Spanish
Leo Tolstoy: "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow witted man if he has no formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him".
Since its inception, capitalism has shown an inherent tendency towards concentration and accumulation. From manufacturing to the factory and from the local enterprise company to regional, national and multinational company. The verb growing is synonymous of living in capitalism. Growth can be accelerated by the centralization and expansion based on takeovers of competitors and finance offered a powerful tool for early concentration.
Achieving a position of monopoly is the dream of every capitalist and the lure that guides his business. No competitors can put the price at will and make super profits. If you do not get a monopoly but operators are few and their size and power is similar, it is best to agree prices (oligopoly) to embark on a spiraling price war to increase the share of the pie at the expense of colleagues.
When we talk about monopolies we do not talk in the restrictive sense of a market with a single vendor, but we refer to large firms with "power monopoly" which are able to limit the entry of potential competitors (barriers to entry), control or negotiate the amount produced, set or agree on pricing (oligopolistic markets), act as unique buyers - Wal Mart -reducing its suppliers to extreme precariousness, to reduce their wage costs with the threat to relocate,.... We therefore refer to a handful of corporations with "monopoly power" over one or more sectors of the economy.
Monopoly Capitalism 1.0.
Monopoly capitalism requires large economic areas to develop. The large U.S., German hinterland ... became the original niche and ideal training ground since the late nineteenth century. The stock market and finance leveraged the process. In 1901, 165 steel companies merged to form U.S. Steel with the cooperation of banking at JP Morgan. In the 20 Vereinigte Stahlwerke emulated U.S. Steel in Germany while IG Farben became the largest chemical company in the world.
They where monopolistic or oligopolistic companies nationwide. Price-fixing and restricting production to obtain and maintain super benefits. Monopolies operated mainly at national level, gave work and pay taxes to the country that supported them in obtaining raw materials, energy, foreign markets ... and defended them in international competition (protectionism) and supported them in their expansionist attempts (imperialism). Monopoly 1.0. ended up with nineteenth-century "laissez fair" and bet strongly on protectionism and State intervention.
There was a kind of "social contract" by which part of the profits of large "national" monopolistic corporations benefited States and people of the nation. The same States established public monopolies preparing the ground for its future privatization. During the short period between the 1st and the 2nd GM, England tried to regain the ground against their monopolistic rivals merging most of the small companies of railways (1921), concentrating and nationalizing most of the power and gas (1926), largely unifying the London transport service, constituting a monopoly on iron and steel (1932) creating a national government-sponsored cartel of coal (1936). Trade unions and left-wing parties had repeatedly supported monopolies and colonial adventures of their respective imperialism.
Monopolies 1.0. controlled their state base and launched armed struggle for the control of raw materials and foreign markets. Oil and rubber were also the first to experience monopoly concentration. Nazism and Fascism will not be understood without that perverse collusion of interests. The Germans monopoly collusion with Nazism has been well studied by Niall Ferguson .
In the ancient cyclical crises of overproduction of the 19th century, competition depressed prices (deflation), fell the least competitive companies (whose size was not "systemic") and the market got back from low prices and fewer offering firms. But after each crisis, the companies that resisted were larger.
Since the end of the 19th century things changed. Monopoly 1.0 monopolized most of the benefits of the national controlled sectors leaving the rest of the companies in precarious conditions. In addition, monopoly has much more power than the normal company to force to lower wages and payments to suppliers. When crisis broke out, companies to sacrifice had acquired a considerable size (systemic). On the other hand the monopolies in good health prevented the sharp drop in the prices of the sectors they controlled so demand dit not recover.
Suddenly people noticed that crisis had left aside its cyclical nature to become unstoppable spirals that swallowed more and more assets and companies. In 1890, at the end of the Long Depression (1870-96), in the United States, were dictated the first antitrust laws (Sherman Antitrust Act). Huey P. Long, Governor of Louisiana (1928-32), Senator from Louisiana from 1932 until his assassination in 1935 (intended to stand for the Presidency of the United States), uncovered during their election campaigns, the sinister amalgam between monopoly and polarization of income and wealth as the fundamental cause of the great depression.
In the 1940s was a commonplace among academic circles the discussion on monopolist disease that afflicted capitalism. Roosevelt attempted to oppose the monopolization of the economy and antitrust laws were established. In the 1930s he established a Committee to investigate the practices of the monopolies that were experiencing an exponential progression in concentration of capital taking advantage of the crisis.
Capitalism had become ill of acute "monopolitis", had precipitated the great depression and had launched the Nations to the self-destruction of WWT that almost destroys humankind. In academic circles peaple spoke of the end of capitalism or the death of capitalism.
After the disaster the system entered a phase of moderation, bowing to pressure from social unrest. It was a kind of resurrection. Capitalism reappear in disguise, a new capitalism with a human face, the New Deal and Keynesianism, the Marshall Plan, improving working conditions in the center and countries neighboring the USSR and China. In addition, generating a welfare state favored a continued demand recovery.
The already fully monopolistic character of the system empowered large corporations to maintain high prices and sufficient to pay employees more fractious, salaries and benefits above the mere subsistence, and, with the return to growth. The emerging debate about the evils of monopoly where set aside and monopolies adopted a new strategy.
Monopoly Capitalism 2.0.
The monopoly of a single country was suffocating. The system needed a qualitative leap towards global monopolism. The entrenched monopoly in an expensive nation-state that could no longer resort to war, invasion or domination, was obsolete. The ground had to be prepared for a new type of monopoles, global monopolism. Neoliberalism, the exaltation of the benefits of competition, deregulation and the global market provided the ideological steamroller for the penetration of global monopoly.
It was needed to lay the groundwork for a new kind of monopoly 2.0. able to operate in a supra-national area, more comprehensive and aggressive, which is no longer limited to the manufacturing sector but invade each and every one of the sectors of the economy (trade retail, hospitality, transportation, telecommunications, messaging,...) and to all geographical areas: the global monopolism. Neoliberalism, the ideological steamroller for the global monopolistic conversion, began to take shape.
Phase 2 began in the early 70's., when meet together an economy with clear signs of excess capacity and a strong expansion of world money supply (eurodollars, USA trade deficit growing ) and transnational banking.
Monopolies were leaving aside its national base to embark to the conquest and subjugation of the planet. When monopoly 1.0 wanted to impose their law declared a "lock out" (lockout). Monopoly 2.0 will simply relocate. States, provinces, cities,... to compete with each other to offer rebates of taxes, reductions in social security contributions, rebates on environmental protection, subsidies, free infrastructure, labor trained and qualified at their expense, ..., to attract elusive multinationals that have managed to outsource most of their costs.
The first years of phase 2.0. were years of battles, shark attacks , hostile takeovers, and tricks to consolidate positions and destroy competitors. "One country monopolies" that resisted change were swept away, one after another. A good Oscar winner screenplay reflected this in the movie Wall Street.
The computerization and telecommunications technological advances facilitated transnational business operations, but it was especially financialization (transnational credit expansion) what supplied the gunpowder and fuel to trigger a global, meteoric and unstoppable, process of mergers and acquisitions.
In the early 1980s North American monopolies were losing ground to Japanese and German corporations. Reagan paved the way for the monopoly 2.0 phase. Between 1980 and 1985 a strong dollar (P. Volker raised interest rates triggering incidentally the Latin American debt crisis and the East European counties debt crisis) and increasing doses of financial deregulation paved the ground for the transnationalization and relocation of monopolies made in USA.
But this first phase of globalization was premature. The consequences for American exports were so severe that Reagan had to turn back. The agreement of the Plaza in 1985 forced the revaluation of the yen and the deutsche mark, returning oxygen to U.S. exporters. But the agreement of the Plaza, which held back somewhat the globalization of monopolies made in USA, had as a result something unexpected, the rapid globalization of the Japanese monopolies that, to compete with a devalued dollar, decided to relocate massibly their plants and industries to the Asian continent. 1985-90 represented the golden time of the "Asian Tigers" (with their currencies linked to the devalued dollar) with massive amounts of foreign investment.
In 1995 the Plaza agreement was reversed (Reverse Plaza Accord). The American monopolies had been left behind in terms of globalization. The agreed rise of the dollar respect to the yen and the DM meant the definitive autsourcing of all what was possible outsourced in the United States. The strength of the dollar (along with Clinton financial deregulation ) constituted a key element in the financial globalization that would lead Wall Street.
The exporting "Asian Tigers" monopolies (South Korean chaevols,...) resented the reversal of the Plaza accord and retaliate relocating part of its plants and industries to China. The Chinese giant was offered a good price (the looting of their environment and their labor) as a platform for total monopoly globalization.
Monopolist concentration is not a linear process but an accelerated one. The neoliberal globalization is the ideal and conducive field of concentration, reproduction and hypertrophy of the large multinational corporations. Thirty years of globalization has meant a degree of unprecedented concentration of capital.
Between 1990 and 1995, more than 40% of the companies listed in Fortune 500, disappeared absorbed by other larger.
This process has occurred in almost all sectors (10 car companies hold 77% of the market 2 aviation companies control 100% of the aviation sector's large aircraft, 5 operators control 83% of fixed telephony, 3 operators control 77% of mobile telecommunications infrastructure, while only three control 65% of mobile market, 10 control 70% of pharmaceutical drug sold; 4 supplied 75% of boxed tobacco smoke, only 3 companies produce about 70% of all agricultural machinery and equipment, ...). Between 1980 and 2008 multinationals increased their direct investment abroad of $ 0.5 billion to 13.6 billion. In 2008, 37% of the shares of European companies belong to foreign investors.
