Download or read book Monopolized written by David Dayen and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the airlines we fly to the food we eat, how a tiny group of corporations have come to dominate every aspect of our lives—by one of our most intrepid and accomplished journalists "If you're looking for a book . . . that will get your heart pumping and your blood boiling and that will remind you why we're in these fights—add this one to your list." —Senator Elizabeth Warren on David Dayen's Chain of Title Over the last forty years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market. This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications. If you are sick you can go to one of three main pharmacies to fill your prescription, and if you end up in a hospital almost every accessory to heal you comes from one of a handful of large medical suppliers. Dayen, the editor of the American Prospect and author of the acclaimed Chain of Title, provides a riveting account of what it means to live in this new age of monopoly and how we might resist this corporate hegemony. Through vignettes and vivid case studies Dayen shows how these monopolies have transformed us, inverted us, and truly changed our lives, at the same time providing readers with the raw material to make monopoly a consequential issue in American life and revive a long-dormant antitrust movement.
Download or read book In Defense of Monopoly written by Richard B. McKenzie and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Defense of Monopoly offers an unconventional but empirically grounded argument in favor of market monopolies. Authors McKenzie and Lee claim that conventional, static models exaggerate the harm done by real-world monopolies, and they show why some degree of monopoly presence is necessary to maximize the improvement of human welfare over time. Inspired by Joseph Schumpeter's suggestion that market imperfections can drive an economy's long-term progress, In Defense of Monopoly defies conventional assumptions to show readers why an economic system's failure to efficiently allocate its resources is actually a necessary precondition for maximizing the system's long-term performance: the perfectly fluid, competitive economy idealized by most economists is decidedly inferior to one characterized by market entry and exit restrictions or costs. An economy is not a board game in which players compete for a limited number of properties, nor is it much like the kind of blackboard games that economists use to develop their monopoly models. As McKenzie and Lee demonstrate, the creation of goods and services in the real world requires not only competition but the prospect of gains beyond a normal competitive rate of return.
Download or read book Break Em Up written by Zephyr Teachout and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[We need] a grassroots, bottom-up movement that understands the challenge in front of us, and then organizes against monopoly power in communities across this country. This book is a blueprint for that organizing. In these pages, you will learn how monopolies and oligopolies have taken over almost every aspect of American life, and you will also learn about what can be done to stop that trend before it is too late." —From the foreword by Bernie Sanders. A passionate attack on the monopolies that are throttling American democracy. Every facet of American life is being overtaken by big platform monopolists like Facebook, Google, and Bayer (which has merged with the former agricultural giant Monsanto), resulting in a greater concentration of wealth and power than we've seen since the Gilded Age. They are evolving into political entities that often have more influence than the actual government, bending state and federal legislatures to their will and even creating arbitration courts that circumvent the US justice system. How can we recover our freedom from these giants? Anti-corruption scholar and activist Zephyr Teachout has the answer: Break 'Em Up. This book is a clarion call for liberals and leftists looking to find a common cause. Teachout makes a compelling case that monopolies are the root cause of many of the issues that today's progressives care about; they drive economic inequality, harm the planet, limit the political power of average citizens, and historically-disenfranchised groups bear the brunt of their shameful and irresponsible business practices. In order to build a better future, we must eradicate monopolies from the private sector and create new safeguards that prevent new ones from seizing power. Through her expert analysis of monopolies in several sectors and their impact on courts, journalism, inequality, and politics, Teachout offers a concrete path toward thwarting these enemies of working Americans and reclaiming our democracy before it’s too late.
