America’s current economy bears the effects of that radical transformation. Four airlines control eighty percent of their market, two drug store chains dominate the pharmacy industry, and Google, Facebook, and Amazon each control nearly all of search, social media, and e-commerce online. The list goes on and on, with almost every industry in America — from agriculture to retail — having become highly concentrated.
This rapid rise in monopolization has increased inequality in all sorts of ways. Monopolistic businesses can charge people more for basic goods like healthcare, transportation, and food. As Lina Khan, the Open Markets’ Director of Legal Policy, and Sandeep Vaheesan explained recently in the Harvard Law and Policy Review, “monopoly pricing on goods and services… turns the disposable income of the many into capital gains, dividends, and executive compensation for the few.”
Those same businesses also have more power to exploit their workers, because in a monopolized economy, there is less competition for the labor of the worker. In fact, one study from the University of Chicago found that individual wages today would be $14,000 higher per year (yes, $14,000!) if the economy had the same levels of competition as it had 30 years ago. It is no accident that Wal-Mart — the nation’s biggest private employer — pays its workers less than a living wage, and crushes their unions when they try to organize. In many communities, workers have few places other than Wal-mart to sell their labor.
Monopoly power is very often brought to bear against the least advantaged in an already unequal society. Monopolistic meatpackers and farm operators subject their slaughterhouse workers, who are predominantly people of color, and their farm workers, who are predominantly immigrants, to exploitative labor conditions and stop them from forming unions to achieve better treatment. Monopoly, like the inequality it spurs, aggravates existing disparities.
Worse this inequality of economic power also promotes greater inequality in our political system. The same big businesses and big investors that raise prices, lower wages, and exploit the disadvantaged are also some of the most powerful actors in America’s politics. Not only do they use their wealth to lobby lawmakers, fund academic researchers, and influence think tanks and policy experts, they also use their market power to pressure elected leaders, as when Aetna threatened to pull out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges unless the Obama administration approved its massive merger with Humana.
Our team looks forward to working with a broad coalition of allies to take on America’s monopoly challenge, and put power back where it belongs — into the hands of workers, creators, families, and communities all across our great nation. This battle won’t be easy, but the American people have taken on such concentrations of power before, and won. At Open Markets, we are confident that, working together, we will do it again.
RSS Feed
September 27th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
Posted in 
Tags: 
