In the rest of the interview, Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Swisher had wide-ranging discussions on health care, technology, foreign policy and other issues. Ms. Klobuchar expressed support for several policies to lower drug prices, including importing products from Canada (“In Minnesota, we can see Canada from our porch,” she joked); ending the “pay for delay” practice in which big pharmaceutical companies pay manufacturers not to produce generics; and allowing the government to negotiate drug prices with Medicare, a perennial proposal from Democrats.
She criticized the relatively short sentence given to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in his financial fraud case this week, citing her experience prosecuting white-collar crime and declaring, “You can’t have two systems of justice, one for the rich and powerful and one for everyone else.” She denounced President Trump for his attacks on the news media, saying he “tweets whatever he wants in the morning but doesn’t respect the amendment that allows him to do it.”
She also said she disagreed with Representative Ilhan Omar’s recent comments about American politicians’ support for Israel, “because I believe you can be true to your country and advocate for another country, whether it is Israel or Canada or Ethiopia” — but condemned Mr. Trump for emboldening intolerance, including anti-Semitism, and noted Ms. Omar’s own background as a refugee.
Asked about a recent proposal by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another presidential candidate, to break up big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, Ms. Klobuchar refused to commit to it. But she endorsed antitrust action and the breakup of monopolies broadly as “one of the governing principles for ensuring that we have a capitalist system.”
Ms. Warren also appeared at South by Southwest on Saturday, speaking with Anand Giridharadas of Time magazine. Mr. Giridharadas began the interview by telling everyone in the audience who either worked for or hoped to work for one of those tech giants to stand, and then asking Ms. Warren to explain to them why she wanted to break up their companies.
Picking Amazon as her example, Ms. Warren condemned the ability of such giants to, essentially, play on a field they control. Amazon not only runs a marketplace, she said, but uses its vast trove of information about consumers’ behavior in the marketplace to create and promote its own products.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/us/politics/amy-klobuchar-2020-staff-interview.html