How 'Free Market' Snookers Americans--Corporate America/Economic Policy

[KoKo]

How 'Free Market' Snookers Americans

Corporate America | Economic Policy
by Don Monkerud | March 5, 2010 - 11:48am

Under the guise of "the free market," conglomerates merged and bought up smaller companies, until, today, they dominate their respective markets in every commodity offered for sale in the U.S.

In this race to consolidate, companies "rationalized" their offerings, in many cases dropping up to 40 percent of what they formerly produced. They buy from the same suppliers, use interchangeable parts and common ingredients, and re-name similar brands, essentially placing the same product in different packages.

-snip-

Before Ronald Reagan we accepted inefficiencies to protect a free political system," says Lynn. "In 1981, we changed laws to a consumer welfare test, measured by price and economies of scale; hence, any consolidation can appear to promote the welfare of the consumer. Unlimited growth was made acceptable. This was a revolutionary overthrow of our antimonopoly laws."

Today libertarian think tanks such as the CATO Institute, serve as "the vanguard of a neofeudalist movement" to attack democratic government. They and other conservative propagandists have spent $30 billion in the past 30 years to promote their agenda and convince people that massive layoffs, foreign competition, and higher prices are the result of "natural free-market forces."

Squeezed from all sides, some Americans react by becoming corporate shock troops attacking their own government.

"Those who control our corporations managed an Orwellian achievement to redefine the use of brute corporate force as 'market forces,'" says Lynn. "We still believe in a consumer utopia, but we have an illusion of choice. Corporate powers manipulate our decision-making and direct us to buy certain goods at certain prices."

Institutional power shifted to Wall Street and large financial institutions. Today a small elite runs corporations to serve themselves as they concentrate their power. Some Americans are waking up to the reality of their situation, but Congress lacks the will to regulate corporate power.
"If we choose to protect our republican way of government, which depends on the separation of powers within our economy and our political system-then we have only one choice, says Lynn."We must restore antitrust law to its central role in protecting our economic rights and breaking up dangerous concentrations of power."
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More at.........

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/27171/don_monkerud/how_free_market_snookers_americans

[ixion]

1. Large corporations have never operated under a truly 'free market'

and have always sought to skew the playing field in their favor.

Small and medium sized business are more under the umbrella of 'free market', in my opinion.

[The Northerner]

3. Agreed 100%

[Lasher]

2. Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?

Why creeping consolidation is crushing American livelihoods.
By Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.

<snip>

The problem of weak job creation certainly can’t be due to increased business taxes and regulation, since both were slashed during the Bush years. Nor can the explanation be insufficient consumer demand; throughout most of the last decade, consumers and the federal government engaged in a consumption binge of world-historical proportions.

Other, more plausible explanations have been floated for why the rate of job creation seems to have fallen. One is that the federal government made too few investments in the 1980s and ’90s in things like basic R&D, so the pipeline of technological innovation on which new jobs depend began to run dry in the 2000s. Another is that a basic shift in competitiveness has taken place—that countries like India, with educated but relatively low-cost workforces, have become more natural homes for jobs-producing sectors like IT.

But while the mystery of what killed the great American jobs machine has yielded no shortage of debatable answers, one of the more compelling potential explanations has been conspicuously absent from the national conversation: monopolization. The word itself feels anachronistic, a relic from the age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. But the fact that the term has faded from our daily discourse doesn’t mean the thing itself has vanished—in fact, the opposite is true. In nearly every sector of our economy, far fewer firms control far greater shares of their markets than they did a generation ago.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1003.lynn-longman.html

Monkerud is not alone in this thinking.

[KoKo]

4. +1

[truedelphi]

5. I briefly held a job as a shoe saleswoman at a lil kid's shoe store

In the eighties.

At that point in time, the number one best selling brand of shoes was something known as "Roos." They were casual kids' shoes, similar to a sneaker. They had a lil zipper pocket where kids could hide away a small treasure.

They also were, unlike many shoes on the market, excellent for a child's growing foot with a lot of support in the exact right places. They were made of sturdy material, not too expensive, and in short, a dream of a shoe to have on hand.

Then some conglomerate bought out the parent company that oversaw the manufacture of "Roos." The old parent company understood the importance of "Roos" and had kept it going - with a nice line of profit as the reward. But the new conglomerate didn't know the shoe market from a hole in the ground, and they discontinued making them.

It was so hard to tell parents that the shoes were not available because of a merger. Parents would say, "Oh Macy's has them, you just don't want anyone to profit when your store doesn't carry them."

They would trudge off to Macy's and a short time later return to say, "You were right. What do we do? How can we get a pair of "Roos" for our kids."

I found that rather scary. And that sort of thing has only gotten worse. And of course, now with the Monsanto-ization of our food crops - just what happens to us all when/if Monsanto goes bust? Or some CEO decides their profit margin doesn't need the distribution of the seeds in India, Bangladesh, or the USA, after they have destroyed all the other seeds?