In fact the statistics fall short because the monopolization takes opaque and sophisticated ways that do not add in the computation, such as hollow companies (Nike, Beneton, Apple, ..., do not invest abroad but outsource almost everything they produce) or strategic (the Star Alliance groups 25 airlines under the leadership of United Airlines).
Also monopolies interact between them in order to keep the entire production process in a global monopolistic environment. Apple has built a kind of global assembly for your iPod and the iPhone line to minimize their costs. The production of the components is divided between Toshiba, Samsung, Infineon, Broadcom, Numonyx, Murata, Dialog Semiconductors and Cirrus Logic. All these components are shipped to assembly plants of Foxconn in Shenzhen where its 400,000 workers earn 80 cents $/h working in worst than Chaplin "Modern times" working conditions. The result is a monopolists profit margin of 64% on each individual appliance.
The process of capitalist concentration is one way in each and every one of the economy sectors. Never operate in reverse. With the exception of unexplored areas, once the operators have been reduced to 10 will never happen again to be 12 or 15 but 7, 4, .... They progress using all kinds of tricks and tactics to phagocyte and grow, raising insurmountable barriers to entry and grow into increasingly monopolistic positions. This is a truly global black hole that swallows and swallows constantly. Economic competition is disappearing. If you are a monopolistic company you only have to cash in profits and, as in the previous phase, the crisis and depression further strengthen and accelerate this process.
The 500 largest multinationals have 80% of the accumulated stock of global foreign direct investment and account for 50% of international trade. Dominate all natural resources, control the development of current and future technologies, control the majority of the agencies and media and entertainment, impose its economic, political, cultural and ideological influence on subject nations, spread everywhere the neoliberal creed, and its decisions of investment, outsourcing, expansion, etc., affect hundreds of millions of workers and their families.
E.G. Jobsbawm (industry and Empire): "During the great depression the standard of living of the workers who still had labor was maintained thanks to the fall in the cost of living".
The history of capitalism is the history of the accumulation and concentration of capital. If there is no accumulation system collapses it. After reaching the monopolist 2.0 phase there is no more phases ahead. Capitalism has succeeded. All the institutional, political, sociological barriers have been crossed. The only limit left, however, is the planet itself, its resources are limited, and these barrier is insurmountable. There is no other planet Earth that hunt or aliens who submit. The total triumph also means the total failure. The system has entered a final crisis of over-accumulation and a depressive spiral , a bottomless abyss.
In the cyclical crises of youth capitalism, failed companies did not have sufficient scope to precipitate a depressive spiral. It was the cyclic time of the system. The crisis of overproduction, result of inter-capitalist competition, reduce prices and only the strongest companies survived. The system seemed to have an automatic mechanism for recovery.
But after each crisis the number of companies in each sector was reduced. As the system has been maturing and aging, the stars of the constellation have been getting increasingly bigger and bigger and more and more dangerous crises, becoming depressive spiral cycles and dragging in their fall not only the big banks that financed them, but also the States that sheltered them.
Overcapacity under monopoly
In past crises, with a less monopolized system, prices plummeted by lack of demand (deflation ) and competition between firms. The disappearance of companies on one side and low prices on the other, ran at the end with overcapacity.
Actually the crisis of overproduction primarily affect the non-monopoly sector. Monopolies tend to resist very well the crisis , often becoming reinforced .
Suppose the case of the aviation industry. This is a duopoly that has outsourced most of its operations. There are no marginal firms prone for destruction. When the recession threatens their income, the duopoly simply stops investing, reduces demand to their suppliers and force them to lower prices, thus costs are reduced and monopoly profits increase.
In addition , the monopolist has some interest in maintaining overcapacity since this is hard barrier to entry . Wal -Mart keeps running huge megastores in certain areas , totally superfluous, to deter potential opponents.
Prices that do not "suffer" depression
In the few non-monopolistic sectors in crisis (rental housing, beach bars,...), who does not drop prices does not sell. In this case, consumers are benefited and few of them are excluded. In contrast in monopolized sectors, such as energy corporations, prices "go up" during the crisis and corporate benefits increase charging more customers that in the absence of alternative suppliers can only choose to pay the Bill or be disconnected (excluded). Private monopolies are generating the exclusion and marginalization of a large part of the population of the planet.
Under overcapacity conditions investment flees to fictitious capital and financial speculation supplying more and more gunpowder for the concentration of capital. As in previous slumps, the crisis is the breeding ground for monopolist concentration with a crescendo non stop in groupings, mergers, acquisitions,..., a race without obstacles to the global monopolism.
The monopoly privilege allows large corporations reduce at pleasure production to ensure a good level of profits while maintaining high level of prices while small and medium-sized enterprises and States succumb, ceding more and more ground to large corporations. Public and private defaults are ceding positions, one after another, sector after sector. Indebted and broken States soon end up being forced to give up business, services and public monopolies that are immediately absorbed by the wide open jaws of monopolist capital.
So the 21st century will be the century of the permanent depression, of the depression without deflation, the continual crisis, without just a hint of cyclical recovery. The 21st century will be the century of the exterminism, of the infernal collapse of a system which, if it is not surpassed by the global socialism, will lead humanity into a global impasse, much more quickly than many people think.
Proponents of capitalist globalization handle very well the discourse on the supposed "efficiency" attributable to the large multinational corporations that benefit the alleged "consumer sovereignty." Actually monopolist efficiency is a "micro-efficiency" in handling the consumer imagination, micro-efficiency in the monopoly and control of the investigation, and micro-efficiency in the production and sale of products essentially "macro-inefficient" in environmental goals and in meeting the real needs of the population.
Its growing micro-efficient sprawling tumor means more macro-inefficiency every day. The senile capitalist system is increasingly more "macro-inefficient". Wasteful production for capricious and extravagant rich (who tire quickly of new models) and planed obsolescencefor the rest. A system that "produces" unpaid externalities and generates an enormous ecological debt (mountains of toxic and carcinogenic waste of energy, climate change, ocean acidification, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, ...)
Public monopolies
Monopolies are not inherently bad. To minimize cost (economies of scale) is economic if everyone uses the same product. Public monopolies may be economically efficient in many cases and do not exclude anyone.Public monopolies are cheaper for the consumer (there are no capitalist CEOs) and are not mutually exclusive. In addition, since they do not promote social inequality, they are surely beneficial to the general public.
If there are no large social differences in a society private monopolist has little to gain, selling only to the richest. But if the differences are abysmal the monopolist tends to exclude the vast majority charging high monopoly prices to the rich minority.
The private monopoly, without the control of the State, is antisocial and exclusionary. In conditions of strong social inequality, to maximize benefits, the monopolist sets prices that exclude a growing proportion of consumers (with low incomes). The combination of global pharmaceutical monopolies and social inequality has been catastrophic in AIDS treatment. The monopolist logical is simple. A low price affordable for every patient generates less profit than a high price only available to wealthy patients.
If the total population with AIDS would be 100 patients and everyone could pay 10 for the treatment, the monopolist would charge 10 and sell 1000 (5 unit cost), so the benefit would be 500. If 90 patients can only afford 8 but the 10 richest can pay 100, the logical in monopoly is not to lower the price to 8 but to rise it up to 100 keeping their benefits, producing less and excluding treatment to the 90% of patients. This is what happened in reality and this is what is widespreading at all levels.
Therefore the private monopoly does not have any special interest in "economic recovery". Social inequality is not a "macro-economic" handicap preventing high earnings and is an advantage in pursuing concentration of capital.
The monopolist advance increases social inequality to levels never seen and soon are the middle classes which are progressively excluded from the monopoly market. Growing portions of the population are being disconnected as the permanent depression progresses. Inequality, monopoly and economic crisis feedback each other.
The "competitive" market is for the worker (labor market) for the self employed, for the subcontracted. If there is competition there would not be super-profits. The positions of monopoly or oligopoly inhibit competition and are synonymous with super-profits. Once consolidated their positions globally monopolists do not compete on price but they agree prices and collaborate on tactics and strategies to achieve higher levels of exploitation because it benefits all together.
The hyper-profits are not the result of "monopolistic competition" but of offshoring, outsourcing, the abuse of small and medium enterprises, outsourcing costs, tax evasion, corruption and manipulation of governments and national and international collusion with illegal trafficking and financial speculation.
Their global power allows them to put here and there wages, environmental regulations, labor, business, tax, criminal, financial, etc. in competition. Hence its vaunted "efficiency" and "competitiveness." Efficiency in exploiting and suicidal competition among its subcontractors.
Monopolies 1.0 used the force of its parent States to expand and control their markets and ensure supplies of raw materials. This phenomenon, known as imperialism, was often regarded as the last stage of capitalism (Lenin).
The strengthening of the State included that part of the profits of the large monopolistic corporations were taxed. Unions and left-wing parties repeatedly supported the colonial adventures of their respective imperialism. Cecil Rhodes recognized that to curb the social conflicts in its territory the British had to be imperialists.
Many of the armed conflicts, including the last two world wars, due to this pattern. Monopolies were interested in strengthening nationalism and public and military structures of their base States for use against other imperialist States. The dominant ideology had nothing to do with the current neo-liberalism. Economic nationalism, industrialization, protectionism, economic planning, areas of influence, colonies, markets captives,....
