Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

While we’re at it, let’s not stop there. The Federal Trade
Commission and the Justice Department should conduct a broad study of
the US economy, looking at every industry, with an eye to busting up
every company that is deemed “too big to fail” because of the impact
such a failure could have on the broader economy.

“Too big to fail” should mean “too big to exist.” It’s not just
that giant companies put the economy at risk. Their size makes them way
too powerful economically and politically, too. (Just look at how
Microsoft, a company that has a mediocre product line, has been able to
succeed in killing off its competition not by making a better
mousetrap, but by simply crushing or buying up those firms that do make
better ones.) Politically, breaking up mega companies prevents such
monopolistic behavior. It also creates more diversity of interest
within each industry, thus providing openings for other political
groups—like trade unions, environmentalists, etc.-- to play companies
off against each other on particular issues.

While we're at it, let's also break up the huge companies that dominate three crucial sectors of the economy, to the detriment of the public good: energy, the media and the military. Does anyone doubt that the phenomenal rise in energy prices we have been experiencing is related directly to the mergers that have occurred over the last decade in the energy industry? Or that America's endless wars, and its military budget--now equal in size to that of all other military budgets in the world combined--are a direct result of the dominance of several giant military companies--GE, Westinghouse, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman and Raytheon? Finally, if it weren't for all those media mergers, we wouldn't have newspapers closing down all over the place, and we wouldn't have the homogenized, sanitized network news we're stuck with now, either.

The tools are already at hand to tear all these anti-democratic,
anti-social and uneconomic corporate monstrosities apart. So let’s fire
up the legal chainsaws and start cutting them down to size. Instead of
bailout, we need to start hearing the word anti-trust in Washington.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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