Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Joel Kotkin — Amazon Eats Up Whole Foods As The New Masters Of The Universe Plunder America

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” —Justice Louis Brandeis
The rise of monopoly, monopsony, oligarchy, plutonomy, and government capture, spelling the death of a moribund republic in which corruption at the top has been legalized in the name of the "free market," which supposedly is a necessary condition for democracy.

A problem with late-stage capitalism is the economies of scale leads to concentration of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer, reducing competition, while a foundation assumption of a free market system is perfect competition. Owing to this internal contradiction, capitalism destroys itself and turns into corporate statism. Neoliberalism is a political theory of global corporate totalitarianism.

New Geography
Joel Kotkin | executive editor of NewGeography.com, Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University. and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism

3 comments:

Kaivey said...

Amazon must be wiping everyone out. Some of the middle class made their money out of little grocery, hardware, butchers, fishmongers, shops, etc, but they went a long time ago. Now Amazon is wiping out the bigger stores. They are still very cheep so they are left alone, but it should be broken up.

Peter Pan said...

No worse than Walmart.

Tom Hickey said...

Walmart devastated small town America. It's impact was game-changing at the time. It was also a significant factor in the socio-economic dysfunctionality that ensued and eventually got Trump elected along with Democratic bungling. HRC was on the board of Walmart, which is based on Arkansas, Bill's home state.