I suggest reading the whole article at the following links.Fiscal Times
Libertarians and Republicans will see no problem with these things. They are the natural and inevitable result of unfettered capitalism.
The "news" media, part of big business, divert attention to things like this by seeking to report on, often inaccurately, things to cause divisiveness among us, so that we don't work together for our common interests.
By David Dayen
November 13, 2015
his week, the American Medical Association formally asked the Department of Justice to block two health insurance mergers (Aetna’s purchase of Humana and Anthem’s acquisition of Cigna) that would reduce that industry to effectively three participants. [So we currently have effectively have only four health insurance providers.] Left unmentioned was the significant consolidation among health care providers that has helped spur the monopoly formation on the insurer side. After all, insurers lose bargaining power on prices when facing giant medical conglomerates, and regain it when they grow themselves.
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This week, Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller completed their $106 billion plan to combine, forming the world’s largest brewery, responsible for 30 percent of global beer sales.
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This week, Apple, Google and Amazon joined forces in a lobbying venture to promote technology-based financial services, or “fintech.”
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It comes at a time when the same tech giants, along with Facebook and Microsoft, have entrenched control over the entire Internet infrastructure, from search to messaging to advertising to video and audio distribution to applications to storage.
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Despite all these shifts in the economy, all moving toward greater market concentration, influencing every major issue for workers and consumers, the nation has met these changes with virtual silence. None of the major-party debates have posed a question about antitrust policy. Republican candidates talk around issues like high drug prices without mentioning that they are the by-products of monopoly. Stories pass through the news — like T-Mobile giving preferential treatment to a handful of companies for streaming services — without any recognition of how large companies get the benefit of a narrow market.
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This undermining of competition has severely negative effects for consumers and workers. Large outsourcing firms can dominate the H-1B visa program, preventing startups from a crack at skilled workers and driving well-paying jobs overseas. Prices rise when monopolies go unchecked, as groundbreaking research by Northeastern University’s John Kwoka has shown. This also affects quality of service: Why should United Airlines or Comcast or AT&T bother to deliver a good product if consumers have no real alternative?
The stratification between big and small companies has impacted inequality. Several studies show that the gap between the most-profitable and least-profitable companies can explain much of the increase in inequality over the past couple decades. Big companies that dominate markets can extract more profits relative to smaller companies fighting it out amid competition, and those profits inevitably go to high-paid workers and executives, accounting for much of the income gap.
This is especially true in concentrated industries like tech and health care, where monopolists use patents and other barriers to entry to segregate competition among a few friends.
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But highly concentrated markets are everywhere, not just high-tech and prescription drugs. Harold Meyerson recently laid out the significant merger activity just in the few months since I finished my American Prospect article, making it nearly obsolete.
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To their credit, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have talked about monopolies while on the presidential campaign trail. Sanders wants to block the Time Warner/Charter Communications merger. Clinton has called for a merger review of health insurers and said she’ll go after “monopoly power” in pharmaceuticals. But another presidential candidate talked a good game on antitrust: Barack Obama. His administration has largely been a disappointment, only making moves to fight monopolies when the concentration was painfully obvious.
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But behind this reticence to use the laws on the books to prevent market concentration is a lack of outside pressure clamoring for it. In other words, we’re the problem.
In the absence of a movement against monopolies, governments seeking the path of least resistance have no reason to do anything to prevent market concentration. White papers and even essays like this will do little to fill this activism gap. People need to understand that their anxiety in the modern economy derives from a few rich companies taking control and divvying up profits. The major economic issues we face all revert back to this point.
We’ve seen periods like this before in America, and they only ended when citizens banded together
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-need-a-new-trust-busting-movement/2015/11/11/8e7e07fa-87d7-11e5-be39-0034bb576eee_story.html
By Harold Meyerson Opinion writer November 11, 2015
U.S. Airways and American Airlines have agreed to give up landing spots and gates at several U.S. airports to win antitrust approval for their proposed merger. (LARRY DOWNING/REUTERS)
By Harold Meyerson Opinion writer November 11
Like immense amoebas on the prowl, America’s already huge corporations are combining like nobody’s business. In recent months, Walgreens bought Rite Aid, uniting two of the nation’s three largest drugstore chains; in beerland, Molson Coors is buying Miller ; mega-health insurers Aetna and Anthem, respectively, bought mega-health insurers Humana and Cigna ; Heinz bought Kraft, good news for those who take ketchup with their cheese; and American Airlines completed its absorption of US Airways, reducing the number of major U.S. airlines to four, which now control 70 percent of the air travel market. On Wall Street, the five biggest commercial banks hold nearly half of the nation’s bank assets; in 1990, the five biggest held just 10 percent.
