Meanwhile, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have become powerful online gatekeepers that control a growing share of our commerce, news, and information. Even the beer we drink is controlled by monopolies three corporations make a staggering three-quarters of the beer Americans consume. Two telecom corporations dominate Internet access. Four giant meatpacking corporations control 85 percent of beef processing. All of this financial power has shifted to Wall Street, where just four big banks control more than $7 trillion in assets, or 41 percent of the assets of the entire U.S. counties without a local financial institution. One in three local banks has disappeared over the last ten years, leaving one-third of U.S. Walmart accounts for one in four dollars that Americans spend on groceries and captures more than half of grocery sales in 43 metropolitan areas. We’ve lost 65,000 small independent retailers in the last decade. There is one phenomenon in particular that has profoundly shaped all of these dynamics, and every single sector of our economy - the consolidation of corporate power.Ĭorporate concentration has reached a level today not seen since years before the Great Depression, when industrial monopolies dominated the American landscape and the American economy. But there is one phenomenon in particular that has profoundly shaped all of these dynamics, and every single sector of our economy - the consolidation of corporate power. There are many drivers of these longstanding trends, including the anemic bargaining power of American workers government budgets that have insisted on austerity for ordinary people while lavishing subsidies on the rich a distorted tax system and a long history of racial segregation and oppression. Meanwhile, our political process has been so hobbled by powerful interests that it’s unable to respond to even the most urgent and pressing risks, from the new coronavirus to the climate crisis. The racial disparities that have long oppressed people of color have only been exacerbated by this pandemic. Too many rural communities and urban neighborhoods alike have been bypassed by economic opportunities and left to get by without basic services like grocery stores and hospitals. While the fortunes of the few have reached unprecedented levels, earnings for the average worker have barely moved, leaving many Americans with no cushion to blunt the force of this downturn. Special thanks to Ron Knox and Zach Freed for their contributions.Ĭovid-19 has laid bare fractures in our society that have been deepening for decades. Holmberg is Senior Editor and Researcher on the Independent Business team, as well as an economist. *Stacy Mitchell is a Co-Director of ILSR and directs our Independent Business Initiative.
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