The disaster and the destruction of the 2 GM did patent the dangerousness and inviability of the imperialist rivalries. The former colonial powers view rapidly reduced their old empires and very soon the "imperialist" adjective was reserved for the United States, the dominant power.
Monopolies, including those of american origin changed their strategy. Neoliberalism, dangerous for the less dynamic monopolies, offered unprecedented opportunities for the more aggressive firms and one after another began to become multinational. The mighty American imperialism, although tended to favor monopolies USA, became de facto the global policeman of private monopolies.
The new imperialism was redesigning according to the coordinates anticipated by Karl Kautsky when he predicted the arrival of the "collective imperialism" - imperialism in block in relation to the colonies - .
After the capitalist reconquest of USSR and China, what was left of old-style imperialism ceased to be functional. "Efficient" monopolies were increasingly less interested in the support of States socially and environmentally too demanding and too expensive in exchange for services that could be obtained directly or in other places, in better conditions and almost without compensatory measures (direct bribes, mercenaries and assassins, international finance, tax havens,...).
It is true that the international institutions (UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, EU,...) were once controlled and manipulated in favor of the interests of the dominant national powers (Washington consensus), but today all these institutions, including NATO, are working for the whole of the multinational Guild, and they have become agencies serving "the markets" which do not hesitate to disrupt and ruin the same national powers who once headed these bodies.
Many thinkers on the left have failed to understand this phenomenon. They do not conceive that capital can organize aside from national principles and that is occurring a transfer of sovereignty de facto from the nation States to stateless persons agencies that operate in the service of multinationals "as a whole". They recognized the universality of capital, the transnationalization, but systematically refuse to recognize that the capital has escaped the confines of the State nation. Multinational monopolies have left substantially their initial national base because multiple relationships and synergies among them bind them with more force than the more lax, residual and distended relationships with their old base States.
Its multinacional-global nature allows monopolies to put in competition, salary adjustments environmental, labour, commercial, tax, criminal, financial regulations, etc. Hence its vaunted 'efficiency' and 'competitiveness'. Efficiency in exploiting and competition suicide among its exploited and outsourced.
Competition and monopoly are like water and oil. "Monopolistic Competition" is an oxymoron of the most classic. Competition, in economy, involves a large number of providers that can not influence the price and have to compete by placing their products on the market. Monopoly means precisely the absence of such competition.
Obviously to achieve monopoly positions is necessary to liquidate opponents. As now the objective was no longer national but global, former national monopolies enter in a fight for global supremacy. In the heat and smoke of the battle, and under the hallucinogenic effects of financialization, it seemed that the process of monopolization of the economy was bringing a total new competitive and healthy air in the form of lower prices for consumers. Business schools sang inflamed neoliberal songs to the newfound "monopolistic competition". (Sic)
The penetration of global monopolies against the outdated 1.0. monopolies was sold as the elixir that would restore competition to the stagnant domestic markets. The Americans were able to buy Japanese cars instead the behemoths on wheels produced in Detroit. Driving a Seat in Spain was now a thing of the grandparents. It seemed as if multinationals have revived the competition in favor of a respected global consumer voting in a global market democracy.
Where this perception became most obvious was in the field of retailer trade . When a Wal-Mart store landed near a city, offering very low prices. In fact it was not competition at all but pure and simple annihilation of smaller competitors and servile submission of providers. What fell from the sky was not the competition in its most pure State but a real wall, a huge barrier to entry against the competition that would forever leave the retailer trade in the claws of Wal-Mart.
The "competitive" market is for subcontractors, for former employees turned into self-employed workers (with an increasingly competitive labour market). The competition is for the not monopolist sector . If there were competition there would not be super revenues (monopoly rents). The positions of monopoly or oligopoly inhibit competition and are synonymous with super revenues. Once consolidated its positions at global level monopolists do not compete on price but agreed or dictate prices and collaborate in the tactics and strategies to achieve higher operating levels since benefits them all together.
The monopoly rents are not a result of "monopolistic competition" but of off-shoring, outsourcing, abuse on small and medium-sized enterprises, the externalization of costs, the tax evasion, corruption and manipulation of Governments and national and international institutions, collusion with illegal trafficking and financial speculation.
Its multinacional-global nature allows them to put in competition here and there, salary adjustments environmental, labour, commercial, tax, criminal, financial, ..., rules. Hence its vaunted 'efficiency' and 'competitiveness'. Exploit efficiency and competition suicide among their broken exploited and outsourced.
Individuals, States and Nations have become disposable utensils. The "social contract" of phase 1.0. has been broken. The multinational monopolies no longer have a solid national "anchor" as in the 30s or 40s years . Increasingly they depend less on powerful States that defend their interests against competing States. No longer need the services a national workers well fed and educated.
During the permanent depression 2008-? we are not going to see a third world war as that caused by the great depression of the 1930s. We will not see again militarized fascist States nor wars to end the crisis. 2.0 monopolies do not need militarized States to settle their quarrels. The crisis will not strengthen States but, rather, quite the opposite; the State sector and public services represent the last frontier to cannibalize the multinational monopolies.
The most paradigmatic case is the accelerated deterioration of the U.S., of its reserves, its infrastructure, its most essential services, of its legislative system, its currency,..., a State on the path to be transmuted in a quasi private agency servicing the monopolies (and not only the American ones).
The vast majority of large American corporations don't pay taxes. Goldman Sachs paid 1.1% of their revenues in 2008, the same year in which he received a ransom of $ 800 billion and earned 2.3 billion $ in revenues. General Electric paid zero $ in taxes in 2010 despite revenues of $ 10.5 billion. In the United States 69% of corporations are "nontaxable businesses", i.e., they welcome a standard known as "pass through" for which revenues are not recorded when they occur in the company but when are distributed as dividends to shareholders. It is not strange that the total obtained by the corporation tax (35%) in 2010 did not come to 1.3% of GDP USA (6.1% in 1952)
Something similar is underway in the EU. Monopolies are afraid of a social Europe, a united Europe with a single fiscal policy and financial regulations that would put an end to their super-revenues and threaten their bases in tax havens. The continuity of the Euro benefits multinational companies but any social and solidarity way out of the euro-crisis is incompatible with the genetics of monopoly capital.
Multinational monopolies are learning to navigate the turbulent waters of the permanent depression. The lugubrious foreseeable horizon in the current monopolist framework , is the dissolution of the regional economic unions and the progressive degeneration of failed States, entire Nations under the control of mafia gangs that will be replacing institutional order. Everything points to a future in which the institutional business framework of multinationals will not be other than criminal-capitalism.
Extort Nations so they rescue multinational in distress has become a common practice of neoliberal globalization. It is enough to maintain the minimum infrastructure appropriate to their petty interests and everything else is target as superfluous. The successive revelations of WikiLeaks cables reveal as much of the diplomats services from Nations have transmuted into commercial agencies of the large multinational groups to introduce their genetically modified seeds, their expensive drugs, aircraft, armament, let their crimes against the environment go unpunished.
Without any national basis, transnational monopolies do not have the slightest interest in environmental protection. Kyoto, Copenhagen and Cancun,... show how lobbies working for monopolies can more than scientific evidence of the advancing climate disaster and speakers
become ridiculous puppets in their hands.
Tax havens are the indispensable crutch of multinationals. Allow them to avoid taxes, wherever they come from. They are their hubs and bases. Its allies are against everything that smacks of democracy or social control. They serve as a cover for environmental and ecological disasters perpetrated by their irresponsible greed.
Multinational monopolies, used basically 3 techniques of tax evasion:
a) moving 'his' intellectual property (patents, brands,...) to subsidiary companies incorporated in tax havens. The subsidiaries no located in tax havens "pay" (deductible expenses) for the patents owned by the fiscal paradise subsidiary
b ) transfer price: All the subsidiaries located in countries where they pay taxes do not record revenue since items will arrive at a cost similar to the selling price charged to final consumers.
In the process of production, transportation and marketing there are involved several subsidiaries billing between themselves. Only obtain profit those recorded in havens fiscales.
c) Profit stripping. Consist in to drain the profits obtained in a country with taxes to a subsidiary in a tax haven (costs for the subsidiary with taxes and revenue for the haven paradise one). A subsidiary in Bermuda lends money at interest to a subsidiary in France. France revenues are reduced to pay the interest to the subsidiary in Bermuda.
The group Fortis in 2008 wielded a prodigious cascade of about 300 subsidiaries registered in tax havens: Fortis Intertrust (BVI), Fortis Investment Management (Cayman Islands) Fortis Commercial Finance (Luxembourg), Fortis Private Wealth Management (Netherlands Antilles), Fortis Foreign Fund Services (Switzerland), JEB Ltd (Liberia), Comanche Ltd (Bahamas), Jasmette Valley Inc (Liechtenstein) of Swilken Holdings (Panama) etc. The list would fill 10 pages.
Bankrupted by the crisis, the entity was taken, after a major injection of public money (11,200 mill €), together with its subsidiaries paradise, by BNP Paribas. Not one euro out of country paradise but the taxpayers of Belgium and the Netherlands, her "national basis."
Not relying on a nation state, multinationals lost interest in strengthening it and, in practice, not even hesitate to weaken, bleeding, de-industrialize, ruin its infrastructure, public services, security, etc. as is happening in the U.S. itself.
Multinationals love only tax havens. Many nations are falling into the hands of gangs and drug lords (whose traffic and finance companies also operate from offices in tax havens) in collusion with politicians and corrupt officials. Offices and members of the mafia and the multinationals, living harmoniously, door to door in tax havens.
