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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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7 March 2010 By Stephen Lendman
Lynn is director of the Markets,
Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative, a senior fellow
at the New America Foundation, and author of "Too Big
to Fail" about the dangers of monopoly capitalism.
He expands on the threat in his
newest book titled, "Cornered: The New Monopoly
Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction,"
explaining today's peril given the power of predatory
giants.
They control governments, the
courts, war and peace, dominant information sources,
and essential services, including health care, air and
water, what we eat and drink, where we live, what we
wear, and school curricula to the highest levels.
They own genetic code patents, basic human life
elements to be commodified the same as toothpaste,
tomatoes or toilet paper.
Omnipotent, they plunder
recklessly, ruthlessly at our expense. They're private
tryannies, endangering humanity, basic freedoms,
environmental sustainability, and planetary survival.
Without exaggeration, they're unaccountable, unchecked
"weapons of mass destruction."
In "Cornered," Lynn explains the
danger and urgency to address it. Our lives and
futures depend on it.
It might have been different had
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison prevailed over John
Adams and Alexander Hamilton in crafting America's
Bill of Rights. They wanted 12, not 10, including
"freedom from a permanent military (and) monopolies in
commerce."
Imagine the possibilities had
they prevailed, or if early leaders agreed with
Jefferson in 1816, seven years after his presidency,
saying in a letter to a friend:
"I hope we shall crush in its
birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which
dare already to challenge our government to a trial of
strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our
country."
Earlier, he opposed chartering
the first Bank of the United States, a 19th century
version of today's central bank, what Andrew Jackson
called a "hydra-headed monster," and Lincoln described
as predatory money powers "more despotic than a
monarch, more insolent than autocracy and more selfish
than a bureaucracy." He feared they'd accumulate
enough wealth and power to destroy the Republic,
similar to former Supreme Court Justice Louis D.
Brandeis' view saying, "We can have democracy in this
country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in
the hands of the few, but we can't have both."
Others call it fascism or a
reasonable facsimile with elements including:
-- the despotic union of
corporate and state power - aka corporatism;
-- rampant corruption;
-- the disdain for human rights,
civil liberties, and ordinary workers;
-- the dominance of militarism,
belligerency, and permanent wars;
-- fraudulent elections;
-- an obsession with national
security;
-- the control of public
information; and
-- the omnipotence of corporate
giants, taking full advantage to pillage and
profiteer.
Lynn's book tells why, beginning
in his preface titled, "Of Rule and Ruin," saying he
warned about monopolization dangers because:
"our political economy is run by
a compact elite that is able to fuse the power of our
public government with the power of private corporate
governments in ways that enable members of the elite
(to freely decide) who wins, who loses, and who
pays."
His book is "a chronicle of a
death foretold, and the corpse on the street (is) the
American Republic." Consolidated corporate power and
the political complicity behind it means monopolists
run the country and the world, justifying it as
free-market fundamentalism - a corrupted deception
masking predatory dominance that destroys democratic
freedoms.
Ronald Reagan accelerated it when
government stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and
encouraged consolidation, production outsourcing,
destruction of America's manufacturing base, the
offshoring of high-paying jobs, financialization's
ascendency and power of Wall Street, and the ability
of corporate predators to break the law and get away
with it, today more than ever under Obama.
Lynn calls his book "a sort of
tour of monopoly in all its many guises, in the United
States today....how monopolists rip us off as
consumers, raising the prices we must pay" for
everything including essentials becoming more
unaffordable. He covers new monopoly forms and others
thought long ago vanished. Understanding them is key
to knowing the dangers, from phenomena including:
-- problems launching and
successfully running a small business;
-- good jobs disappearing,
replaced by low-paying service ones with few
benefits;
-- the destruction of organized
labor, aided by corrupted union bosses;
-- skyrocketing medical costs;
-- blocking efficient, low cost
technologies that hurt profits;
-- low quality food, drugs and
other products;
-- the burgeoning national debt
and current account deficit; and
-- corporatization's corrupting
dominance heading American toward despotism with
governments as willing partners.
The auto industry is instructive,
Lynn saying it "resembles the Hydra, the many-headed
monster from Greek mythology." Like their heads
relying on one body, the automakers "increasingly rely
on a single common body of companies that supply the
same components to all of them."
In today's hard times, they stand
or fall together, governments facilitating
consolidation and bailing out the majors, or in other
words, socializing risks, privatizing profits, and
doing it for other endangered sectors, Wall Street
getting the most by far from a privatized central bank
they own and US Treasury they control.
Lynn structures his book in three
parts:
-- examples of monopolies and the
fallout from unrestrained corporate dominance;
-- the effects on ordinary
people; and
-- how it affects other systems -
ones in place "to protect peaceful international
relations, our knowledge of how to make the products
and grow the foods we need, and our political
institutions."
Combined, he reveals a
neofeudalist system of vast size and power, dominating
all major American and global industries,
consolidating for greater strength, partnered with
governments, operating ruthlessly, crushing
competition, exploiting workers, and colluding for
greater control, the public welfare be damned.
Without antitrust enforcement,
monopoly options include:
-- home-based ones to build a
power base to capture global markets;
-- pincer ones - "One of the
oldest techniques for capturing and protecting
monopoly positions" by controlling related activities,
then using them to consolidate and crush competition;
-- trading ones that rely on
offshore suppliers, investing instead in marketing and
strategic alliances for greater market share;
-- middleman ones to build power
positions between producers and end users;
-- privatized public monopolies -
the simplest, fastest way to create private ones;
-- leapfrog ones by repackaging
old businesses in new technologies to escape
government oversight;
-- futures ones so financiers can
dominate trading markets for commodities, financial
instruments and currencies, etc.;
-- respecting other monopolies so
they'll respect yours; and
-- perfecting your monopoly with
new positions, raising prices to exploit them.
These practices made the land of
"free-market capitalism" the land of monopoly, Lynn
calling it nothing mysterious, saying:
Monopoly is just "a form of
government that one group of human beings imposes on
another group, (its purpose being to let) the first
group....transfer wealth and power to (itself. They)
organize and disorganize, to grab and smash, to rule
and ruin, in ways that serve their interests only. At
bottom, monopoly is merely a political tool," not
because of a better product or service, but through
better capitalization and political connections.
The rich "reappropriated the
institution of the corporation after (early 20th
century antitrust laws restrained them), regarding
(them) as the 'owners' of these institutions lies at
the heart of our present crisis."
Our system's single biggest
problem is having ceded "almost complete power over
these institutions (to) a class of people whose
interests (aren't) served....by building things but by
breaking" them. Capitalism lets some people "use the
power in concentrated capital to harness free
citizens" and crush democratic freedoms.
As a result, monopolies run
America. Antitrust enforcement is null and void, and
according to Lynn: "It will take more than a lawsuit
or two to overthrow America's corporatist oligarchy
and restore a model of capitalism that protects our
rights as property holders and citizens."
Getting money out of politics is
key - the reality that big money dictates policy,
pre-selects candidates, predetermines outcomes, gets
the best democracy it can buy, assures a de facto
one-party state, and a dominant media trumpeting the
best of all possible worlds that's, in fact,
corrupted, broken, despotic, and ruinous by benefiting
the rich against the rest.
Short of sweeping fundamental
change, nothing will deter corporate giants from
securing total global control in a world intolerable
for most, the direction we're now heading unless mass
people power stops them. There's no other way! So what
are we waiting for?
Stephen Lendman is a Research
Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
He lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog
site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to
cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on
the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive
Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and
Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are
archived for easy listening. http://lendmennews.progressiveradionetwork.org/
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