When a corporation’s profits are reckoned in billions, chances are pretty slim that it’s going to have anything but superficial concern about its individual customers. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
In a functional economy with real competition and transparency, every one of these cartel-corporations would be driven out of business by their ‘too big to care’ incompetence.
We’ve all heard of Too Big to Fail, a description of the consequences of consolidating capital and power in a few corporate entities, the net result of which is monopolies and cartels becoming so large that their collapse would send the entire economy into a crisis without easy solution, as the void left cannot be filled by competitors because there are no competitors.
Given the risks generated by this consolidation of capital and power in cartels, the federal government and central bank had to bail out these systemically critical corporations in 2008, regardless of the cost or political precedent being established.
One would be forgiven for reckoning that the first thing the federal government would do post-meltdown was break up the Too Big to Fail entities as an unacceptably dangerous source of systemic risk. But the Central State did nothing of the sort, and the dominant firms in every sector of the economy have continued consolidating by snapping up competitors and start-ups and merging with other giants.
Everywhere we look, a few firms dominate each sector–the perfection of state-cartel-capitalism in which the core dynamics of open markets–competition and transparency–have been suffocated as obstacles to expanding profits and power. Eliminating competition and transparency is the unstoppable logic of increasing profits by any means available, for eliminating competition and transparency are the lowest-risk ways to increase profits without bothering to increase productivity or quality.
