Adventures in Greed (Megacorps vs Everyday people)

edit: aw those fuckos removed it.  It was a whole video about how you should be the company's interests before your own, and  its very important to be loyal to the company.

In a run that lasted some two decades, American industry reached levels of industry concentration arguably unseen since the original Trust era. A full 75 percent of industries witnessed increased concentration from the years 1997 to 2012, according to an extensive study by economist Gustavo Grullon and his co-authors, which was echoed by studies by the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House, and an independent study by the Economist magazine.

But to get a sense beyond the statistics it is worth considering some concrete examples:

The AT&T monopoly, which had been forced to divide into 8 pieces, was allowed, over the 2000s, to reconstitute itself in two giant firms: Verizon and AT&T. Later, AT&T bought DirecTV and then TimeWarner to return close to its size in the 1980s. The idea of allowing AT&T to come back in such a fashion might have seemed shocking to those who thought the breakup was important to competition.

The airline industry, which had been deregulated in the 1970s with the goal of increasing competition, was allowed to merge into an increasingly smaller number of “major” airlines. Delta bought Northwestern airlines; United bought Continental, and American bought U.S. Airlines, reducing the total number of traditional major airlines to just three. Since then, the airlines have found it easy to cooperate on matters like the shrinking of seats or the introduction of new fees, yielding unprecedented profit for years on end.

The cable industry, which at one point in the 1960s had been an upstart challenger to the broadcasters, was allowed to combine into just three major regional monopolies, facing limited competition in each area. Cable was also freed to charge monopoly prices, and happily raised monthly prices at some eight times the rate of inflation. During a period of historically low inflation, it managed to raise its prices by an impressive 8 percent per year. Bills that were once in the $30–40 range rose over $100, and as much as $200 per month.

The pharmaceutical industry, which had been fairly fragmented, underwent a major consolidation from 2005 through 2017, with thousands of combinations that reduced the international market from some sixty-odd firms to about ten. This consolidation was international in scope. Meanwhile, within the United States, enforcement agencies allowed passage of a new and disturbing kind of drug acquisition: the sale of a drug to a firm whose immediate design was to take full advantage of the monopoly pricing potential, by raising prices by at least 1,000 percent and sometimes as much as 6,000 percent. The most famous example was that of an opportunistic young man named Martin Shkreli who managed to acquire the facilities for the production of a rare drug named Daraprim, and immediately increased the price from $13.50 a pill to $750. But that was just one of many similar transactions—none of which were challenged—and indeed the price of Daraprim remains at $750.

Ticketmaster, the nation’s dominant seller of tickets to live events, was allowed to merge with LiveNation, the nation’s near-monopoly promoter of events. Among other effects, this deal allowed Ticketmaster to survive any potential challenge in primary ticket sales stemming either from Live-Nation’s own entry, or from any internet startups.

Bayer, the German descendent of the I.G. Farben monopoly, was allowed to buy Monsanto to reduce the global seed and pesticide industry to just three major players. (Other mergers include a Dow-DuPont merger and ChemChina’s acquisition of Syngenta.) Over recent years, the price of a bag of seed corn has risen from $80 to $300, based on reduced competition.

The global beer industry consolidated into a single firm in 2016, as Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller merged. The combination controls over 2,000 beers, including most of the major non-craft brands in the world like Budweiser, Beck’s Bass, Labatt’s, Michelob, Corona, and Stella Artois. In the United States, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Miller-Coors control over 70 percent of beer sales.

And of all of the blind spots during the last decade, the greatest was surely that which allowed the almost entirely uninhibited consolidation of the tech industry into a new class of

Exxon claims to support global effort to tackle climate change, but it hasn’t always. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the company orchestrated a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign that manufactured doubt regarding the link between global warming and the burning of fossil fuels.

McCoy told an undercover Unearthed reporter that the company had cast doubt on the scientific consensus: “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science, absolutely not. Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments, we were looking out for our shareholders.”

that was my first look at how people used to be treated, which is probably why employers feel entitled to a pool of desperate and impoverished workers

Never forget this is how your bosses would treat you if it where legal. Join a union today

The poor jobless are a "reserve army of labour", that can be called upon when current workers won't put up with the bullshit. The very bottom classes keep wages down, and so capitalism will never get rid of poverty.

This is how immigrant workers live in Qatar right now though. With ~2.7 million people living there, 2 million of them are immigrants.  6500 real people died building that cursed stadium.

Never forget ppl with power have to be forced to do the right thing

Lots of people in this world, this is still the reality. Things we buy in the USA depend on the labor of people in bad situations. Here in the US we might not have an elevator stuffed with people but we immigrants working shoulder to shoulder in processing plants where the air quality is horrible, where the people are packed in busses way past capacity and shipped from farm to farm. Last time I was in Florida a bunch of men as dirty as these workers got off a bus that was packed beyond capacity. They had obviously been doing hard labor in the heat all day.

RACHEL TIPPED FOR THIS POST