They have transformed any agency or democratic structure in their petty interests. They manipulate electoral processes, funding political parties, control or bay medias and distort information.
They have whole sections of lobbying offices in Brussels and Washington. Laws are made and remade according to their interests and convenience. His financial crimes are unpunished while controlling whole prison systems.
In case of resistance resort to the heavy artillery of its international agencies under control (IMF, European Commission, ECB, ...) to take command of the economies of whole countries, replacing the national parliaments and governments imposing the socialization of losses (direct result of the speculation of the same multinationals) and the looting of public property.
While the legal systems adapt to their corporate interests, criminal law is manipulated to avoid any criminal liability for countless atrocities. The most flagrant case is undoubtedly the American criminal law that condemns to 5 years for possession of 5 grams of crack or 100 grams of heroin, and life imprisonment by triple repetition of petty crime (in contrast to only 5 years for possession half a kg. cocaine, the drug of the rich). Legislation tailored to the greed of the multinationals that have transformed the U.S. prison system into a thriving slave business relocated in their own territory (a real gulag of 2 million prisoners working at $ 2 an hour) that produces military equipment, office furniture, medical equipment, aircraft components, ... IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT & T Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin. ..
They are causing the economic crisis, social and ecological planet. They are responsible for world poverty, global hunger, global depletion of resources, global environmental destruction, the destruction and criminalization of the states (Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Russia, countries of Eastern Europe, northern and central countries African, southern Italy, ...).
They have converted the European Union, the ECB, the World Bank, the IMF, OIC, OECD, WHO, ... in specialized agencies in defending their interests. International agencies catalyze and accelerate the corrosion process to which they are subjecting national democracies. Neoliberal globalization promotes increasing usurpation of national sovereignty to hand it out to supranational companies petty interests (EU, ECB, IMF, WTO, ...) in order to impose a straitjacket for citizens abroad and taxpayers, preventing any democratic resistance to the planned worsening of their social conditions.
All international organizations are being manipulated and converted into subordinate agents in order to ensure an environment (regulatory, economic and political) as favourable as possible to the interests of multinationals. The international agencies are responsible to stop and prevent any local resistance or boycott any attempt to resist.
Unlike a medieval monopoly (guilds) or a public one, private capitalist monopolies are carcinogenic organisms that have to grow and grow. They have not enough controlling a specific plot of the market; They must continue hoarding more and more market. But for this it is essential to secure the market share already dominated by raising all kinds of huge barriers to entry (William Shepherd has studied up to 22 different types of barriers to entry). Building barriers means, often, penetrate markets related to prevent possible future competition (Microsoft into the mobile phone business,...).
The most effective barriers to entry are the intellectual property, patents and marketing.
Intellectual property consists of the granting of a 'temporary' monopoly to the recorder of the patent which allows to obtain monopoly rents above the actual costs of production. Sold as an incentive to creativity (exist other ways of rewarding the researchers and creators: prizes, incentives, public or private,...) when in reality are used as barrier to entry against competition.
Lobbyists at the service of the monopolists are changing laws in "defending the intellectual property and patents". Cargill, Nike, Pfizer, Wal-Mart,... are behind an international treaty (ppt) seeking to establish a strict legislative framework between countries adhered with transnational courts of Justice to defend the interests of the multinationals against States, prolonging the life of patents up to 70-120 years after the author's death, chasing any circumvention of technological protection measures, criminalizing the circumvention of such measures even in the case of non-existence of infringement of copyright, the establishment of a system of responsibility of providers of internet services that aims to establish measures of identification of alleged offenders, removal of content and internet disconnection.
Monopolies have transformed marketing as a fundamental tool for building solid and impenetrable barriers to entry.
Marketing monopoly is a multifunctional tool:
They are responsible for relocation, irrational depredation of natural resources, the irrational polarization of industry and trade to the "havens" of exploitation, "special areas" of human predation.
They corrupt the elites of poor countries to surrender their territories to the depredation of natural resources, pollution and contamination of their environment and the inhuman exploitation of their populations.
They are the true nomads of the century. At the slightest sign of labor resistance multinationals threaten to pack and leave for another country. And, as they can, often just the mere threat is enough to subject their employees to their draconian working conditions.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest company, is responsible (along with its rivals, Kmart Corporation, Costco, Carrefour, Eroski , ...) of the desertification of the industrial and commercial states and entire countries, the ruthless exploitation of the labor force so that suppliers are forced to relocate their plants, and the ruin of farmers submitted to ridiculous prices.
The decent jobs disappear once the sector is engulfed by a multinational. Whether it is telecommunications, textile, computers, ..., workers are subject to the laws of offshore exploitation. Wages and working conditions go down as profit and the earnings of top executives go up. When a multinational company fired 1,000 workers, their actions are triggered automatically on the Stock Exchange.
But it's not only employees of multinationals, small and medium businesses eventually succumb to the increasingly vast outsourcing networks . The monopoly position allows to extort small suppliers forcing them to battle a civil war as if they were gladiators. This is the "efficiency" of the monopolies praised by Economy Nobel Prizes of neoliberalism (Hicks, Hayek, Friedman, Stigler, Coase, Williamson)
They distort innovation to fit their myopic interests (usually are experts in exploiting the innovation of others). Once earned monopoly positions in certain sectors (oil, pharmaceuticals, nuclear energy, computers ...) and built the corresponding entry barriers delay or prevent innovation to maintain its privileged monopoly.
They prefer the guaranteed return of the chronically ill to investigate healing drugs or vaccines. They prefer centralized nuclear power to renewables. Hamper public transport, electric motor cars, ... to maintain their super profits. His innovation is often perverse as it advances in fields whose sole purpose is to submit, blackmail, exploitation and, ultimately, to consolidate their positions of privilege. Pharmaceutical, tobacco and agribusiness are flooding the planet with "innovative" toxic and addictive products to subdue and control of producers and consumers.
They appropriate the public and social knowledge of indigenous cultures, biodiversity, ... enforcing patents here and there, putting all kinds of barriers and compartments to free flow of ideas and therefore hampering the very essence of innovation.
Information is a public good by nature a community to which everyone should be able go to feed our brains. The consumption of an individual does not preclude its use for the rest of his fellows. It's like air or water.
The early Internet represented an unexplored field similar to the great American West for newcomers settlers. It was a vast "public" territory, a new continent of knowledge and the possibility of a huge democratic sphere of exchange of communication without barriers or restrictions.
Privatize and curb anything public has always been the innate sport of monopoly capital. Anything that is not scarce is not business. The idealized "conquest of the West" was basically to generate huge shortages fencing and privatizing public lands.
Something similar is happening on the Internet. Gradually, the area of information exchange and knowledge is being parceled out, fenced, "protected", subdivided, ... Its use-value of universal access (public) is quickly becoming exchange value of restricted and controlled access (private).
AT & T recently purchased a T-Mobile (wireless provider) so absorbing 75% of the U.S. market. AT & T is an avowed opponent of "net neutrality". Net neutrality has so far ensured that all data is transported without any discrimination to the same speed on the Internet. AT & T aims to destroy that neutrality to turn the Internet into a toll road benefiting large corporations and leaving small guys out of the high-speed track. With its acquisition of T-Mobile will enjoy a monopoly position enough to impose their designs.
The abundance of information in the network is not a "commodity", is not a business. Monopolistic logic requires generating monopoly shortage. The business is made from the scarcity and in the case of Internet, the shortage must be created. It is artificial scarcity and thus requires the intervention of public institutions in collusion with monopoly capital and this is what is happening. From the hand of the legislator submissive and in a climate increasingly prone to globalization, monopoly capital rule over the information sector with unprecedented speed and forcefulness.
The entire planet becomes fodder for the unlimited greed of multinationals. The North Pole is threatened to death by the oil companies. They pollute with impunity seas and oceans. Its radioactive nuclear elements infest the atmosphere while the chemical waste infest waters and soils in Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and South America.
They operate outside society and outsourced much of its costs. They operate in a a-social and a-democratic dimension, avoiding any responsibility for his misdeeds .
From a certain size, large multinational corporations do not obey any one except its own corporate logic. Its seems even its powerful managers can't resist this irrational and predatory logic. J. Van der Veer, chief executive and head absolute Shell is a Dutch friendly, polite and sensitive guy and the Netherlands is a country socially advanced and concerned about the environment and climate change that could be submerged under the waters of the Atlantic, but this does not preclude for the Anglo-Dutch company acts as an implacable juggernaut with a genetic code programmed to destroy biodiversity, human rights and environmental sustainability of the planet.
Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,
The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism
The Internationalization of Monopoly Capital
Leo Tolstoy: "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow witted man if he has no formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him".
Origin of monopolies
Since its inception, capitalism has shown an inherent tendency towards concentration and accumulation. From manufacturing to the factory and from the local enterprise company to regional, national and multinational company. The verb growing is synonymous of living in capitalism. Growth can be accelerated by the centralization and expansion based on takeovers of competitors and finance offered a powerful tool for early concentration.
Achieving a position of monopoly is the dream of every capitalist and the lure that guides his business. No competitors can put the price at will and make super profits. If you do not get a monopoly but operators are few and their size and power is similar, it is best to agree prices (oligopoly) to embark on a spiraling price war to increase the share of the pie at the expense of colleagues.
