that “we are all in this together” in terms of lockdowns “just isn’t the case,” she remarked.

Roth noted the arbitrary determinations of supposedly “essential” and “non-essential” businesses and operations.

“The big guys — the Amazon warehouse, the Walmarts, [and] in some jurisdictions, weed dispensaries that weren’t even legal a couple years before — were deemed essential,” she said, “Somehow, people’s businesses were told by the government the most horrible thing they could be told, that they were not essential.”

She continued, “None of this was based in data and science, and [small businesses] did not get appropriate compensation [from the government] for basically subjugating their property rights for the quote, unquote ‘good’ of society.”

Large “essential” retailers benefit from consumers being denied access to small businesses due to government edicts, Roth stated.

She explained, “If you shut down a small business and people are trying to spend money and they can’t spend money with these small businesses, the beneficiaries of those sellers are those big companies — the Amazons of the world — and I think that’s pretty straightforward.”

Roth explained the role of the Federal Reserve in facilitating the transfer of wealth from small businesses to the world’s largest corporations.

She remarked, “What people don’t realize is the level of intervention by the Federal Reserve on behalf of the government and by them artificially suppressing interest rates and ‘printing money’ — and I put that in quotes, because they don’t actually print it, they do an accounting entry, they do it out of nowhere — that has really increased the value of these companies.”

Five technology firms’ valuations collectively increased by over three trillion dollars as small businesses were being artificially destroyed by government policy, Roth said.

She stated, “We had five tech companies in 2020 that gained $3.4 trillion in value at the same time that hundreds of thousands of small businesses were being murdered and millions more were struggling to survive. You had a record year for IPOs.”

“Today, we have five tech companies that are worth $9 trillion in value, and the increase in this value — if you compare the chart to the Fed printing — is almost exactly the same as the amount that the Fed has pumped into the system,” she added.

She went on, “So really, they are just maneuvering that money from savers, from retirees, who are earning absolutely nothing, and giving these tech companies not only increased value but access to capital that they can use to go out and compete with smaller businesses in the market.”

Roth concluded by warning that public compliance with abusive government decrees only encourages further abuses.

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

Bezos rockets into space, then thanks Amazon employees and customers who 'paid for all of this'

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Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos briefly blasted into space on Tuesday along with his brother Mark Bezos and two others aboard an approximately 10 minute flight.

During a press conference following his jaunt into space the Amazon founder expressed his thanks to Amazon employees and customers who he said “paid for all of this.”

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York pounced on Bezos’ comments.

“Yes, Amazon workers did pay for this – with lower wages, union busting, a frenzied and inhumane workplace, and delivery drivers not having health insurance during a pandemic. And Amazon customers are paying for it with Amazon abusing their market power to hurt small business,” the lawmaker tweeted.

Joining the 57-year-old billionaire business tycoon and his brother aboard the jaunt into space were 82-year-old Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen who are now respectively the oldest and youngest individuals ever to have ventured into space, according to Blue Origin.

The flight took place on the anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing and marked the company’s first flight with people aboard its New Shepherd rocket system.

“Named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space, New Shepard is our reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space,” according the Blue Origin website.

Bezos said that the way to protect the earth “is slowly over decades to move all heavy industry, all polluting industry, out into space. That’s what we’re gonna do so we can keep this planet the gem that it is,” he said during an interview with BloombergTV’s Emily Chang.

“Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth,” the company’s website says. “In order to preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space. Blue is working on this today by developing partially and fully reusable launch vehicles that are safe, low cost and serve the needs of all civil, commercial and defense customers.”

White Fragility Author’s Sequel on ‘Nice Racism’ Looks Like a Flop

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Robin DiAngelo giving a talk on ‘White Fragility’. Seattle, WA, July 3, 2018. (Seattle Channel/Screenshot via Youtube)

Last year, in the wake of the riots and protests triggered by George Floyd’s death, white anti-racist author Robin DiAngelo appeared to be everywhere. Her book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism skyrocketed to the top of the Amazon bestseller list; she raked in five-figure speaking fees; trained major corporations; and addressed 184 Democratic members of Congress. But it seems like her license to print money comes with limits:

As of this writing, her new book is ranked 2,326 on Amazon.