Download or read book Monopolies Suck written by Sally Hubbard and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An urgent and witty manifesto, Monopolies Suck shows how monopoly power is harming everyday Americans and practical ways we can all fight back."--
Download or read book Big Box Swindle written by Stacy Mitchell and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Book Sense Pick and Annual Highlight With a New Afterword In less than two decades, large retail chains have become the most powerful corporations in America. In this deft and revealing book, Stacy Mitchell illustrates how mega-retailers are fueling many of our most pressing problems, from the shrinking middle class to rising pollution and diminished civic engagement—and she shows how a growing number of communities and independent businesses are effectively fighting back. Mitchell traces the dramatic growth of mega-retailers—from big boxes like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Costco, and Staples to chains like Starbucks, Olive Garden, Blockbuster, and Old Navy—and the precipitous decline of independent businesses. Drawing on examples from virtually every state in the country, she unearths the extraordinary impact of these companies and the big-box mentality on everything from soaring gasoline consumption to rising poverty rates, failing family farms, and declining voting levels. Along the way, Mitchell exposes the shocking role government policy has played in the expansion of mega-retailers and builds a compelling case that communities composed of many small, locally owned businesses are healthier and more prosperous than those dominated by a few large chains. More than a critique, Big-Box Swindle provides an invigorating account of how some communities have successfully countered the spread of big boxes and rebuilt their local economies. Since 2000, more than two hundred big-box development projects have been halted by groups of ordinary citizens, and scores of towns and cities have adopted laws that favor small-scale, local business development and limit the proliferation of chains. From cutting-edge land-use policies to innovative cooperative small-business initiatives, Mitchell offers communities concrete strategies that can stave off mega-retailers and create a more prosperous and sustainable future.
Download or read book Breaking Into the Monopoly written by Yukihisa Kumagai and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Breaking into the Monopoly, Yukihisa Kumagai examines how the commercial pressure groups of Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester organised campaigns to end the British East India Company’s monopoly from 1812-1813 and 1829-1833.
Download or read book Goliath written by Matt Stoller and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Every thinking American must read” (The Washington Book Review) this startling and “insightful” (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has transformed American politics, and business. Going back to our country’s founding, Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power—whether by government or banks—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. “An engaging call to arms,” (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.
Download or read book Breaking into the Monopoly written by Yukihisa Kumagai and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Breaking into the Monopoly, Yukihisa Kumagai examines how the commercial pressure groups of Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester organised campaigns to end the British East India Company’s monopoly from 1812-1813 and 1829-1833.
Download or read book Captive Audience written by Susan Crawford and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten years ago, the United States stood at the forefront of the Internet revolution. With some of the fastest speeds and lowest prices in the world for high-speed Internet access, the nation was poised to be the global leader in the new knowledge-based economy. Today that global competitive advantage has all but vanished because of a series of government decisions and resulting monopolies that have allowed dozens of countries, including Japan and South Korea, to pass us in both speed and price of broadband. This steady slide backward not only deprives consumers of vital services needed in a competitive employment and business market—it also threatens the economic future of the nation. This important book by leading telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford explores why Americans are now paying much more but getting much less when it comes to high-speed Internet access. Using the 2011 merger between Comcast and NBC Universal as a lens, Crawford examines how we have created the biggest monopoly since the breakup of Standard Oil a century ago. In the clearest terms, this book explores how telecommunications monopolies have affected the daily lives of consumers and America's global economic standing.
Download or read book Writing Without Bullshit written by Josh Bernoff and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joining the ranks of classics like The Elements of Style and On Writing Well, Writing Without Bullshit helps professionals get to the point to get ahead. It’s time for Writing Without Bullshit. Writing Without Bullshit is the first comprehensive guide to writing for today’s world: a noisy environment where everyone reads what you write on a screen. The average news story now gets only 36 seconds of attention. Unless you change how you write, your emails, reports, and Web copy don’t stand a chance. In this practical and witty book, you’ll learn to front-load your writing with pithy titles, subject lines, and opening sentences. You’ll acquire the courage and skill to purge weak and meaningless jargon, wimpy passive voice, and cowardly weasel words. And you’ll get used to writing directly to the reader to make every word count. At the center of it all is the Iron Imperative: treat the reader’s time as more valuable than your own. Embrace that, and your customers, your boss, and your colleagues will recognize the power and boldness of your thinking. Transcend the fear that makes your writing weak. Plan and execute writing projects with confidence. Manage edits and reviews flawlessly. And master every modern format from emails and social media to reports and press releases. Stop writing to fit in. Start writing to stand out. Boost your career by writing without bullshit.