Definition of "monopoly"
When we talk about monopolies we do not talk in the restrictive sense of a market with a single vendor, but we refer to large firms with "power monopoly" which are able to limit the entry of potential competitors (barriers to entry), control or negotiate the amount produced, set or agree on pricing (oligopolistic markets), act as unique buyers - Wal Mart -reducing its suppliers to extreme precariousness, to reduce their wage costs with the threat to relocate,.... We therefore refer to a handful of corporations with "monopoly power" over one or more sectors of the economy.
Monopoly Capitalism 1.0 vs monopoly capitalism 2.0
Monopoly Capitalism 1.0.
Monopoly capitalism requires large economic areas to develop. The large U.S., German hinterland ... became the original niche and ideal training ground since the late nineteenth century. The stock market and finance leveraged the process. In 1901, 165 steel companies merged to form U.S. Steel with the cooperation of banking at JP Morgan. In the 20 Vereinigte Stahlwerke emulated U.S. Steel in Germany while IG Farben became the largest chemical company in the world.
They where monopolistic or oligopolistic companies nationwide. Price-fixing and restricting production to obtain and maintain super benefits. Monopolies operated mainly at national level, gave work and pay taxes to the country that supported them in obtaining raw materials, energy, foreign markets ... and defended them in international competition (protectionism) and supported them in their expansionist attempts (imperialism). Monopoly 1.0. ended up with nineteenth-century "laissez fair" and bet strongly on protectionism and State intervention.
There was a kind of "social contract" by which part of the profits of large "national" monopolistic corporations benefited States and people of the nation. The same States established public monopolies preparing the ground for its future privatization. During the short period between the 1st and the 2nd GM, England tried to regain the ground against their monopolistic rivals merging most of the small companies of railways (1921), concentrating and nationalizing most of the power and gas (1926), largely unifying the London transport service, constituting a monopoly on iron and steel (1932) creating a national government-sponsored cartel of coal (1936). Trade unions and left-wing parties had repeatedly supported monopolies and colonial adventures of their respective imperialism.
Monopolies 1.0. controlled their state base and launched armed struggle for the control of raw materials and foreign markets. Oil and rubber were also the first to experience monopoly concentration. Nazism and Fascism will not be understood without that perverse collusion of interests. The Germans monopoly collusion with Nazism has been well studied by Niall Ferguson .
In the ancient cyclical crises of overproduction of the 19th century, competition depressed prices (deflation), fell the least competitive companies (whose size was not "systemic") and the market got back from low prices and fewer offering firms. But after each crisis, the companies that resisted were larger.
Since the end of the 19th century things changed. Monopoly 1.0 monopolized most of the benefits of the national controlled sectors leaving the rest of the companies in precarious conditions. In addition, monopoly has much more power than the normal company to force to lower wages and payments to suppliers. When crisis broke out, companies to sacrifice had acquired a considerable size (systemic). On the other hand the monopolies in good health prevented the sharp drop in the prices of the sectors they controlled so demand dit not recover.
Suddenly people noticed that crisis had left aside its cyclical nature to become unstoppable spirals that swallowed more and more assets and companies. In 1890, at the end of the Long Depression (1870-96), in the United States, were dictated the first antitrust laws (Sherman Antitrust Act). Huey P. Long, Governor of Louisiana (1928-32), Senator from Louisiana from 1932 until his assassination in 1935 (intended to stand for the Presidency of the United States), uncovered during their election campaigns, the sinister amalgam between monopoly and polarization of income and wealth as the fundamental cause of the great depression.
In the 1940s was a commonplace among academic circles the discussion on monopolist disease that afflicted capitalism. Roosevelt attempted to oppose the monopolization of the economy and antitrust laws were established. In the 1930s he established a Committee to investigate the practices of the monopolies that were experiencing an exponential progression in concentration of capital taking advantage of the crisis.
Capitalism had become ill of acute "monopolitis", had precipitated the great depression and had launched the Nations to the self-destruction of WWT that almost destroys humankind. In academic circles peaple spoke of the end of capitalism or the death of capitalism.
After the disaster the system entered a phase of moderation, bowing to pressure from social unrest. It was a kind of resurrection. Capitalism reappear in disguise, a new capitalism with a human face, the New Deal and Keynesianism, the Marshall Plan, improving working conditions in the center and countries neighboring the USSR and China. In addition, generating a welfare state favored a continued demand recovery.
The already fully monopolistic character of the system empowered large corporations to maintain high prices and sufficient to pay employees more fractious, salaries and benefits above the mere subsistence, and, with the return to growth. The emerging debate about the evils of monopoly where set aside and monopolies adopted a new strategy.
Monopoly Capitalism 2.0.
The monopoly of a single country was suffocating. The system needed a qualitative leap towards global monopolism. The entrenched monopoly in an expensive nation-state that could no longer resort to war, invasion or domination, was obsolete. The ground had to be prepared for a new type of monopoles, global monopolism. Neoliberalism, the exaltation of the benefits of competition, deregulation and the global market provided the ideological steamroller for the penetration of global monopoly.
It was needed to lay the groundwork for a new kind of monopoly 2.0. able to operate in a supra-national area, more comprehensive and aggressive, which is no longer limited to the manufacturing sector but invade each and every one of the sectors of the economy (trade retail, hospitality, transportation, telecommunications, messaging,...) and to all geographical areas: the global monopolism. Neoliberalism, the ideological steamroller for the global monopolistic conversion, began to take shape.
Phase 2 began in the early 70's., when meet together an economy with clear signs of excess capacity and a strong expansion of world money supply (eurodollars, USA trade deficit growing ) and transnational banking.
Monopolies were leaving aside its national base to embark to the conquest and subjugation of the planet. When monopoly 1.0 wanted to impose their law declared a "lock out" (lockout). Monopoly 2.0 will simply relocate. States, provinces, cities,... to compete with each other to offer rebates of taxes, reductions in social security contributions, rebates on environmental protection, subsidies, free infrastructure, labor trained and qualified at their expense, ..., to attract elusive multinationals that have managed to outsource most of their costs.
The first years of phase 2.0. were years of battles, shark attacks , hostile takeovers, and tricks to consolidate positions and destroy competitors. "One country monopolies" that resisted change were swept away, one after another. A good Oscar winner screenplay reflected this in the movie Wall Street.
The computerization and telecommunications technological advances facilitated transnational business operations, but it was especially financialization (transnational credit expansion) what supplied the gunpowder and fuel to trigger a global, meteoric and unstoppable, process of mergers and acquisitions.
In the early 1980s North American monopolies were losing ground to Japanese and German corporations. Reagan paved the way for the monopoly 2.0 phase. Between 1980 and 1985 a strong dollar (P. Volker raised interest rates triggering incidentally the Latin American debt crisis and the East European counties debt crisis) and increasing doses of financial deregulation paved the ground for the transnationalization and relocation of monopolies made in USA.
But this first phase of globalization was premature. The consequences for American exports were so severe that Reagan had to turn back. The agreement of the Plaza in 1985 forced the revaluation of the yen and the deutsche mark, returning oxygen to U.S. exporters. But the agreement of the Plaza, which held back somewhat the globalization of monopolies made in USA, had as a result something unexpected, the rapid globalization of the Japanese monopolies that, to compete with a devalued dollar, decided to relocate massibly their plants and industries to the Asian continent. 1985-90 represented the golden time of the "Asian Tigers" (with their currencies linked to the devalued dollar) with massive amounts of foreign investment.
In 1995 the Plaza agreement was reversed (Reverse Plaza Accord). The American monopolies had been left behind in terms of globalization. The agreed rise of the dollar respect to the yen and the DM meant the definitive autsourcing of all what was possible outsourced in the United States. The strength of the dollar (along with Clinton financial deregulation ) constituted a key element in the financial globalization that would lead Wall Street.
The exporting "Asian Tigers" monopolies (South Korean chaevols,...) resented the reversal of the Plaza accord and retaliate relocating part of its plants and industries to China. The Chinese giant was offered a good price (the looting of their environment and their labor) as a platform for total monopoly globalization.
Exponential Concentration
Monopolist concentration is not a linear process but an accelerated one. The neoliberal globalization is the ideal and conducive field of concentration, reproduction and hypertrophy of the large multinational corporations. Thirty years of globalization has meant a degree of unprecedented concentration of capital.
Between 1990 and 1995, more than 40% of the companies listed in Fortune 500, disappeared absorbed by other larger.
This process has occurred in almost all sectors (10 car companies hold 77% of the market 2 aviation companies control 100% of the aviation sector's large aircraft, 5 operators control 83% of fixed telephony, 3 operators control 77% of mobile telecommunications infrastructure, while only three control 65% of mobile market, 10 control 70% of pharmaceutical drug sold; 4 supplied 75% of boxed tobacco smoke, only 3 companies produce about 70% of all agricultural machinery and equipment, ...). Between 1980 and 2008 multinationals increased their direct investment abroad of $ 0.5 billion to 13.6 billion. In 2008, 37% of the shares of European companies belong to foreign investors.
In fact the statistics fall short because the monopolization takes opaque and sophisticated ways that do not add in the computation, such as hollow companies (Nike, Beneton, Apple, ..., do not invest abroad but outsource almost everything they produce) or strategic (the Star Alliance groups 25 airlines under the leadership of United Airlines).
Also monopolies interact between them in order to keep the entire production process in a global monopolistic environment. Apple has built a kind of global assembly for your iPod and the iPhone line to minimize their costs. The production of the components is divided between Toshiba, Samsung, Infineon, Broadcom, Numonyx, Murata, Dialog Semiconductors and Cirrus Logic. All these components are shipped to assembly plants of Foxconn in Shenzhen where its 400,000 workers earn 80 cents $/h working in worst than Chaplin "Modern times" working conditions. The result is a monopolists profit margin of 64% on each individual appliance.
