..the dramatic return of monopoly to the American landscape.......Monopoly is back, in a massive way, and yet it seems as though even liberals often have trouble talking about it. If we’re really going to do something about inequality, however, it’s time we looked this thing in the face. Monopoly: It sounds like a very old-fashioned problem. It sounds like an economic issue from the 19th century. Is it still a problem today? Yes, absolutely, a huge problem. The American economy is more concentrated today than it’s been in more than a century, since the days of the plutocrats. Pretty much every sector of the economy is dominated by a few Goliaths, sometimes a single dominant corporation. And this poses immense economic and political dangers, to growth and the quality of our jobs, and to our democracy itself. But to really understand what this means, let’s start at the very beginning. It was a huge problem a century ago. That was the plutocratic era. You had a guy named JP Morgan who pretty much ran Wall Street and pretty much determined who did what in this country and where they did it, who made steel and who didn’t make steel. How’d he do that? If he controls Wall Street, how does he … Because he determined who got credit and who didn’t. There was a cartel of bankers, and it was under JP Morgan’s control, and that’s one of the things they found out in the 1907 crash. It wasn’t anyone in the government that saved the world from that crash, it was JP Morgan sittin’ there in the middle of things and … salon/2014/06/29/free_markets_killed_capitalism_ayn_rand_ronald_reagan_wal_mart_amazon_and_the_1_percents_sick_triumph_over_us_all/
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 18:42:15 +0000
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