Oligopolies Run Our Lives

To truly understand what The Uniparty is, you must understand its corporate side. The Uniparty is not just Washington: it is every center of power in this country, as they are all connected and on the same page. They’re all just divisions of the same omnipotent Uniparty.

Multinational megacorporations have consolidated market share and power to an alarming degree over the past four decades and the end result is that they exert ever greater control over our lives. The fewer options we have, the more power the companies have over us.

A consistent theme in most major industries today is that they are dominated by just a handful of multinational megacorporations.

TV is just a few companies: Disney, Comcast, Time Warner, Viacom, CBS and Newscorp.

In 1983, 90% of US media was divided up by 50 companies. Today six companies own 90%. Everything you see on TV comes from one of six major Uniparty corporations.

On top of this, CBS and Viacom are working on a merger, and Time Warner was just bought out by AT&T, meaning a cable provider (AT&T) now owns the content company. Another cable provider, Comcast, already owns a considerable slice of the television market, and now it will be joined by another cable provider in the Big Six (soon to be Big Five).

Entertainment: There used to be the Big Six Studios of Hollywood—Disney, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal and Sony—but now Disney is taking over 20th Century Fox, so there’s five. Plus, Universal is owned by NBC, which is owned by Comcast.

So Disney is one of the Big Five of television, and also one of the Big Five of Hollywood. Ditto goes for Comcast, Warner Brothers (owned by Time Warner) and Paramount Pictures (owned by Viacom). Only Sony Pictures is not owned by a TV giant.

When I refer to “the entertainment industry” I’m referring to this five-headed oligopoly that owns virtually all of TV and Hollywood. Over the past 40 years, due to mergers and acquisitions, the entire entertainment industry has been consolidated into just five multinational megacorporations.

The point is to concentrate the power of the entertainment industry into as few hands as possible, so as to control the messaging and content closely.

It’s easier than ever to get blackballed in Hollywood today because there are so few places for aspiring actors, directors, writers and producers to go.

In case you were wondering about the music industry, there are now three major record labels: Universal Music Group (owned by French media conglomerate Vivendi), Sony Music, and Warner Music Group (which was spun off by Time Warner in 2011 and is now owned by private conglomerate called Access Industries).

Advertising: four companies, plus one Japanese form, run the advertising/marketing industry.

Why do you think all commercials are basically the same? They’re all about pushing diversity, glorifying feminism, hitting all over whites, and trashing men.

This is because four companies control the advertising and marketing industry.

Internet and Social Media: Google, Facebook, Amazon and maybe Twitter, but only because Twitter is an important site with a lot of visitors, not because Twitter is actually big. Twitter’s market cap is $26 billion, meaning any of the Big Three could buy Twitter and barely even notice.

Online commerce is monopolized by Amazon. Search is monopolized by Google, as well as online video. Facebook owns social networking. Amazon now wields the power of making or breaking an author’s career.

The Silicon Valley oligopoly is probably the most well-known, and that’s because it is the newest and most glamorous. Seemingly overnight these companies went from quirky startups to global behemoths, and they now have more direct power over individual behavior than perhaps any companies in history.

If you run a blog or a page or a YouTube channel that the Uniparty feels is a threat, you will disappear from the internet without a trace. The internet oligopoly can ensure that. Never forget that we can only say what they permit us to say.

Groceries:

Ten companies produce virtually every product you will find in your local supermarket.

You want to boycott Gillette razors? Sure, you can go buy razors from a company owned by Unilever. That’ll show ’em. Just make sure not to shoot yourself in the foot by supporting any other brands owned by Procter & Gamble, Gillette’s parent company, including: Tide, Gain, Dawn, Duracell, OralB, Crest, Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Old Spice, Bounty, Mr. Clean and Febreeze. Stick it to ’em!

Retail Banks: Chances are you bank with one of the four major banks.

Chances are, either JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup has your money.

Chase is now shutting down the accounts of political dissidents. The other three are likely to follow suit, which means you will soon be out of banking options if your political views don’t align with the Uniparty’s.

Back in the old days, banks used to be more local and smaller. Think about it: if you lived in Indiana, how could you store your money in a bank based in San Francisco? The rise of the internet has allowed megabanks to go nationwide. And so the local banks died out and gave way to the banking giant oligopoly.

Big Pharma: How could we forget this one? Perhaps the most insidious of all the major oligopolies in America, Big Pharma is literally poisoning America and making money hand-over-fist in the process.

Big Pharma is global, comprising not just American companies but European ones including Novartis (Swedish), Bayer (German), Roche (Swiss), Teva (Israeli) and GlaxoSmithKline (British). The biggest of all is Johnson & Johnson, an American giant which you’ll recall was also part of the supermarket oligopoly:

All in all, there are 22 pharmaceutical companies worldwide with revenues greater than $10 billion. A recent article explains why Big Pharma exists:

“The pharmaceutical industry is becoming an oligopoly due to the staggering costs of developing and marketing new drugs and because of patents that protect new products from competitors. It can cost more than $1 billion to develop a new drug, get it approved by the Food and Drug Administration and bring it to market, according to “Forbes” magazine. With those kind of upfront costs, only a handful of companies including Pfizer, Merck and Novartis, can afford to create and sell new products. The government grants those companies extended patents on their drugs, and these patents protect drug developers from competitors for many years.”