My rough thesis is that white progressives were okay purchasing her earlier a book because it was on white racism broadly speaking. As long as white people in general are being accused of being racist and fragile, white progressive readers can imagine that other white people are racist and fragile, and not them. But the title of her new book is: Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm. In retrospect, it may not have been the wisest marketing strategy for DiAngelo to write a book directly accusing her core audience of white progressives of being racists themselves.

For those unfamiliar with the book (which I confess to not having read) this ridiculous CNN interview provides some background. This anecdote is a taste of what DiAngelo’s readers can expect:

DiAngelo, author of “White Fragility,” remembers the precise moment it happened. A friend invited her to join a few friends of hers for dinner. When DiAngelo arrived at the restaurant, she was excited to see that the couple waiting for them at the table was Black.
DiAngelo was a college student who had no Black friends and had rarely spent any time around Black people. But she saw herself as a proud progressive and a feminist. She proceeded to tell the Black couple how racist her family was and spent the entire evening recounting every uncensored racist joke, story, and comment she could remember them making, despite her dinner companions’ growing discomfort.
She didn’t know it at the time, but DiAngelo was doing something she now calls “credentialing” — a conversational tactic White progressives sometimes use to show Black people they are not racist. Well-meaning White liberals do this by casually dropping into conversations such comments as, “My grandchildren are biracial,” or “I don’t see color,” or “My best friend is Black.

Lina Khan Just Got a Lot More Powerful

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FTC Commissioner nominee Lina M. Khan testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., April 21, 2021. (Graeme Jennings/Pool via Reuters)

Lina Khan has made waves at the Federal Trade Commission for her aggressive moves on antitrust policies. Capitalizing on the bipartisan trustbusting trend, Khan is pushing a radical agenda that few before her even tried. In a series of 3–2 votes along party lines, Democratic appointees led by Khan have gutted a number of long-standing regulatory rules at the FTC that limited its power. In response, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has alerted conservatives to the threat Khan poses to ordinary businesses.

Khan rose to prominence for her critique of traditional methods of measuring monopolistic power. Specifically, she argued that Amazon presented an antitrust paradox that needed to be rectified through more aggressive regulatory action. The Wall Street Journal editorial board warns that Khan’s efforts are not confined to Big Tech companies, though. They write, 

The agency eliminated the long-standing role of the agency’s chief administrative law judge in presiding over fact-finding and rule-making. Now Ms. Khan, or someone of her choosing, will preside. The Democrats also killed the requirement that the FTC staff get a majority vote of the commission to start an investigation. Now only a single commissioner can sign off. Subpoenas can also fly at Ms. Khan’s discretion.

The Journal continues, 

This is a sure signal that the three Democrats are planning to dump the consumer-welfare standard for antitrust that has prevailed for decades. Instead the agency will replace it with some new standard it hasn’t specified. Also on the chopping block is the “rule of reason” the Supreme Court has applied to antitrust law for more than a century.

Striking down the “rule of reason” as a test would be a massive change in antitrust policy. The “rule of reason” test is the most rigorous level of scrutiny in the courts and is the test most antitrust cases fall under. Business conduct that is not illegal per se (which covers the most obvious forms of monopolistic practices, such as cartel price-fixing) falls under this level of scrutiny. 

In a “rule of reason” analysis, potential anticompetitive behavior is analyzed for its effect on consumers within a larger context. Courts are tasked with figuring out the net benefit or harm of an allegedly anticompetitive contract. Factors such as market size, geography, and relative power play a role in a “rule of reason” test. 

The main idea of the test is to figure out if a contract unreasonably restricts trade. However, it seems that Khan may be looking to use the “Quick Look” test more often, which would truncate the FTC’s economic analysis and allow for more ideological results. As the Wall Street Journal points out, moving beyond the “rule of reason” standard would greatly expand the regulatory powers of the FTC. 

These Republicans may be under the illusion that Ms. Khan has only Big Tech in her sights. But the new powers she is claiming will give her authority to shoot at business in all directions. The FTC is supposed to be mainly an enforcement agency that polices bad practices, but Ms. Khan and her fellow Democratic commissioners want to expand its regulatory powers as well.

Regulatory action often ends up hurting ordinary businesses unintentionally. In this case, though, the FTC’s message is clear: American companies will not be given deference. If Khan decides to expand and use the FTC’s newfound powers, consumers, employees, and employers will all be worse off because of it.