Organized Money

White Collar Crime Enforcement In The Age Of ICE

As The Department and Homeland Security and ICE see their budget balloon, anything unrelated to to immigration is getting short shrift. Today on the show, Matt and David talk to Richard Powers, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at The Justice Department, and the former Acting Assistant Attorney General at the Antitrust Division, to discuss the consequences of ignoring antitrust and white collar crime. They discuss the post-DOGE state of The Justice Department, the culture of prosecution (or lack thereof) that dominated the antitrust division through the Obama and first Trump era, and how to make budgeting antitrust a priority. 

The Monopolists Who Gatekeep the Court System

We tend to think of the law as a public asset - centuries of statutes, common law, and legal precedents that shape how society governs itself. So why is the law itself so hard and so expensive to access? Matt and David talk with Mike Lissner of the Free Law Project about the quiet duopoly that controls legal information, how Westlaw and LexisNexis turned public court records into pricey commodities, and why even the federal government charges by the page to read your own laws. Along the way, they uncover a system that drives up legal costs, shuts regular people out of justice, creates real security risks, and stifles innovation and explore how a scrappy nonprofit might finally crack it open. 

The New Frontier in Price Discrimination

This week Matt and David talk with pricing expert Lindsay Owens about Google's plan to turn its Gemini AI into your personal shopping assistant. It sounds convenient until you realize it's actually a massive surveillance pricing operation. Google just announced partnerships with Walmart, Visa, MasterCard, and others to use everything they know about you (emails, photos, calendar, searches) to help retailers personalize prices and steer you toward higher-priced products. Lindsay, who went viral calling this out on Twitter, explains how Google's own reply basically admitted they "restrain price", a pretty wild admission for a company facing antitrust lawsuits. It's a sobering conversation about how AI shopping could turbocharge price discrimination, why major retailers are handing over their pricing power to Google, and whether we can stop this before it's too late. 

The Secret Scam Driving Up Food Prices

In the twilight of the Biden Administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan filed a price-fixing case against Pepsi, using the powerful but little-enforced Robinson-Patman Act. A few months into Trump’s 2025 term, that lawsuit was dead and buried by the new regime, leaving only a bunch of redacted documents and a lot of questions for the public to pore over. Our guest today is Stacy Mitchell, the co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, who recently convinced a judge to release those files. Together, Matt and David break down how Pepsi and Walmart worked together to set “price gaps,” and how similar techniques are used throughout the economy, driving up prices for everyone, even as Walmart gets to take credit for having the lowest prices around.If you love Organized Money, support us! Go to Organizedmoney.fm to subscribe to our newsletter, or Organizedmoney.fm/donate to throw us a donation. It helps us keep the lights on!

The Enshitification Life Cycle With Cory Doctorow

As a holiday treat, we bring you a new conversation with author and Organized Money alum Cory Doctorow about his new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Recorded earlier this year at a live book event, David asks Cory to expand on the thesis of the book: that digital platforms are now locked in a cycle of decay, seeing our technology become less intuitive, less useful, and less private. For Cory, this cycle is a choice, driven by government policy favoring lax antitrust enforcement, strong digital rights management, and wholesale regulatory capture. In this wide ranging conversation they discuss how market consolidation and DRM has shifted the balance of power away from workers, who are no longer able to defend themselves with the technology they are forced to use. They also get into the history of digital rights management, why Cory isn't on Audible, algorithmic pricing, and how coalition building and policy change might just be the way out of the enshitification cycle. Organized Money will be back in the new year. Thanks for listening!