Retailers that look to be rivals actually turn out to be brands of a single firm. A company called Luxottica owns LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Sears Optical and Target Optical. Online shoppers for flights and hotels may be less than thrilled to learn that once the Expedia-Orbitz merger is completed, the combined company and Priceline will control all the online vendors. Hyatt is considering buying Starwood, itself the owner of the Sheraton, W and St. Regis brands.
October was the fifth-biggest month ever for mergers and acquisitions.
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Northeastern University economics professor John Kwoka’s study of 46 mergers found that 38 resulted in significantly higher prices. Other studies have shown that the decline in the number of new companies is partly due to the increasing market power of corporate giants, while economists Jason Furman, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and former Obama administration Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag have calculated that the rise in inequality has been driven in part by the extraordinary rewards to executives and shareholders of firms that dominate their field.
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We need a new trust-busting movement in America
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U.S. Airways and American Airlines have agreed to give up landing spots and gates at several U.S. airports to win antitrust approval for their proposed merger. (LARRY DOWNING/REUTERS)
By Harold Meyerson Opinion writer November 11
Like immense amoebas on the prowl, America’s already huge corporations are combining like nobody’s business. In recent months, Walgreens bought Rite Aid, uniting two of the nation’s three largest drugstore chains; in beerland, Molson Coors is buying Miller ; mega-health insurers Aetna and Anthem, respectively, bought mega-health insurers Humana and Cigna ; Heinz bought Kraft, good news for those who take ketchup with their cheese; and American Airlines completed its absorption of US Airways, reducing the number of major U.S. airlines to four, which now control 70 percent of the air travel market. On Wall Street, the five biggest commercial banks hold nearly half of the nation’s bank assets; in 1990, the five biggest held just 10 percent.
Retailers that look to be rivals actually turn out to be brands of a single firm. A company called Luxottica owns LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Sears Optical and Target Optical. Online shoppers for flights and hotels may be less than thrilled to learn that once the Expedia-Orbitz merger is completed, the combined company and Priceline will control all the online vendors. Hyatt is considering buying Starwood, itself the owner of the Sheraton, W and St. Regis brands.
Harold Meyerson writes a weekly political column that appears on Thursdays and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. View Archive
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October was the fifth-biggest month ever for mergers and acquisitions. So far this year, the value of those deals is roughly $4 trillion, creeping up on the all-time record of $4.3 trillion, set in 2007, just before the crash. These numbers, as one study after another demonstrates, are bad news for consumers, workers and start-ups. As David Dayen writes in the current American Prospect, “market power overwhelms . . . efficiency gains.” Northeastern University economics professor John Kwoka’s study of 46 mergers found that 38 resulted in significantly higher prices. Other studies have shown that the decline in the number of new companies is partly due to the increasing market power of corporate giants, while economists Jason Furman, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and former Obama administration Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag have calculated that the rise in inequality has been driven in part by the extraordinary rewards to executives and shareholders of firms that dominate their field. (Internet giants, we’re looking at you.)
But the unchecked combination of mega-firms tells just half the story of the rising imbalance of wealth and power (both market and political). The other half is the legal obstacle course that makes it effectively impossible for consumers to come together, and for workers to form unions. The New York Times’s series last week on the rise of compulsory, company-controlled arbitration when consumers have a grievance made clear that in purchasing the services of a phone, cable, credit card, car rental or many other companies, tens of millions of Americans have signed contracts that forbid them from filing or joining class-action suits. Rather than being able to share the expense of taking a corporate giant to court for widespread abuses, consumers are compelled either to take on those giants and assume the court costs themselves or to submit to company-appointed arbitrators ruling on their complaints.
It’s only in the past few years, the Times documents, that these clauses banning consumers from coming together have become standard in many companies’ contracts — the same years during which these companies have boosted their own clout by coming together.
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