If the consent decree clearing the Paramount megamerger were a movie, it wouldn’t be an original — it would be the latest installment in a long-running horror franchise.
In exchange for the plaintiffs (all Democratic attorneys general, sigh) removing one of the last remaining roadblocks to Paramount’s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount signed on to commitments with no real enforcement behind them. Even modest concessions — like $5 million a year for independent film — sunset within five years. There are no divestitures. And some terms are just laughable, like granting the conglomerate’s owners oversight of the editorial independence of CNN and CBS News (which is probably why two of the attorneys general openly objected to this term).
This summer, our organization, American Economic Liberties Project, detailed the typical pattern of antitrust consent decrees in a memo . We tracked what became of the commitments companies made to win merger approval. The record is consistent. The concessions fail, the enforcement never comes, and by the time the safeguards’ failure is undeniable, the companies are too integrated to unwind. Over and over again, like the Fortune 500 version of Groundhog Day .
But with Paramount, you don’t need a catalog of failed consent decrees to understand what is to come. You only need the record of the family making the promises: David Ellison, CEO of Paramount, and his father, tech billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison.
🎧 Tune in to Lever Time later today for an in-depth investigation into the Paramount Settlement’s loopholes , fine print, and false promises — and what it means for you.
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Larry Ellison first became a Wall Street darling by co-founding Oracle in 1977. But in 1990, the database software company nearly went bankrupt when it was revealed that its aggressive sales team booked more than $100 million in “ phantom revenue. ”
This is interesting and shocking, but it’s the pattern that follows that actually matters in the case of Paramount. The elder Ellison has a history of making public promises in exchange for something he wants, gets the thing, and then the promise disappears.
In 2013, Ellison won the America’s Cup and with it the right to set the terms of the next race. He brought the regatta to San Francisco on promises of a transformed waterfront, 8,800 jobs and $1.4 billion in economic activity, then designed the competition around $100 million yachts only fellow billionaires could build. The field collapsed from a projected 15 teams to four. As The New York Times reported in a piece titled “When Billionaire Sets Rules, It’s an Exclusive Race,” his event authority walked away from more than $100 million in promised waterfront investment, leaving the city to cover $22 million in upgrades itself, and the projected windfall shrank by half a billion dollars. A supervisor who had voted for the race concluded the promoters’ claims weren’t true.
The year before, Ellison bought an island in Hawaii. Plenty of billionaires own islands. But Lanai also had nearly 3,000 residents, many from families who had worked its pineapple fields for generations. He paid $300 million for 98 percent of it and announced on CNBC that Lanai would become a “model for sustainable enterprise” and that he would “support the local people.”
A decade later, Bloomberg Businessweek tallied the results: $75 million poured into Ellison’s two Four Seasons resorts, while residents — most of them now his tenants, his employees, or both — held 30-day commercial leases no bank would lend against, and residential leases under agreements that losing a job with one of his companies could mean eviction. The promised tennis academy, university, and film studio never came.
In the Bloomberg Businessweek article, a retired local journalist offered the Hawaiian word for all the front-speak about the plans: waha . Bullshit.
The Fine Print In Democrats’ Hollywood Merger Surrender
Democrats promised to play hardball, then accepted loophole-ridden pledges leaving Paramount’s $111 billion megamerger intact.
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For David Ellison, it’s already like father, like son. Before taking over Paramount and CBS, the younger Ellison promised to protect “ unbiased journalism ” and avoid putting “ a finger on the scale ,” only to immediately fire Trump adversary Stephen Colbert and undertake a conservative restructuring of CBS News under a new editor-in-chief, right-wing commentator Bari Weiss .
Now he’s once again vowing to protect the editorial integrity of Warner Bros.’ CNN after he acquires it — via an oversight board that he controls .
The very rich bending the rules to treat communities this way is nothing new. Getting the imprimatur to do it from powerful elected officials like California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Governor Gavin Newsom has also defined the neoliberal era of policymaking in the U.S. The rights and interests of everyday people are expendable.
There’s a theory about how the very rich come to treat communities this way, borrowed from video games. Everyone else is an NPC (a non-player character) who is there for scenery and some dialogue. They are expendable by design. The people of Lanai were NPCs in Larry Ellison’s island simulation. The country’s entertainment and media workers are next.
That’s the plan. But it doesn’t have to be the outcome. The thing about fighting a monopoly is that its holdings are so vast that the people it has screwed are just as many, and just as varied – and they’re angry. Monopoly power compounds. But so does coalition power. And even the longest-running horror franchises eventually come to an end. Or so we have to hope.
The Ellisons Have Made This Movie Before
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at LeverNews.