The process of capitalist concentration is one way in each and every one of the economy sectors. Never operate in reverse. With the exception of unexplored areas, once the operators have been reduced to 10 will never happen again to be 12 or 15 but 7, 4, .... They progress using all kinds of tricks and tactics to phagocyte and grow, raising insurmountable barriers to entry and grow into increasingly monopolistic positions. This is a truly global black hole that swallows and swallows constantly. Economic competition is disappearing. If you are a monopolistic company you only have to cash in profits and, as in the previous phase, the crisis and depression further strengthen and accelerate this process.
The 500 largest multinationals have 80% of the accumulated stock of global foreign direct investment and account for 50% of international trade. Dominate all natural resources, control the development of current and future technologies, control the majority of the agencies and media and entertainment, impose its economic, political, cultural and ideological influence on subject nations, spread everywhere the neoliberal creed, and its decisions of investment, outsourcing, expansion, etc., affect hundreds of millions of workers and their families.
Monopoly, crisis and depression
E.G. Jobsbawm (industry and Empire): "During the great depression the standard of living of the workers who still had labor was maintained thanks to the fall in the cost of living".
The history of capitalism is the history of the accumulation and concentration of capital. If there is no accumulation system collapses it. After reaching the monopolist 2.0 phase there is no more phases ahead. Capitalism has succeeded. All the institutional, political, sociological barriers have been crossed. The only limit left, however, is the planet itself, its resources are limited, and these barrier is insurmountable. There is no other planet Earth that hunt or aliens who submit. The total triumph also means the total failure. The system has entered a final crisis of over-accumulation and a depressive spiral , a bottomless abyss.
In the cyclical crises of youth capitalism, failed companies did not have sufficient scope to precipitate a depressive spiral. It was the cyclic time of the system. The crisis of overproduction, result of inter-capitalist competition, reduce prices and only the strongest companies survived. The system seemed to have an automatic mechanism for recovery.
But after each crisis the number of companies in each sector was reduced. As the system has been maturing and aging, the stars of the constellation have been getting increasingly bigger and bigger and more and more dangerous crises, becoming depressive spiral cycles and dragging in their fall not only the big banks that financed them, but also the States that sheltered them.
Overcapacity under monopoly
In past crises, with a less monopolized system, prices plummeted by lack of demand (deflation ) and competition between firms. The disappearance of companies on one side and low prices on the other, ran at the end with overcapacity.
Actually the crisis of overproduction primarily affect the non-monopoly sector. Monopolies tend to resist very well the crisis , often becoming reinforced .
Suppose the case of the aviation industry. This is a duopoly that has outsourced most of its operations. There are no marginal firms prone for destruction. When the recession threatens their income, the duopoly simply stops investing, reduces demand to their suppliers and force them to lower prices, thus costs are reduced and monopoly profits increase.
In addition , the monopolist has some interest in maintaining overcapacity since this is hard barrier to entry . Wal -Mart keeps running huge megastores in certain areas , totally superfluous, to deter potential opponents.
Prices that do not "suffer" depression
In the few non-monopolistic sectors in crisis (rental housing, beach bars,...), who does not drop prices does not sell. In this case, consumers are benefited and few of them are excluded. In contrast in monopolized sectors, such as energy corporations, prices "go up" during the crisis and corporate benefits increase charging more customers that in the absence of alternative suppliers can only choose to pay the Bill or be disconnected (excluded). Private monopolies are generating the exclusion and marginalization of a large part of the population of the planet.
Under overcapacity conditions investment flees to fictitious capital and financial speculation supplying more and more gunpowder for the concentration of capital. As in previous slumps, the crisis is the breeding ground for monopolist concentration with a crescendo non stop in groupings, mergers, acquisitions,..., a race without obstacles to the global monopolism.
The monopoly privilege allows large corporations reduce at pleasure production to ensure a good level of profits while maintaining high level of prices while small and medium-sized enterprises and States succumb, ceding more and more ground to large corporations. Public and private defaults are ceding positions, one after another, sector after sector. Indebted and broken States soon end up being forced to give up business, services and public monopolies that are immediately absorbed by the wide open jaws of monopolist capital.
So the 21st century will be the century of the permanent depression, of the depression without deflation, the continual crisis, without just a hint of cyclical recovery. The 21st century will be the century of the exterminism, of the infernal collapse of a system which, if it is not surpassed by the global socialism, will lead humanity into a global impasse, much more quickly than many people think.
Micro-efficiency and Macro-inefficiency
Proponents of capitalist globalization handle very well the discourse on the supposed "efficiency" attributable to the large multinational corporations that benefit the alleged "consumer sovereignty." Actually monopolist efficiency is a "micro-efficiency" in handling the consumer imagination, micro-efficiency in the monopoly and control of the investigation, and micro-efficiency in the production and sale of products essentially "macro-inefficient" in environmental goals and in meeting the real needs of the population.
Its growing micro-efficient sprawling tumor means more macro-inefficiency every day. The senile capitalist system is increasingly more "macro-inefficient". Wasteful production for capricious and extravagant rich (who tire quickly of new models) and planed obsolescencefor the rest. A system that "produces" unpaid externalities and generates an enormous ecological debt (mountains of toxic and carcinogenic waste of energy, climate change, ocean acidification, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, ...)
Public monopolies vs private monopolies
Public monopolies
Monopolies are not inherently bad. To minimize cost (economies of scale) is economic if everyone uses the same product. Public monopolies may be economically efficient in many cases and do not exclude anyone.Public monopolies are cheaper for the consumer (there are no capitalist CEOs) and are not mutually exclusive. In addition, since they do not promote social inequality, they are surely beneficial to the general public.
Private monopolies: disconnection and exclusion
If there are no large social differences in a society private monopolist has little to gain, selling only to the richest. But if the differences are abysmal the monopolist tends to exclude the vast majority charging high monopoly prices to the rich minority.
The private monopoly, without the control of the State, is antisocial and exclusionary. In conditions of strong social inequality, to maximize benefits, the monopolist sets prices that exclude a growing proportion of consumers (with low incomes). The combination of global pharmaceutical monopolies and social inequality has been catastrophic in AIDS treatment. The monopolist logical is simple. A low price affordable for every patient generates less profit than a high price only available to wealthy patients.
If the total population with AIDS would be 100 patients and everyone could pay 10 for the treatment, the monopolist would charge 10 and sell 1000 (5 unit cost), so the benefit would be 500. If 90 patients can only afford 8 but the 10 richest can pay 100, the logical in monopoly is not to lower the price to 8 but to rise it up to 100 keeping their benefits, producing less and excluding treatment to the 90% of patients. This is what happened in reality and this is what is widespreading at all levels.
Therefore the private monopoly does not have any special interest in "economic recovery". Social inequality is not a "macro-economic" handicap preventing high earnings and is an advantage in pursuing concentration of capital.
The monopolist advance increases social inequality to levels never seen and soon are the middle classes which are progressively excluded from the monopoly market. Growing portions of the population are being disconnected as the permanent depression progresses. Inequality, monopoly and economic crisis feedback each other.
Multinationals, "efficiency" and "competitiveness"
The "competitive" market is for the worker (labor market) for the self employed, for the subcontracted. If there is competition there would not be super-profits. The positions of monopoly or oligopoly inhibit competition and are synonymous with super-profits. Once consolidated their positions globally monopolists do not compete on price but they agree prices and collaborate on tactics and strategies to achieve higher levels of exploitation because it benefits all together.
The hyper-profits are not the result of "monopolistic competition" but of offshoring, outsourcing, the abuse of small and medium enterprises, outsourcing costs, tax evasion, corruption and manipulation of governments and national and international collusion with illegal trafficking and financial speculation.
Their global power allows them to put here and there wages, environmental regulations, labor, business, tax, criminal, financial, etc. in competition. Hence its vaunted "efficiency" and "competitiveness." Efficiency in exploiting and suicidal competition among its subcontractors.
Monopoly capitalism 2.0 and imperialism 2.0
Monopolies 1.0 used the force of its parent States to expand and control their markets and ensure supplies of raw materials. This phenomenon, known as imperialism, was often regarded as the last stage of capitalism (Lenin).
The strengthening of the State included that part of the profits of the large monopolistic corporations were taxed. Unions and left-wing parties repeatedly supported the colonial adventures of their respective imperialism. Cecil Rhodes recognized that to curb the social conflicts in its territory the British had to be imperialists.
Many of the armed conflicts, including the last two world wars, due to this pattern. Monopolies were interested in strengthening nationalism and public and military structures of their base States for use against other imperialist States. The dominant ideology had nothing to do with the current neo-liberalism. Economic nationalism, industrialization, protectionism, economic planning, areas of influence, colonies, markets captives,....
The disaster and the destruction of the 2 GM did patent the dangerousness and inviability of the imperialist rivalries. The former colonial powers view rapidly reduced their old empires and very soon the "imperialist" adjective was reserved for the United States, the dominant power.
Monopolies, including those of american origin changed their strategy. Neoliberalism, dangerous for the less dynamic monopolies, offered unprecedented opportunities for the more aggressive firms and one after another began to become multinational. The mighty American imperialism, although tended to favor monopolies USA, became de facto the global policeman of private monopolies.
The new imperialism was redesigning according to the coordinates anticipated by Karl Kautsky when he predicted the arrival of the "collective imperialism" - imperialism in block in relation to the colonies - .
