Antonis Christodoulou Takes on Pete Aguilar | Full Interview [17:19-22:28]

Let's switch gears to your plan to break up monopolies as a future, potential future member of Congress. You say on the, oh, can you hear me? Can you hear me? I just got back, I'm sorry. No worries, no worries, yeah. Yeah, I can hear you're now frontier in the interview right now. Breaking up monopolies, you say on the, you completed a ballot, media candidate connection survey where you said that there is anti-competitive behavior happening in a variety of different markets. What do you mean by anti-competitive behavior taking place in our economy? So if you've watched the news even like the past few, past month, you are watching companies buy up all their competitors. It's happening with paramount and HBO right now with Netflix that wanted to come in. And Netflix even today and now they're going to increase an increased pricing subscription. So they're increasing their prices. It's because when these companies notice that they own a lot of the market and they have so much people subscribe and people, they take advantage of them, they take advantage of these people, they make sure that they can profit a lot from these people because they'll either forget about the subscription or they make the subscription hard to cancel. So currently to make it a little simpler to understand anti-competitive, I studied antitrust law in law school. I focused a lot on this and I view it as the future of our democracy. I view this as the next frontier of the legal system. We need to focus on holding companies accountable when they try and become way too big. Because in antitrust law, we want to have regulations and when we don't have regulations, then we need the government to step in and break up these companies. So we've done this before with many utility companies and I think we need to do it again. Even this past few months, I've been dealing with Frontier and Verizon out here because two years ago Verizon bid to purchase Frontier and that ended up going through with FTC and what happened was I saw an increase in my price by $15 and then another $15 in the past two months where I had to jump through so many hoops to talk to a human being at Verizon to then get the price to what it should be because they were advertising something that was completely lower and when we don't have governments that hold these companies in check, then we end up paying a large part of our monthly wages to these companies who just hope that we forget or hope that we have these barriers that we just give up and don't want to fight for a few dollars back. Because this is how these companies live, this how these companies make record profits every year and this is what I feel like the biggest thing that our federal government needs to do. We need to follow what Lina Khan started. We need to make sure we hold these companies accountable so they can't profit from everything so they don't become so big. Recently we saw our grocery bills skyrocketing and we saw an FTC that wanted to break up a big merger between Kroger and Albertsons and this would have created a huge huge monopolization of our grocery stores. When we walk around this district you will see Albertsons and Rouse right next like not too far from each other. If one was able to buy the other I can promise you they were closed down one of those shops fire everyone at that place and then at the next place they might lower the prices. They might lower the wages not prices. They might lower the wages of the people working there because they have nowhere else to go. Our FTC has amazing power to come after these big corporations to make sure that they are checked. So they make sure that no you are competing no matter what. You will either sell to someone else who is smaller or you will stay there and you will not sell to the big competitors around. And that is how we bring it down prices. For anyone who doesn't understand antitrust law I implore you to research it. I implore you to Google Lina Khan listen to her talk about how our government should be working to make sure that our prices aren't going too high. To make sure that our government is working properly for the people and not letting these companies make record profits and then pay those record profits to our to their executives to give golden parachutes to do all these things because like I mentioned Netflix I mean people need to be able to survive and the real issue is housing utilities all these things grocery stores but a lot but also Netflix subscriptions. When we see that these prices in other markets are going high. Sorry. No worries. Sorry. When we see that these