The Monopoly of Our Soul
For the last fifty years monopoly capitalism has been destroying diversity of our choices with a seemingly unquenchable desire to obliterate all competition in the name of profit. When I was growing up I could shop at any number of local stores, all gone now and replaced by national retailers. In recent decades monopoly has become the accepted norm, the gaming of the system only increasing as the grand experiment of the internet has gone off the rails with a few monoliths controlling what we search for, how we socialize and what we buy.
Remember the promise of the internet in the 1990’s? Of course you don’t because no one utters any nonsense these days about a free exchange of ideas and commerce. Oh yes we bleat about net-neutrality but that’s because we want our Netflix movies to play without any interruption. Most people have the same choice for high speed internet service as I do, a single provider.
Remember when a search would take you to independent little sites no matter what you asked for, be it band aids, shoes, dildos or news? Try that today and you get Amazon shilling all four. It’s no coincidence that monopoly focused Amazon pays terrible wages unless you’re a software developer or considered their intellectual kin. People working in Amazon’s warehouses make less per hour than those software developers spend on a breakfast latte and a muffin at a monopoly coffee company called Starbucks. As an aside, from my jaded point of view, though I love really strong coffee, Starbucks burns the roast and deserves to go out of business for just that tragedy.
Starbucks is a perfect example of how monopolies look good, but at every layer of the onion they suck for society. Starbucks outlets look modern and happy, but it pays shit wages for mostly part time jobs without benefits. They don’t hire local suppliers because they’re centralized and everything needs to be the same in every Starbucks. Starbucks pays the equivalent of $25,000 for most of its full time jobs. The definition of working poverty. From news to shoes we have less and less choice of what to buy and where to buy it as monopolies eat smaller fish and then centralize their diet by dining on each other. Remember Sears? Or JC Penny? Soon we’ll have just Wal Mart and Target left and they’ll be owned by the same corporation under the justification that cheap goods makes our economy strong.
It is, of course, bullshit. Cheap goods helped destroy American unions, leading to a low wage economy, less workers’ rights and laws protecting voracious capitalism with Orwellian names like Right to Work. No wonder we’ve seen 50 years of unremitting wage stagnation for workers with and without college educations, while the few, that 1%, take an ever greater percentage of the society’s wealth.
I write this cause I worry about my kids, and yours. Every issue where greed trumps humanity and the environment can be traced to the lack of diversity in commerce and thought. Why does the cost of health care rise over the rate of inflation? Because health care is a monopoly. A select few companies control drug prices, ninety percent of our nation’s pharmacies are owned by two companies, and the doctors we visit now uniformly work for local monopolies. Every successful monopoly seeks higher profits though higher prices. Personal diversity is revered by the left (My people), but we need to start equating economic diversity with public health.