After the capitalist reconquest of USSR and China, what was left of old-style imperialism ceased to be functional. "Efficient" monopolies were increasingly less interested in the support of States socially and environmentally too demanding and too expensive in exchange for services that could be obtained directly or in other places, in better conditions and almost without compensatory measures (direct bribes, mercenaries and assassins, international finance, tax havens,...).
It is true that the international institutions (UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, EU,...) were once controlled and manipulated in favor of the interests of the dominant national powers (Washington consensus), but today all these institutions, including NATO, are working for the whole of the multinational Guild, and they have become agencies serving "the markets" which do not hesitate to disrupt and ruin the same national powers who once headed these bodies.
Many thinkers on the left have failed to understand this phenomenon. They do not conceive that capital can organize aside from national principles and that is occurring a transfer of sovereignty de facto from the nation States to stateless persons agencies that operate in the service of multinationals "as a whole". They recognized the universality of capital, the transnationalization, but systematically refuse to recognize that the capital has escaped the confines of the State nation. Multinational monopolies have left substantially their initial national base because multiple relationships and synergies among them bind them with more force than the more lax, residual and distended relationships with their old base States.
Monopolist competition?
Its multinacional-global nature allows monopolies to put in competition, salary adjustments environmental, labour, commercial, tax, criminal, financial regulations, etc. Hence its vaunted 'efficiency' and 'competitiveness'. Efficiency in exploiting and competition suicide among its exploited and outsourced.
Competition and monopoly are like water and oil. "Monopolistic Competition" is an oxymoron of the most classic. Competition, in economy, involves a large number of providers that can not influence the price and have to compete by placing their products on the market. Monopoly means precisely the absence of such competition.
Obviously to achieve monopoly positions is necessary to liquidate opponents. As now the objective was no longer national but global, former national monopolies enter in a fight for global supremacy. In the heat and smoke of the battle, and under the hallucinogenic effects of financialization, it seemed that the process of monopolization of the economy was bringing a total new competitive and healthy air in the form of lower prices for consumers. Business schools sang inflamed neoliberal songs to the newfound "monopolistic competition". (Sic)
The penetration of global monopolies against the outdated 1.0. monopolies was sold as the elixir that would restore competition to the stagnant domestic markets. The Americans were able to buy Japanese cars instead the behemoths on wheels produced in Detroit. Driving a Seat in Spain was now a thing of the grandparents. It seemed as if multinationals have revived the competition in favor of a respected global consumer voting in a global market democracy.
Where this perception became most obvious was in the field of retailer trade . When a Wal-Mart store landed near a city, offering very low prices. In fact it was not competition at all but pure and simple annihilation of smaller competitors and servile submission of providers. What fell from the sky was not the competition in its most pure State but a real wall, a huge barrier to entry against the competition that would forever leave the retailer trade in the claws of Wal-Mart.
Monopoly 'efficiency' and 'competitiveness' ?
The "competitive" market is for subcontractors, for former employees turned into self-employed workers (with an increasingly competitive labour market). The competition is for the not monopolist sector . If there were competition there would not be super revenues (monopoly rents). The positions of monopoly or oligopoly inhibit competition and are synonymous with super revenues. Once consolidated its positions at global level monopolists do not compete on price but agreed or dictate prices and collaborate in the tactics and strategies to achieve higher operating levels since benefits them all together.
The monopoly rents are not a result of "monopolistic competition" but of off-shoring, outsourcing, abuse on small and medium-sized enterprises, the externalization of costs, the tax evasion, corruption and manipulation of Governments and national and international institutions, collusion with illegal trafficking and financial speculation.
Its multinacional-global nature allows them to put in competition here and there, salary adjustments environmental, labour, commercial, tax, criminal, financial, ..., rules. Hence its vaunted 'efficiency' and 'competitiveness'. Exploit efficiency and competition suicide among their broken exploited and outsourced.
Monopolies, Nation-States and Economic Unions
Individuals, States and Nations have become disposable utensils. The "social contract" of phase 1.0. has been broken. The multinational monopolies no longer have a solid national "anchor" as in the 30s or 40s years . Increasingly they depend less on powerful States that defend their interests against competing States. No longer need the services a national workers well fed and educated.
During the permanent depression 2008-? we are not going to see a third world war as that caused by the great depression of the 1930s. We will not see again militarized fascist States nor wars to end the crisis. 2.0 monopolies do not need militarized States to settle their quarrels. The crisis will not strengthen States but, rather, quite the opposite; the State sector and public services represent the last frontier to cannibalize the multinational monopolies.
The most paradigmatic case is the accelerated deterioration of the U.S., of its reserves, its infrastructure, its most essential services, of its legislative system, its currency,..., a State on the path to be transmuted in a quasi private agency servicing the monopolies (and not only the American ones).
The vast majority of large American corporations don't pay taxes. Goldman Sachs paid 1.1% of their revenues in 2008, the same year in which he received a ransom of $ 800 billion and earned 2.3 billion $ in revenues. General Electric paid zero $ in taxes in 2010 despite revenues of $ 10.5 billion. In the United States 69% of corporations are "nontaxable businesses", i.e., they welcome a standard known as "pass through" for which revenues are not recorded when they occur in the company but when are distributed as dividends to shareholders. It is not strange that the total obtained by the corporation tax (35%) in 2010 did not come to 1.3% of GDP USA (6.1% in 1952)
Something similar is underway in the EU. Monopolies are afraid of a social Europe, a united Europe with a single fiscal policy and financial regulations that would put an end to their super-revenues and threaten their bases in tax havens. The continuity of the Euro benefits multinational companies but any social and solidarity way out of the euro-crisis is incompatible with the genetics of monopoly capital.
Multinational monopolies are learning to navigate the turbulent waters of the permanent depression. The lugubrious foreseeable horizon in the current monopolist framework , is the dissolution of the regional economic unions and the progressive degeneration of failed States, entire Nations under the control of mafia gangs that will be replacing institutional order. Everything points to a future in which the institutional business framework of multinationals will not be other than criminal-capitalism.
Extort Nations so they rescue multinational in distress has become a common practice of neoliberal globalization. It is enough to maintain the minimum infrastructure appropriate to their petty interests and everything else is target as superfluous. The successive revelations of WikiLeaks cables reveal as much of the diplomats services from Nations have transmuted into commercial agencies of the large multinational groups to introduce their genetically modified seeds, their expensive drugs, aircraft, armament, let their crimes against the environment go unpunished.
Without any national basis, transnational monopolies do not have the slightest interest in environmental protection. Kyoto, Copenhagen and Cancun,... show how lobbies working for monopolies can more than scientific evidence of the advancing climate disaster and speakers
become ridiculous puppets in their hands.
Private monopolies and offshore paradises
Tax havens are the indispensable crutch of multinationals. Allow them to avoid taxes, wherever they come from. They are their hubs and bases. Its allies are against everything that smacks of democracy or social control. They serve as a cover for environmental and ecological disasters perpetrated by their irresponsible greed.
Multinational monopolies, used basically 3 techniques of tax evasion:
a) moving 'his' intellectual property (patents, brands,...) to subsidiary companies incorporated in tax havens. The subsidiaries no located in tax havens "pay" (deductible expenses) for the patents owned by the fiscal paradise subsidiary
b ) transfer price: All the subsidiaries located in countries where they pay taxes do not record revenue since items will arrive at a cost similar to the selling price charged to final consumers.
In the process of production, transportation and marketing there are involved several subsidiaries billing between themselves. Only obtain profit those recorded in havens fiscales.
c) Profit stripping. Consist in to drain the profits obtained in a country with taxes to a subsidiary in a tax haven (costs for the subsidiary with taxes and revenue for the haven paradise one). A subsidiary in Bermuda lends money at interest to a subsidiary in France. France revenues are reduced to pay the interest to the subsidiary in Bermuda.
The group Fortis in 2008 wielded a prodigious cascade of about 300 subsidiaries registered in tax havens: Fortis Intertrust (BVI), Fortis Investment Management (Cayman Islands) Fortis Commercial Finance (Luxembourg), Fortis Private Wealth Management (Netherlands Antilles), Fortis Foreign Fund Services (Switzerland), JEB Ltd (Liberia), Comanche Ltd (Bahamas), Jasmette Valley Inc (Liechtenstein) of Swilken Holdings (Panama) etc. The list would fill 10 pages.
Bankrupted by the crisis, the entity was taken, after a major injection of public money (11,200 mill €), together with its subsidiaries paradise, by BNP Paribas. Not one euro out of country paradise but the taxpayers of Belgium and the Netherlands, her "national basis."
Not relying on a nation state, multinationals lost interest in strengthening it and, in practice, not even hesitate to weaken, bleeding, de-industrialize, ruin its infrastructure, public services, security, etc. as is happening in the U.S. itself.
Multinationals love only tax havens. Many nations are falling into the hands of gangs and drug lords (whose traffic and finance companies also operate from offices in tax havens) in collusion with politicians and corrupt officials. Offices and members of the mafia and the multinationals, living harmoniously, door to door in tax havens.
Multinationals, law and democracy
They have transformed any agency or democratic structure in their petty interests. They manipulate electoral processes, funding political parties, control or bay medias and distort information.
They have whole sections of lobbying offices in Brussels and Washington. Laws are made and remade according to their interests and convenience. His financial crimes are unpunished while controlling whole prison systems.
