OpEdNews - Article: Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction"

OpEdNews - Article: Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction"
By Stephen Lendman

Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction" - by Stephen Lendman

Lynn is director of the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and author of "Too Big to Fail" about the dangers of monopoly capitalism.

He expands on the threat in his newest book titled, "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction," explaining today's peril given the power of predatory giants.

They control governments, the courts, war and peace, dominant information sources, and essential services, including health care, air and water, what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, and school curricula to the highest levels. They own genetic code patents, basic human life elements to be commodified the same as toothpaste, tomatoes or toilet paper.

Omnipotent, they plunder recklessly, ruthlessly at our expense. They're private tryannies, endangering humanity, basic freedoms, environmental sustainability, and planetary survival. Without exaggeration, they're unaccountable, unchecked "weapons of mass destruction."

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Lynn calls his book "a sort of tour of monopoly in all its many guises, in the United States today....how monopolists rip us off as consumers, raising the prices we must pay" for everything including essentials becoming more unaffordable. He covers new monopoly forms and others thought long ago vanished. Understanding them is key to knowing the dangers, from phenomena including:

-- problems launching and successfully running a small business;

-- good jobs disappearing, replaced by low-paying service ones with few benefits;

-- the destruction of organized labor, aided by corrupted union bosses;

-- skyrocketing medical costs;

-- blocking efficient, low cost technologies that hurt profits;

-- low quality food, drugs and other products;

-- the burgeoning national debt and current account deficit; and

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Without antitrust enforcement, monopoly options include:

-- home-based ones to build a power base to capture global markets;

-- pincer ones - "One of the oldest techniques for capturing and protecting monopoly positions" by controlling related activities, then using them to consolidate and crush competition;

-- trading ones that rely on offshore suppliers, investing instead in marketing and strategic alliances for greater market share;

-- middleman ones to build power positions between producers and end users;

-- privatized public monopolies - the simplest, fastest way to create private ones;

-- leapfrog ones by repackaging old businesses in new technologies to escape government oversight;

-- futures ones so financiers can dominate trading markets for commodities, financial instruments and currencies, etc.;

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