Reading Stacy Mitchell's Big-Box Swindle, and a lot of the material is familiar, re: Wal-Mart and Best Buy and other landscape dominating retail giants. Still enraging, of course. And since the book is from 2006, aspects of it are dated. Borders Books no doubt did damage to independent book retailers, but now it's gone belly up. Reading about the effects of Blockbusters on the video rental business is kind of like talking about the sexual dynamics of a roomful of skeletons.
There are fresh outrages, though. The seventh chapter starts by recounting the way Brookings, South Dakota was persuaded to lure a Lowe's superstore to the town by offering about $3 million in public subsidies. The smaller hardware and home improvement businesses hadn't received any such largesse, of course. And now they were put in the position of handing over their tax dollars to a well-heeled competitor that wanted to put them out of business.
This dynamic continues to play out in other contexts. Many of the economic decisions of the lockdown era had to do with boosting giant and/or online retailers that already seemed to be rising and kneecapping independents. Whatever the virtues and vices of the free market, this wasn't the free market. It was very much the manipulated market.
2 comments:
I understand how interesting it was to read a book about how the mega-markets effectively destroyed the economies of American communites, and not just in the US either. As you note the one that caused the most consternation at the time was the takeover of small towns by Wal-Mart. Although many people saw what was happening there weren't many able to do much about it, particularly when you consider that it was often local politicians who arranged the zoning and licensing, perhaps even being compensated for doing so.
Naturally enough once the example had been made so successfully it wasn't long before other very large corporate businesses followed the example of the power and wealth available in their pursuit of unrestrained capitalism.
I remembered a post written by JM Greer a while back in which he stated:
The investors who own stock in corporations have an understandable interest in maximizing the return on their investment, so they reliably vote in boards of directors who will hire management who will force down wages as far as possible. The investors who own stock in corporations also have an understandable interest in keeping as much of their wealth as possible out of the clutches of the tax man, so they reliably pressure and bribe government to spend as little as possible for the benefit of anybody outside the investor class.
Being unrestrained, the next step has been the takeover of big corporations by even bigger conglomerates and that appears to be what we're seeing now, the Ouroubouros effect. Everyone involved expects to maintain all the perks and comfort they've come to expect, but when there's a wildly unbalanced distribution of wealth it's eventually going to fail - the French Revolution as an example. We'll have to see how long that takes in this particular circumstance.
Certainly it's infuriating that political leaders did so much to aid the big box stores in taking over towns across the country, given the way communities have so often been hollowed out as a result. Some of them might have actually thought that their actions would lead to greater overall prosperity. Others did not believe this and acted in pure self interest. But the results were much the same in both cases. Declining wages and a more homogenized business environment.
As you say, other corporate businesses were eager to follow suit, because you don't want to be the one who gets left behind. The problem is that the assets of these towns are getting used up, and eventually there's almost nothing left. Greer is very savvy about this kind of thing.
The accumulation of wealth does lead to greater and greater inequality. How much before the lower classes in society, the 99%, snap because they can't put up with it any longer? I don't know. But the higher-ups who should know better appear to think themselves immune.
Post a Comment