David Dayen's New Book Exposes the Dirty Hands of Wall Street Driving Monopoly Power in U.S.

Source: Wall Street On Parade

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 27, 2020 ~

As Americans wake up each day to the new dystopian normal and reports of another corporate or Wall Street bailout (no doubt at the urging of the corporate lobbyists that have embedded themselves in the Trump administration), there is widespread agreement that big corporations have too much power and control in America.

America was founded on blowback to the tyrannical restraints on average Americans’ lives by King George III. Now we have multinational corporations pushing us around while bleeding the U.S. Treasury, mushrooming the national debt, and thus creating an even greater dystopian threat to our children’s generation who will inherit that crippling debt pile.

Against this backdrop comes a very welcome new book from David Dayen: Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power. Dayen is Executive Editor of American Prospect and one of the most admired and prolific financial writers in America.

If you think the book title sounds like a dry treatise on anti-trust law, think again. Dayen has brilliantly humanized this book by allowing the reader to step inside the personal lives of everyday Americans who are attempting to navigate and financially survive the corporatization of their country.

A sampling of a few of the book's chapter titles offers a window into the author's use of personal narrative to crystallize for the reader just how far we have devolved from a real democracy:

"Monopolies Are Why a Farmer's Daughter Is Crying Behind the Desk of a Best Western." Dayen explains how the independent, multi-generational family farmer has been squeezed out by giant corporate farms and the emotional and financial toll it has taken on farm families in the Midwest. Dayen writes that 70 percent of farmers raising hogs have gone out of business since the mid-1990s; JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef control about 85 percent of the beef industry in the U.S.; chicken farming is currently dominated by Perdue, Pilgrim's, Sanderson Farms, and Tyson Foods.

Dayen notes that the United States had 1.6 million independent chicken farms in the 1950s; today the U.S. has just 25,000. The book's revelations about what is happening to farmers in the way corporations are controlling their seeds and tractors reads like something straight out of Orwell.

"Monopolies Are Why Hundreds of Journalists Became Filmmakers, then Back to Writers, then Unemployed." Dayen walks the reader through what has happened to news reporters as a result of internet giants Google and Facebook dominating media advertising dollars in America. It has left news deserts in large swaths of America and crippled the ability of thousands of journalists to earn a decent living.

"Monopolies Are Why Students Sit in Starbucks Parking Lots at Night to Do Their Homework." As a result of monopolistic telecom practices, the U.S. has digital deserts across rural America preventing access to the internet. Dayen takes the reader through one family's expensive ordeal in dealing with this reality and one community's innovative response. One of the key reasons for these digital deserts is that Big Telecom lobbyists have succeeded, says Dayen, in getting 25 states to either ban municipal broadband, place restrictions on it, or limit it to a specific area.

In short, concentrated corporate power is choking off individual liberty and job opportunity, strangling business innovation and U.S. competitiveness, stunting economic growth, and killing the American dream that each successive generation will live a more prosperous and fulfilling life than the previous generation. To put it bluntly, we're going backwards in America.

The most important chapter in the book is Chapter 6, which explains in stark detail how the acceleration of monopoly power can be traced directly to the doorsteps of Wall Street. Dayen shows how the evolution (read devolution) in the structure of Wall Street has incentivized the making of monopolies and why it's getting worse.

The incentive for the investment bankers on Wall Street to use their M&A departments (mergers and acquisitions) to create ever larger corporate conglomerates is based on one thing and one thing only: money that flows directly to their own compensation and bonuses. It's all about getting rich for the structurers of giant conglomerates: the investment bankers, the lawyers, and the CEOs, who have golden parachutes that pay massive sums when there is a change in control. (That last gimmick is actually embedded in CEO compensation agreements as a means of incentivizing the desire to merge and acquire.)

Please go to Wall Street On Parade to read the entire article.
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Source: ArmstrongEconomics

The Fall of the United Nations

July 27, 2020

QUESTION: Dear Martin, The UN Charter was formed 26 June 1945 86 years will take it to June 2031. Does the UN Agenda 2030 coincide with a collapse of it’s forced agenda?

ANSWER: According to our models, the United Nations, as we know it, will come to an end by 2031 following the old League of Nations. They have made a strategic play in an attempt to become the world government by using both this virus and climate change, continually calling for governments to submit to their direction. Our model clearly shows that Bill Gates and Soros will also fail. They have unleashed the destruction of Western Society, and this social distancing is precisely the opposite of what encourages the formation of civilization. What lies ahead will be the topic of a special report after the elections laying out the various paths that we face going into the future.
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Who really rules the world...

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Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes

Machiavelli Inc: Are corporations psychopaths?

Webinar, Center for Global Justice, "Why Banking Needs to Be Run as a Public Utility"