Status Updates From Monopolized: Life in the Ag...

Everyone should read this

Gifted with incredible riches, elites earn money from having money, deploying capital, and collecting rent on real estate or interest on debt. The top 1 percent holds the greatest share of overall wealth in recorded history.

Amazon happily ships a flood of counterfeit goods. If you’re wondering why things fall apart so easily, why you seem to get less for your dollar, thank your local monopoly business.

Technological devices wire in either planned obsolescence or deliberate degradation to force repurchases.

Mass-produced fruits and vegetables have engineered out flavor as an optional extravagance

When an entrepreneur with a great idea looks at the brick wall monopolists construct around their businesses and just gives up, we all lose

Working under monopoly means that the boss sets the rules, & not in your favor. Millions are classified as independent contractors, losing benefits and hard-earned rights. To depress wages, oligopolists collude w rivals on no-poaching agreements, vowing not to hire away competitors’ workers or even workers at its own franchises; the guy at the McDonald’s in Dallas can’t work at another McDonald’s in Dallas.

Corporate profits are up and wages haven’t kept pace, because when you’re a star, they let you do that

In a monopoly, many buyers are faced with one seller; in a monopsony, there are many sellers and one buyer. That buyer can purchase labor or manufacturing materials. When an industry concentrates, workers in that industry have fewer places to sell their labor. And that means that companies can offer less without worrying about losing employees to a competitor.

Monopoly steals wages. When companies talk about “efficiencies” in mergers, they typically mean that the merged company’s combined operations require fewer workers to make it run. Efficiencies, in other words, equals layoffs.

Instead of an enforcement mechanism to fight market power, Bork argued, the Sherman Act constituted nothing more than a safeguard for “consumer welfare.” To Bork, consumer welfare effectively meant lower prices. Therefore, if a merger made the combined business more efficient, able to earn profits while dropping prices, that merger should be approved.

Monopoly in transport of goods sparked the farmer-led Granger movement; monopoly in industrial factory work sparked the labor movement; trusts throughout the economy sparked the Progressive Era and produced the government’s tools to combat market power. The push and pull of monopoly and resistance exists on the periphery of our most critical debates and conversations.

Citizens under British rule in New England reacted to the Tea Act of 1773, which gave the East India Company unfettered control over the sale of the sought-after leaves to the colonies by tossing chests of the stuff into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party, in other words, was an antimonopoly riot.

The fact that fewer and fewer companies control most economic sectors today helps to explain virtually all the challenges America faces.

Those attacks have been kept in abeyance for over forty years; government has abandoned its post as the guardian of competition. As a result, we toil in this age of monopoly, this age of plutocrats, this age of soaring inequality and broken democracy, this age of middle-class despair and sawed-off ladders to prosperity.