AT&T plays The Joker as US politicians condemn Time Warner tie-up

Both the Trump and Clinton campaigns have criticised the mega-deal but will their opposition last after the election?

The Joker will join AT&T after its bid for Time Warner succeeds

Time to recast Donald Trump as Batman, riding to the defence of the American consumer, a Dark Knight taking on the bad guys of corporate America?

The Donald was quick to condemn telecom company AT&T’s $85.4bn (£70bn) proposed purchase of media giant Time Warner, Batman's owner, in what would be one of the deals of the decade if the two companies can pull it off.

This is not, as its advocates were quick to point out, a “horizontal merger” eliminating a competitor. Instead it combines a distributor of content with a provider of it. A provider that owns (among other things) the Harry Potter film franchise, Game of Thrones producer HBO, news network CNN and Batman’s DC Entertainment.

The company thus created could match the clout of DC’s big three (Superman and Wonderwoman along with the Caped Crusader) combined. Perhaps we should cast Randall Stephenson, the AT&T CEO slated to run the combined group, as evil genius Lex Luthor, the bête noir of the Man of Steel.

Mr Trump would probably agree with that and he'd have a point too. Well, even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.

But in reality, Trump is no Batman. He’s much more like The Joker, a nasty nihilist whose objection to this deal is as much about his objection to the aforementioned CNN’s coverage of the election as it is about any desire to protect the public from an over-powerful corporate giga-weight.

Not wanting to leave an open door for its opponent, the Clinton campaign naturally followed suit via its VP candidate Tim Kaine, who said he favoured competition over concentration. The latter, he said, was particularly “unhelpful” in the media.

His boss’s spokesman also weighed in as did one of her favourite think tanks. Last year she wrote that “being pro business doesn’t mean hanging consumers out to dry” and promised to strengthen the antitrust departments of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, while referencing trust-busting Republican President Teddy Roosevelt.

AT&T Time Warner is exhibit A for why that might be a thoroughly good idea.

Whether it actually happens after the heat of the campaign is open to question, however, assuming another Clinton takes possession of the White House. Time Warner isn’t listed among her campaign's top donors during the current election battle, but OpenSecrets has it kicking north of $1.6m to the former Senator Hilary Clinton during the course of her career on Capitol Hill.

Defenders of corporate America are lining up to criticise the “economic populism” indulged in by both sides. It’s not so much populism as it is cynicism. But regardless of the motivations of the two campaigns, a little more scepticism over M&A is long over due.

The year 2015 saw US companies splashing out a staggering $3.8 trillion on mergers and acquisitions, surpassing the previous record set in 2007, just before the financial crisis hit. Clinton herself, in the aforementioned op ed, noted that the number of airlines fell from 10 to four over 15 years and railed against price gouging by pharmaceutical firms.

It isn’t just in the US where the race to do deals by multinational companies is problematic. It’s an issue wherever they ply their trade and sell their services. Typically a regulator here or a regulator there will demand a remedy of some sort as the price for allowing a deal to go through. But they rarely seem to amount to much and it’s vanishingly rare for them to be blocked. Want evidence? That $3.8 trillion figure tells you all you need to know.

In the case of the AT&T Time Warner tie up, the combined company will likely be required to sell its content to others, but that’s no great burden when set against the benefits that will accrue to AT&T from becoming a content player as opposed to a passive distributor of material that is produced by others through smartphones made by others.

Ultimately it’s not Trump that is The Joker here. It is the corporate executives and their bankers who conceive these deals and then push them through, lubricating the process by means of money and lobbyists and favour trading. They use the language of efficiency, and of innovation and of growth, when in fact they’re almost always having a laugh at the consumer’s expense.

It says it all that the two companies appear to have had little concern about announcing their tie up in the midst of a febrile election campaign in which big corporations have been both candidates’ whipping boys. That’s because they know how these things usually go.

They may still fail. Time Warner’s history with deals is not a pretty one. Remember the disastrous deal with AOL? Time Warner wishes it could forget. It has also swatted aside a bid from 21st Century Fox.

The wider issue will retain its relevance because even if this latest deal involving the company collapses under its own weight. There will be others, by which time a new president will be in the White House, and the Batmobile will be back in the Batbatcave as the business of soliciting donations takes precedence over any matters of public interest.

Corporate America will ultimately have the last laugh as it always does.