Just in time for #Davos, here’s 'Taken, not earned: How monopolists drive the world’s power and wealth divide," a report from a coalition of international tax justice and anti-corporate activist groups:
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Monopolists have the power “to extract wealth from, to restrict the freedoms of, and to manipulate or steer the vastly larger numbers of losers.” They establish themselves as gatekeepers and create chokepoints that they can use to raise prices paid by their customers and lower the payout to their suppliers:
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
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These chokepoints let monopolies usurp “one of the ultimate prerogatives of state power: taxation.” Amazon sellers pay a 51% tax to sell on the platform. App Store suppliers pay a 30% tax on every dollar they make with their apps. That translates into higher costs.
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Consider a good that costs $10 to make: the bottom 50% of companies (by size) would charge $12.50 for that product on average. The largest companies would charge $15. Thus monopolies don’t just make their owners richer - they make everyone else poorer, too.
This power to set prices is behind the #greedflation (or, more politely, #SellersInflation). The CEOs of the largest companies in the world keep getting on investor calls and bragging about this:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power
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The food system is incredibly monopolistic. The #Cargill family own the largest commodity trader in the world, which is how they built up a family fortune worth $43b. Cargill is one of the “ABCD” companies (“Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus”) that control the world’s food supply, and they tripled their profits during the lockdown.
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Monopolies gouge everyone - even nations. #Pfizer charged the #NHS £18-22/shot for vaccines that cost £5/shot to make. They took the UK government for £2bn - enough to pay last year’s pay hike for NHS nurses, six times over,
But monopolies also abuse suppliers, especially their employees. All over the world, competition authorities are uncovering “wage fixing” and “no poaching” agreements among large firms, who collude to put a cap on what workers in their sector can earn.
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Unions report workers having their pay determined by algorithms. Bosses lock employees in with noncompetes and huge repayment bills for “training”:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose
Monopolies corrupt our governments. Companies with huge markups can spend some of that money on lobbying. The 20 largest companies in the world spend more than €155m/year lobbying in the US and alone, not counting the money they spend on industry associations and other cutouts that lobby on their behalf.
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Big Tech leads the pack on lobbying, accounting for 82% of EU lobbying spending and 58% of US lobbying.
One key monopoly lobbying priority is blocking climate action, from Apple lobbying against right-to-repair, which creates vast mountains of e-waste, to energy monopolist lobbying against renewables.
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And energy companies are getting more monopolistic, with #Exxonmobil spending $65b to buy Pioneer and #Chevron spending $60b to buy Hess. Many of the world’s richest people are fossil fuel monopolists, like Charles and Julia Koch, the 18th and 19th richest people on the Forbes list. They spend fortunes on climate denial.
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When people talk about the billionaires’ climate impact, they o focus on the carbon footprints of mansions and private jets, but the true environmental cost of the ultra rich comes from the anti-renewables, pro-emissions lobbying they buy with their monopoly winnings.
The good news is that the tide is turning on monopolies. A coalition of “businesses, workers, farmers, consumers and other civil society groups” have created a “remarkably successful anti-monopoly movement.”
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