In case of resistance resort to the heavy artillery of its international agencies under control (IMF, European Commission, ECB, ...) to take command of the economies of whole countries, replacing the national parliaments and governments imposing the socialization of losses (direct result of the speculation of the same multinationals) and the looting of public property.
While the legal systems adapt to their corporate interests, criminal law is manipulated to avoid any criminal liability for countless atrocities. The most flagrant case is undoubtedly the American criminal law that condemns to 5 years for possession of 5 grams of crack or 100 grams of heroin, and life imprisonment by triple repetition of petty crime (in contrast to only 5 years for possession half a kg. cocaine, the drug of the rich). Legislation tailored to the greed of the multinationals that have transformed the U.S. prison system into a thriving slave business relocated in their own territory (a real gulag of 2 million prisoners working at $ 2 an hour) that produces military equipment, office furniture, medical equipment, aircraft components, ... IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT & T Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin. ..
They are causing the economic crisis, social and ecological planet. They are responsible for world poverty, global hunger, global depletion of resources, global environmental destruction, the destruction and criminalization of the states (Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Russia, countries of Eastern Europe, northern and central countries African, southern Italy, ...).
Multinational and international organizations
They have converted the European Union, the ECB, the World Bank, the IMF, OIC, OECD, WHO, ... in specialized agencies in defending their interests. International agencies catalyze and accelerate the corrosion process to which they are subjecting national democracies. Neoliberal globalization promotes increasing usurpation of national sovereignty to hand it out to supranational companies petty interests (EU, ECB, IMF, WTO, ...) in order to impose a straitjacket for citizens abroad and taxpayers, preventing any democratic resistance to the planned worsening of their social conditions.
All international organizations are being manipulated and converted into subordinate agents in order to ensure an environment (regulatory, economic and political) as favourable as possible to the interests of multinationals. The international agencies are responsible to stop and prevent any local resistance or boycott any attempt to resist.
Monopolies and barriers to entry: patents, intellectual property, marketing, planned obsolescence.
Unlike a medieval monopoly (guilds) or a public one, private capitalist monopolies are carcinogenic organisms that have to grow and grow. They have not enough controlling a specific plot of the market; They must continue hoarding more and more market. But for this it is essential to secure the market share already dominated by raising all kinds of huge barriers to entry (William Shepherd has studied up to 22 different types of barriers to entry). Building barriers means, often, penetrate markets related to prevent possible future competition (Microsoft into the mobile phone business,...).
The most effective barriers to entry are the intellectual property, patents and marketing.
Intellectual property consists of the granting of a 'temporary' monopoly to the recorder of the patent which allows to obtain monopoly rents above the actual costs of production. Sold as an incentive to creativity (exist other ways of rewarding the researchers and creators: prizes, incentives, public or private,...) when in reality are used as barrier to entry against competition.
Lobbyists at the service of the monopolists are changing laws in "defending the intellectual property and patents". Cargill, Nike, Pfizer, Wal-Mart,... are behind an international treaty (ppt) seeking to establish a strict legislative framework between countries adhered with transnational courts of Justice to defend the interests of the multinationals against States, prolonging the life of patents up to 70-120 years after the author's death, chasing any circumvention of technological protection measures, criminalizing the circumvention of such measures even in the case of non-existence of infringement of copyright, the establishment of a system of responsibility of providers of internet services that aims to establish measures of identification of alleged offenders, removal of content and internet disconnection.
Monopolies have transformed marketing as a fundamental tool for building solid and impenetrable barriers to entry.
Marketing monopoly is a multifunctional tool:
- - serve to expand the market share (at the expense of the competition, or at the expense of the sanity of the long-suffering consumer)
- -works as a barrier to entry. Currently, between 70% and 90% of the cost of most of the products that reach the market are costs related to the marketing of waste (advertising, fashion, packaging, product differentiation, a wide range of models,...). A product manufactured by competition, even if it is of much higher quality than the monopolist, may never reach the consumer because of the enormous entry barriers imposed, of which capitalist marketing of waste tends to be the most insurmountable.
- - as the monopoly aims to grab the "entire" market, also uses another marketing technique: the segmentation of the market: good (expensive) products for the rich and (cheap) products that last little.
- - obsolescence planned - for the poor, with fair rents, may be forced to repeat again and again the act of purchase. Both segments end up generating huge amounts of waste (the rich always want the "latest model" of yacht and the poor cannot keep the mercedes, yachts,... disposed of by those). The result of all these tricks is a huge waste of resources and a huge generation of waste and pollution.
Multinationals, nomadism and offshoring
They are responsible for relocation, irrational depredation of natural resources, the irrational polarization of industry and trade to the "havens" of exploitation, "special areas" of human predation.
They corrupt the elites of poor countries to surrender their territories to the depredation of natural resources, pollution and contamination of their environment and the inhuman exploitation of their populations.
They are the true nomads of the century. At the slightest sign of labor resistance multinationals threaten to pack and leave for another country. And, as they can, often just the mere threat is enough to subject their employees to their draconian working conditions.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest company, is responsible (along with its rivals, Kmart Corporation, Costco, Carrefour, Eroski , ...) of the desertification of the industrial and commercial states and entire countries, the ruthless exploitation of the labor force so that suppliers are forced to relocate their plants, and the ruin of farmers submitted to ridiculous prices.
The decent jobs disappear once the sector is engulfed by a multinational. Whether it is telecommunications, textile, computers, ..., workers are subject to the laws of offshore exploitation. Wages and working conditions go down as profit and the earnings of top executives go up. When a multinational company fired 1,000 workers, their actions are triggered automatically on the Stock Exchange.
But it's not only employees of multinationals, small and medium businesses eventually succumb to the increasingly vast outsourcing networks . The monopoly position allows to extort small suppliers forcing them to battle a civil war as if they were gladiators. This is the "efficiency" of the monopolies praised by Economy Nobel Prizes of neoliberalism (Hicks, Hayek, Friedman, Stigler, Coase, Williamson)
Multinationals and Innovation
They distort innovation to fit their myopic interests (usually are experts in exploiting the innovation of others). Once earned monopoly positions in certain sectors (oil, pharmaceuticals, nuclear energy, computers ...) and built the corresponding entry barriers delay or prevent innovation to maintain its privileged monopoly.
They prefer the guaranteed return of the chronically ill to investigate healing drugs or vaccines. They prefer centralized nuclear power to renewables. Hamper public transport, electric motor cars, ... to maintain their super profits. His innovation is often perverse as it advances in fields whose sole purpose is to submit, blackmail, exploitation and, ultimately, to consolidate their positions of privilege. Pharmaceutical, tobacco and agribusiness are flooding the planet with "innovative" toxic and addictive products to subdue and control of producers and consumers.
They appropriate the public and social knowledge of indigenous cultures, biodiversity, ... enforcing patents here and there, putting all kinds of barriers and compartments to free flow of ideas and therefore hampering the very essence of innovation.
Monopolies and Internet
Information is a public good by nature a community to which everyone should be able go to feed our brains. The consumption of an individual does not preclude its use for the rest of his fellows. It's like air or water.
The early Internet represented an unexplored field similar to the great American West for newcomers settlers. It was a vast "public" territory, a new continent of knowledge and the possibility of a huge democratic sphere of exchange of communication without barriers or restrictions.
Privatize and curb anything public has always been the innate sport of monopoly capital. Anything that is not scarce is not business. The idealized "conquest of the West" was basically to generate huge shortages fencing and privatizing public lands.
Something similar is happening on the Internet. Gradually, the area of information exchange and knowledge is being parceled out, fenced, "protected", subdivided, ... Its use-value of universal access (public) is quickly becoming exchange value of restricted and controlled access (private).
AT & T recently purchased a T-Mobile (wireless provider) so absorbing 75% of the U.S. market. AT & T is an avowed opponent of "net neutrality". Net neutrality has so far ensured that all data is transported without any discrimination to the same speed on the Internet. AT & T aims to destroy that neutrality to turn the Internet into a toll road benefiting large corporations and leaving small guys out of the high-speed track. With its acquisition of T-Mobile will enjoy a monopoly position enough to impose their designs.
The abundance of information in the network is not a "commodity", is not a business. Monopolistic logic requires generating monopoly shortage. The business is made from the scarcity and in the case of Internet, the shortage must be created. It is artificial scarcity and thus requires the intervention of public institutions in collusion with monopoly capital and this is what is happening. From the hand of the legislator submissive and in a climate increasingly prone to globalization, monopoly capital rule over the information sector with unprecedented speed and forcefulness.
Externalization of costs, global environmental depredation
The entire planet becomes fodder for the unlimited greed of multinationals. The North Pole is threatened to death by the oil companies. They pollute with impunity seas and oceans. Its radioactive nuclear elements infest the atmosphere while the chemical waste infest waters and soils in Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and South America.
They operate outside society and outsourced much of its costs. They operate in a a-social and a-democratic dimension, avoiding any responsibility for his misdeeds .
From a certain size, large multinational corporations do not obey any one except its own corporate logic. Its seems even its powerful managers can't resist this irrational and predatory logic. J. Van der Veer, chief executive and head absolute Shell is a Dutch friendly, polite and sensitive guy and the Netherlands is a country socially advanced and concerned about the environment and climate change that could be submerged under the waters of the Atlantic, but this does not preclude for the Anglo-Dutch company acts as an implacable juggernaut with a genetic code programmed to destroy biodiversity, human rights and environmental sustainability of the planet.
Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,
The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism
The Internationalization of Monopoly Capital