One billion dollars to develop a new drug? Years of patent protection granted by the government in order to monopolize your market? That type of cost doesn’t exactly lend itself to robust competition, does it?

This is all by design: costs are so high because of the need to comply with government regulations, which were in turn written by Big Pharma lobbyists in order to discourage and prevent competition.

After all, if the government wasn’t writing the rules to make things more favorable for the Big Pharma oligopoly, then the $4 billion the industry has spent on lobbying over the past two decades has been a tremendous waste. No other industry spends more on lobbying than Big Pharma.

Insurance: Coming in second to Big Pharma in lobbying spending over the past two decades at $2.7 billion is the insurance industry, specifically healthcare. Already a highly-concentrated industry prior to 2010, the Obamacare law made it an oligopoly:

“Health insurance is a highly regulated industry with a number of government mandates at the state and federal level. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires insurers to accept more high risk patients as customers and to provide comprehensive coverage to all their customers. Such constraints favor a handful of established companies, such as Humana, Cigna, Aetna and WellPoint. Some observers suspect that companies capable of surviving new legal mandates will evolve into an oligopoly.”

Again, it’s important to note that it’s not just Obamacare that is the problem in health insurance. The industry was already considered “highly concentrated” before 2010.

Today, there are only three states in the US where the top two largest health insurance providers hold less than a 50% market share:

And as you can see, many states’ health insurance markets are outright monopolized–for example in Alabama, Blue Cross Blue Shield has an 83% market share.

“Free market conservatives” think the problem with insurance companies is that they’re too heavily regulated and this drives costs up. But why are they so highly regulated in the first place? Because they lobbied for those regulations to get rid of competition. Who do you think primarily wrote the Obamacare law?

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The common theme is further and further concentration of power, in all industries. Fewer players means fewer moving parts, meaning things are easier to control.

Bloomberg shows that the number of public companies has been cut in half over the past 20 years:

Fewer options for the consumer can be a good thing in certain cases–take computer and phone operating systems, for instance–but overall the lack of options usually means consumers are at the mercy of big corporations.

The whole point is power: the more options consumers have, the less power companies have. The fewer options consumers have, the more power the companies have. And right now, the scales are tipped heavily towards the corporations.

This is all by design.

Trump–as a genuine outsider who won the Presidency despite having virtually all the Uniparty’s corporate, media and political interests aligned vehemently against him–must realize that as a billionaire not in thrall to the multinational megacorporations, he is in a unique place to become the great trust-buster of the 21st century.

Trump doesn’t need the corporations to bankroll him. He doesn’t have to be their bitch the way virtually every other politician does. Most politicians go into politics to become rich, but Trump was the other way around, which is why the Uniparty was so opposed to him: they knew they couldn’t bribe and control him. That’s why he was so scary for them. And this puts Trump in a unique position where he can go after these major corporations with little fear of retaliation.

It appears to be the case that in a robust capitalist economy like ours, every century or so the major players reach a point where they attain too much power, and their influence over government regulation (i.e. writing their own rules) means that the economy is no longer functionally capitalist. It happened around the turn of the 20th century with the Robber Barrons, and it’s happening again now.

The problem with capitalism is that in theory it promotes competition, but in reality the companies that comprise the capitalist economy are inherently threatened by competition, and so they seek to crush or absorb their competitors whenever and wherever possible.

Not only that, but companies also seek to influence the government in order to obtain subsidies, favorable regulations and tax breaks. This is the process whereby Big Business and Big Government become one. It wasn’t just Amazon that paid no taxes last year: IBM, General Motors, Netflix, Chevron and US Steel, among dozens more large corporations, also paid no taxes. If you think that’s simply “the free market at work” you have been flat-out brainwashed.

The natural tendency of the capitalist system is toward oligopoly and monopoly, and so every hundred years or so, after most of the industries have become consolidated and oligopolized, and the government fully corrupted by corporate interests, it becomes necessary for some President from outside the corrupt system to come in and break up the party, effectively “resetting” the system back to its original, genuine “free market” state (or as close to it as possible.)

That should be Donald Trump.

But Trump seems to be obsessed with propelling the stock market higher and higher. I don’t know that he’s even considered the idea of becoming a trust-buster. He seems to be hanging his hat on higher corporate profits and higher stock prices. He does not seem to be concerned with the corrosive, oppressive influence of mutinational megacorporations on the American people.

It would be a terrible missed opportunity if Trump does not warm to trust-busting, because right now it’s a major talking point on the Democratic side with Bernie Sanders (the front-runner and, as it stands, likely Democratic nominee) and Elizabeth Warren.

Trust-busting needs to happen one way or another. The problem is that the Democrats who want to do it bring with them so many other problems that are equally as destructive to this country as corporate domination–namely open borders (which the major corporations all want because it equals cheap labor), toxic feminism (which the major corporations also all want because it promotes women in the workforce), nonwhite supremacism, and massive government welfare programs, among many other things.

So it has to be Trump. I hope he senses the stakes of this moment today and fulfills his potential as the 21st century’s great Trust Buster.