Download or read book A Race for the Future written by Mike Gonzalez and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark work examining the impact of Hispanic immigration on American politics, with a blueprint for what conservatives must do to recapture the American electorate. Since 1965, millions of people have come to this country from Latin America and the Caribbean, seeking freedom and the chance to make a better life. Now accounting for more than 16 percent of the population, Hispanics have emerged as a decisive voting bloc that overwhelmingly skews liberal as they influence pivotal electoral races. But it doesn’t have to be that way forever. In A Race for the Future, Mike Gonzalez describes what the term Hispanic means, correcting the erroneous assumption that it is a homogenous group and presenting an un- varnished look at the challenges each nationality—Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and many others—faces in America. Despite their growing political power, Hispanics have largely been kept separate from mainstream America, and many of them are consigned to an underclass status. A Race for the Future reveals exactly how bureaucratic decisions that encourage public assistance and discourage assimilation hinder Hispanics and allow them to be politically monopolized by progressives. Gonzalez shows how conservatives can begin to reverse this damaging trajectory by supporting policies that would help Hispanics thrive—education choice, family values, and financial freedom. By returning to their core values of community, industry, and independence, conservatives can actively court the vital Hispanic vote. The fate of too many key battleground states, from Texas to Florida—analyzed in depth here—depends on the Right’s ability to successfully do just that. A powerful take on a rapidly changing and diverse community, A Race for the Future is a much-needed course correction on how our country can successfully enable Hispanics to flourish while standing firm on our principles.
Download or read book Against Intellectual Property written by N. Stephan Kinsella and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 2008 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Antitrust Paradox written by Robert Bork and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.
Download or read book Move Fast and Break Things written by Jonathan Taplin and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that started the Techlash. A stinging polemic that traces the destructive monopolization of the Internet by Google, Facebook and Amazon, and that proposes a new future for musicians, journalists, authors and filmmakers in the digital age. Move Fast and Break Things is the riveting account of a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs who in the 1990s began to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms -- Facebook, Amazon, and Google -- that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries. Jonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page: overlooking piracy of books, music, and film while hiding behind opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users in order to create the surveillance-marketing monoculture in which we now live. The enormous profits that have come with this concentration of power tell their own story. Since 2001, newspaper and music revenues have fallen by 70 percent; book publishing, film, and television profits have also fallen dramatically. Revenues at Google in this same period grew from $400 million to $74.5 billion. Today, Google's YouTube controls 60 percent of all streaming-audio business but pay for only 11 percent of the total streaming-audio revenues artists receive. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to the creators and owners of that content. The stakes here go far beyond the livelihood of any one musician or journalist. As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, as well as music and other forms of entertainment, from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy. Move Fast and Break Things offers a vital, forward-thinking prescription for how artists can reclaim their audiences using knowledge of the past and a determination to work together. Using his own half-century career as a music and film producer and early pioneer of streaming video online, Taplin offers new ways to think about the design of the World Wide Web and specifically the way we live with the firms that dominate it.
Download or read book The Profit Paradox written by Jan Eeckhout and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power—and how it stifles workers around the world In an era of technological progress and easy communication, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power—the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil. The Profit Paradox describes how, over the past forty years, a handful of companies have reaped most of the rewards of technological advancements—acquiring rivals, securing huge profits, and creating brutally unequal outcomes for workers. Instead of passing on the benefits of better technologies to consumers through lower prices, these “superstar” companies leverage new technologies to charge even higher prices. The consequences are already immense, from unnecessarily high prices for virtually everything, to fewer startups that can compete, to rising inequality and stagnating wages for most workers, to severely limited social mobility. A provocative investigation into how market power hurts average working people, The Profit Paradox also offers concrete solutions for fixing the problem and restoring a healthy economy.
Download or read book Natural Monopolies in Digital Platform Markets written by Francesco Ducci and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through three case studies, this book investigates whether digital industries are naturally monopolistic and evaluates policy approaches to market power.
Download or read book The Monopoly Companion written by Philip Orbanes and published by Sterling Publishing Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a fun-packed guide to the history, rules, and winning strategies behind the worlds most popular board game, by the man known as Mr. Monopoly.
