In the process of trying to reach out to more people for more understanding about America and what our country has become, I think that the biggest concerns that I have about this country is how our corporations are structured and why this is the biggest issue that we have to take to task and solve.
It is not enough to say that corporations have too much power in America. It is not even enough to say that the major shareholders make too much money. I think what's necessary to understand here is the underlying structure that underpins the entire corporate sphere and HOW this creates a monopoly of power and wealth. The main point is perhaps not even merely automated manufacturing, crucial as it is to understanding concentrations of income. It is well known that barriers to entry are becoming higher for more people. You could theoretically go out and buy your own factory equipment, at least according to some economists. But that doesn't work in practice all that well, since it still takes much more effort than that to compete with corporations these days.
American corporations seemingly have a firm grip on supply chains; the higher you go up in this chain, the more power you have. And whatever the supplied good in question is, it is always better to make sure you need less and less people to supply it.
This is the point through which you must begin to understand America today.
Plastics, and hence, oil, are some kind of mystery to me. It's plain to me, at least, that this is a certain kind of blind spot when economists talk about economics. It's like oil has zero relevance to the way economics is understood. Seriously, listen to them - hearing them talk, you would think that capitalism came from the heavens and only then did history start. Our real growth in this country did NOT merely happen because of capitalism. If you pour as much oil into any country like the US, you would get a bonanza, almost guaranteed. But apparently, oil had nothing to do with this all, only capitalism. It's clearly one of the biggest lies ever conceived by mankind.
Search the internet: it's almost as if plastics don't exist much, though there is discussion of them, yes. But to me, this is a monstrous black hole in our understanding of American life and the history of concentrations of income and wealth.
Plastics and oil are the most easily mass-produced goods on the face of the earth. We also have a nation that is saturated by them and OBVIOUSLY trapped in a perpetual cycle of oil and plastic consumption. Therefore, to understand American corporate power, you would almost have to understand it in the sense of an oil-saturated pyramid empire, with families controlling the corporations which are most likely to produce passive income in the form of dividends, carried out - (hopefully for them) - ad infinitum; these corporations are tied to family dynasties.
But......YOU NEVER HEAR ABOUT THESE PEOPLE, at least, not before Occupy Wall Street. This is not some kind of conspiracy - obviously corporations are a legal entity - but I would guess that if there ever was a conspiracy most easy to maintain, money would be involved. Since corporations are perfectly legal, Americans just got used to talking about things in abstractions: like someone owns shares, returns on investment - investotopia, don't question, just invest yourself, and don't talk about it. Americans obviously have been told to shut up about wealth for a very long time. Most people probably don't even understand the difference between wealth and income, for instance. In one sense, this is a good thing. Become rich yourself, invest in your future, become frugal and wise. But it also has diverted attention away from what I like to call, the shareholder underground - people who make free money and hang out with each other in gated communities, or living off of interest, or whatever. This group is fed through Wall Street and Wall Street fosters a nation dependent on pure consumerism. They don't even have the respect to call the spending we engage in, citizen spending, they just say consumers. That brings me to the next point.
You have to admit, that America is the most completely trapped nation in the history of the world in terms of consumerism. We absolutely must be forced to buy things instead of enjoying life. There is no public space hardly, you must have your own car, you must burn oil, pharmaceuticals are mass-produced, on and on and on. And of course, people who work for shareholders cannot question this all, they just say, "I was hired by my shareholders to do right by my shareholders." And the rest often remains a secret. But it is not a secret, for instance, that neoliberalism is the dominant agenda, which basically only means that everything produced, must also sell out in the open and free market of exchange. Most goods are not produced by American individuals. If you must buy something, most of the rest of us are forced to buy something from a supplier and play a massive game of arbitrage, fighting with each other for crumbs. Economists might be good little sheep and talk about fanciful things like market failures and stuff and public squalor and inefficiency, on and on, etc. But it just seems like most of the rich are just looking for things to be sold off so they can invest in them and make YET MORE FREE MONEY. Seriously, these people make the most drug-addicted of the poor look like Jesus Christ for all the free money they get, often from the poor working for them.
So, as for these people, saying that you own a corporation is basically the same thing as saying that you own a factory. For instance, I saw a video of people working for Sunny Juice, and many were being fired and work was being tightened - all in the name of supposed efficiency, competition and returns on investments. The whole purpose of people working there then, would be for them mostly to be the dummies who move product to market.
I guess the point of this whole thing is to state that there is a whole shareholder underground of people who make free money and live lives of decadence. The stock market doesn't even tell the whole picture, since the stock market is a used stock market - the shares were already bought - you just put money THROUGH the market. Most of the fortunes in America come from stocks that were never sold. And much of this empire is built on oil and plastics.
Have you ever wondered why things are the way they are in terms of how corporations operate? For instance, corporations are not merely hermetically-sealed for the sake of competition. They don't release secrets, but they also don't release much in the way of financial statements. This is especially true when you're talking about shareholders. Why is it that Americans focus so much on CEO pay? Yes, it is really high, but you also have to realize that him/her, along with the Boards of Directors - also highly-payed - work for the shareholders. I mean, maybe it's even a conspiracy to raise CEO pay so high that Americans don't realize the craziness of the shareholders getting free money and hence, the shareholder empire. But I'm not into conspiracies, I just look at reality. The reality is, Americans are taught not to look much at that all.
Shareholders don't appear much on TV, the only people who appear mostly are the famed capitalists who built companies themselves.....but shareholders don't build companies, they just invest, and whatever you may think about them, their role ought to be trivial. Money shouldn't be this crazy thing that mostly only wealthy people can have and therefore, are the only ones that can invest. But that's what neoliberalism is basically. All money is debt, period, and the only way to make enough to invest in the stock market is to be a capitalist in the first place, having started out with a loan and beating the competition. But people who have for years been rich in this country, long as it's been around, don't start out with a negatively-tilted balance sheet - they start out in the pure positive.
This is the rub here, among with my other points: since capitalism is not a steady-state system at the moment, like the Austrians would like, capitalism, if we're not even talking about corporations at the moment, cannot function in the pure way libertarians envision. The only way out is to change the way money is created or to grow out of the trap by growing the economy to escape the sucking power of corporations.
But aside from the tangent I made, it still remains critical in our understanding of our system to realize that American capitalism and hence, the corporate empire, is first and foremost an oil empire, set up to make life in this country disposable, for maximum profitability and based in such a way to give the most amount of free money to families in a dynastic fashion, passing fortunes on through from generation to generation. Life seems mostly geared for the most consumption. You cannot get most places without a car. We consume 17 million barrels a day, and the only thing that economists talk about is more growth.
I think the best thing for our country would be to shrink some. And start to build cities and lives that don't require oil so much, lives that don't suck so much that the only thing that makes you happy is Panda Express/McDonald's, etc., and movies. In summary, it was once said, by none other than some of the greatest economists, including Murray Rothbard, that the only real tax should be on resources. But if you think about the way our nation has become, so dependent on a non-stop consumer lifestyle, with much of this wealth going to families like the Bushes, it sometimes would make more sense to nationalize some companies or make them non-corporate at all. Oil has shaped our national psyche and much of the oil lifestyle was fostered by corporations after World War II, pursuing maximum profit, and those corporations doing that many times for VERY few people. Wow, the history of America is some kind of crazy, isn't it?