{"id":213703,"date":"2021-07-12T10:18:11","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T15:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/?p=213703"},"modified":"2021-07-12T11:13:14","modified_gmt":"2021-07-12T16:13:14","slug":"capitalism-without-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/blog\/capitalism-without-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism Without Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week President Biden signed an executive order \u201cpromoting competition\u201d in business, which will hopefully help stem the ever-rising tide of inequality in America.\u00a0 In his speech the president said that \u201cCapitalism without competition isn\u2019t capitalism, it\u2019s exploitation,\u201d and let me unequivocally state that what we\u2019ve had in this country of late is downright exploitation!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The president\u2019s order is aimed at industries including agriculture, technology, pharmaceuticals, and banking, among others.  In other words, big ag, big tech, big pharma and Wall Street.  Why ever would he pick on such an innocent group of hard-working capitalists?  Where do I even begin? \u201cBig tech\u201d has been getting all the attention lately, but what \u201cbig ag\u201d has been doing to small farmers in recent years\u2014squeezing them out of existence\u2014is nothing short of criminal.  I\u2019m talking about companies like Archer Daniels Midland and what used to be Monsanto until it was taken over by Bayer. (It\u2019s hard to imagine a company big enough to swallow Monsanto, but the German pharmaceutical and life science giant apparently is.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which brings me to the mad rush in recent years to corporate consolidation.  We\u2019ve all heard the claim that consolidation increases efficiency and lowers costs, thus benefiting consumers, but the evidence shows it just makes the top executives and major stockholders very rich and further reduces competition.  Per usual, those at the top increase their wealth and power, while everyone else loses.  It\u2019s all too reminiscent of the \u201cgilded age\u201d of the late 1800s.<\/p>\n\n\n

America\u2019s Disastrous Slide Toward Inequality Began with Ronald Reagan<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"Ronald<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The president rightfully described \u201cmonopolistic practices,\u201d and politely referred to a \u201cmisguided 40-years experiment\u201d that allowed U.S. companies to consolidate with minimal regulation.  This experiment, of course, began with the Reagan Presidency in 1980 when the Republicans started dismantling many governmental protections going back to FDR in the 1930s, and even Teddy Roosevelt in the early 1900s.  As the president correctly stated, after 40 years of letting giant corporations acquire more and more power, the result is slower economic growth and a declining standard of living.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I strongly concur that the experiment has failed, miserably, but what more can I say about the Republican Party that I haven\u2019t said before? (The Republican Party has been nothing but a ruse concocted by the corporate power structure using their contrived \u201cculture wars\u201d to persuade a disaffected segment of the American electorate to vote against their own economic best interests<\/a>.) And that doesn\u2019t even begin to address what has recently come to the fore\u2014that some of America\u2019s largest corporations pay absolutely no income tax.  Or that many of the same companies routinely benefit from moving money to different countries around the world to avoid paying taxes on it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the many economic injustices the president\u2019s order failed to address, none is more glaring than the laws that give \u201cprivate equity\u201d the ability to loot and bankrupt companies, one after the other across corporate America.  Private Equity refers to buying companies (often public companies taken private), generally through \u201cleveraged buyouts,\u201d a polite term for saddling the purchased company with so much debt that it is often impossible for it to survive.  Not only do the tax laws enable them to loot huge amounts of money for themselves, aided by the good ol\u2019 carried interest loophole, but the fired workers often lose their health insurance and pensions, and can\u2019t find comparable paying jobs.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not ready to advocate socialism, but sometimes the list of injustices that stand in the way of our country achieving economic equality seem insurmountable.  While the gilded age is generally considered to represent capitalism\u2019s worst abuses, I firmly believe the \u201cCotton Kingdom,\u201d that terrible home of the \u201cslave power\u201d in which I grew up before the Civil War, was the very worst manifestation of capitalism.  We can all hope the president\u2019s actions signal a long overdue beginning in stopping our country from becoming another gilded kingdom of any sort. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week President Biden signed an executive order \u201cpromoting competition\u201d in business, which will hopefully help stem the ever-rising tide of inequality in America.\u00a0 In his speech the president said that \u201cCapitalism without competition isn\u2019t capitalism, it\u2019s exploitation,\u201d and let me unequivocally state that what we\u2019ve had in this country of late is downright exploitation! […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213706,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213703"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213708,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213703\/revisions\/213708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}