Ms. Zephyr Teachout: “Tyrants have arisen in every age because the taste for power informs every human institution and resides in every human being; how we harness it is the question over which nations live or die.
”For the last few decades, political scientists and economists have been living in a collective delusion, a fantasy that..owners of private corporations belong to a different species..are driven by the profit motive alone..they have no designs on the rest of us. All the average tycoon wants..is to make as much money as possible and to be left alone by those who are in the messy business of governance.”…
”This fantasy..[blinds us]..to the extraordinary political power that they have amassed..”
“These people wield vast control over both our civic ans..individual lives. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his views about privacy in the spring of 2019..his words were more potent than any law..policies adopted by the corporation he controls impact hundreds of millions of people…Facebook has the power to determine which newspapers thrive…when Zuckerberg changes his mind he changes what we read..even how we think. When Werner Baumann, CEO of Bayer – formerly Monsanto – decides to try out a new form of crop rotation, tens of thousands of farmers must go along with his experiment or face bankruptcy. Pfizer exercises a capricious power that we would never permit in a government agency; when it decides to hike up insulin prices before an earnings report, or just test a theory, people die. Google has gained power so vast as to be nearly invisible..Google can make or break any company or idea according to where it appears on a search result..”
”Two corporations control office supplies. Four..control wireless. Five..control food. Two..dominate retail. Five..control defense contracting. Four.. control home internet, and in many parts of the country, people have no say at all about which provider they use. One corporation dominates books. Five oil corporations control contracts at 50,000 gas stations. The entire pharmaceutical business model is a monopoly. Three corporations dominate the market for voting machines. A decade after they helped trigger the Great Recession, too-big-to-fail banks are bigger and more concentrated than ever.”
”In the last eleven years we have allowed over 500,000 mergers worldwide.. As mergers have grown, so have mega-mergers. Microsoft recently bought LinkedIn, and AT&T bought Time Warner..Amazon merge3d with Whole Foods, and Walmart announced that it would buy..Bonobos..”
”These monopolies extract wealth from people directly, through price-gouging and wage theft, and indirectly, by causing regional inequality and closing off opportunities to start businesses. they then extract political power too, so they can keep it that way.”
”..data harvesting and analytic tools have become ubiquitous. As a result, thr very nature of work is changing: surveillance, isolation, and fear are becoming a daily fact of the workplace. The 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United struck down long-standing limits on corporate political speech. Corporations are using the leeway given them by. Citizens United. not only to spend money on Super PACs, but to let their workers know how they should vote.”
”The highest and best goals of America – equality and freedom – require government to protect citizens from any group or any person wielding too much power. We used to do this pretty well, using antitrust, campaign finance laws, public utility regulation, labor laws, and other anti-monopoly laws. but in recent years, our government has failed on all these fronts. Meanwhile, corporations have disabled key institutions designed to protect against arbitrary power.”
”The rule of law depends on transparency, reason giving, and each person being treated equally by the law..After the crash of 2008, the impunity of elite networks was on full display when no banker was jailed for lawless activity. And corporate monopolies are not just avoiding individual prosecutions..but building the architecture of a new system without protections for the powerless..Public courts have been replaced by arbitration in which judges are paid by corporations, reasons aren’t given, and no one knows what happens..justice is disappearing.”
”A vibrant news system can provide a check on private power and corruption in public institutions..it needs to be decentralized; ownership needs to be widely dispersed, and newspapers need to be able to survive on either ads or subscriptions.. failure to regulate and break up the advertising duopoly of Facebook and Google has allowed them to grab control over media and centrally edit the floe of information.”
”Economic democracy requires workers..able to bargain for decent benefits, and business owners to freely compete..as we have given the green light to monopolies, big corporations have been setting the terms – not negotiating for them..increasingly managing the entire economy for consumer goods..”
”..we can break these concentrations of power..We already have the tools..a new president can demand the the FTC and the Department of Justice stop mergers..State attorneys general can..investigate big trusts, block mergers..Congress could certainly help to speed the process, by passing laws that overturn decades of bad Supreme Court precedent and return us to the jurisprudence developed prior to 1981…”
”..monopoly is tyranny..no democracy can survive flor long once a few corporations have amassed governmental power in such a massive form and scale. those corporations use isolation, surveillance, and fear to extract value from workers, silence political dissent, exploit users and regulate all of us.”…
”They spy on workers and tell them what to think. They fund foundations that shape editorial boards. They are the biggest lobbyists. they don’t pay taxes. They embed themselves in federal, state, and local law enforcement. They build moats around their power and use predatory pricing or mergers to keep out competitors.”
”When a handful of CEOs and Wall Street financiers have subverted our democracy, destroyed our individual liberties, and stolen the value of our labor – all in the name of freedom and progress – then ..[they are]..tyrants.”
With Justice For All 