New America Foundation's Barry Lynn (author of Cornered), has a very important article in Washington Monthly called:
"Who Broke American Jobs."
In my view, all of our problems, from campaign financing, to media consolidation, to the government dysfunctionalism and hyper partisanship that is breaking down anything that ever made American a worthwhile experiment, can all be seen as breaking not just American Jobs, but America itself.
A rampant, unchecked monopolization of nearly everything has powered a winner-take-all, crony Capitalism Gone Wild environment that infects every aspect of this nation and our world.
And the giant corporations behind it all are perfectly happy to have us shrug, feel it's beyond our control, or just some containable by-product of an invisible hand that will sweep us along and everything will turn out well in the end. Uh, ya.. good luck with that.
So inform yourself: Watch the video of Barry on Washington Journal today. Force other people to watch it. Capitalism provides useful tools for providing the basic goods and services of our civilization. But this criminally stupid conservative myth that capitalism can only exist in this totally unregulated state is as childish as it is reckless and irresponsible. Only a suicidal culture would allow it to continue this way, especially after a global economic meltdown has just illustrated nicely just how bad things became while we were playing video games, listening to iPods, learning how to blog, and building Wal-Marts and Starbucks on every god damn street corner.
We have to understand this basic change to how things are now working and find some way to make them work differently; to reinsert some of the checks and balances that once existed. Nothing less than the future of this country depends on it.
Video
On C-Span's Washington Journal, March 8th 2010 — Barry Lynn Discussing the national and global monopoly problem, and how Wal-Mart and other big US corporations are driving our bus, and how we might stop them.
There IS hope: Be absolutely sure to see the end, where he discusses how WE have the power to control the corporations.
Other reading
Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction
Through stories of real people and real industries, Barry C. Lynn shows how monopolies threaten independent businesses, squelch innovation, degrade the quality and safety of basic products, destabilize our most vital industrial and financial systems, and destroy the very fabric of democracy. Avoiding the partisan cant that has poisoned virtually every important American debate in recent years, he explains how, over the past three decades, leaders of both parties and thinkers across the political spectrum have encouraged and enabled the growth of monopolies.
US Chamber Builds Political Operations
The LA Times reports today on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s growing “large-scale grass-roots political operation” that is being “funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals.” In 2009, the Chamber spent $144 million on lobbying and grassroots organizing, “well beyond the spending of individual labor unions or the Democratic or Republican national committees.”
About Barry Lynn
Barry C. Lynn is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He has written for Harper's Magazine, the Financial Times, the Harvard Business Review, and the American Prospect, among others. He has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, the BBC, and C-SPAN. He is the author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation.