Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power

by David Dayen

Overview

From the airlines we fly to the food we eat, how a tiny group of corporations have come to dominate every aspect of our lives—by one of our most intrepid and accomplished journalists

"If you're looking for a book . . . that will get your heart pumping and your blood boiling and that will remind you why we're in these fights—add this one to your list." —Senator Elizabeth Warren on David Dayen's Chain of Title

Over the last forty years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market.

This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications. If you are sick you can go to one of three main pharmacies to fill your prescription, and if you end up in a hospital almost every accessory to heal you comes from one of a handful of large medical suppliers.

Dayen, the editor of the American Prospect and author of the acclaimed Chain of Title, provides a riveting account of what it means to live in this new age of monopoly and how we might resist this corporate hegemony.

Through vignettes and vivid case studies Dayen shows how these monopolies have transformed us, inverted us, and truly changed our lives, at the same time providing readers with the raw material to make monopoly a consequential issue in American life and revive a long-dormant antitrust movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620975411
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	07/21/2020
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	1,098,486
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

David Dayen writes regularly for The Intercept and The Nation and has just been appointed the editor of the American Prospect. He is the author of Chain of Title, winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize for a first book in the public interest. Dayen lives in Venice, California.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Monopolies Are Why People Keep Contracting Deep Vein Thrombosis on Long-Haul Flights 19

Chapter 2 Monopolies Are Why a Farmer's Daughter Is Crying Behind the Desk of a Best Western 43

Chapter 3 Monopolies Are Why Hundreds of Journalists Became Filmmakers, then Back to Writers, then Unemployed 69

Chapter 4 Monopolies Are Why Students Sit in Starbucks Parking Lots at Night to Do Their Homework 93

Chapter 5 Monopolies Are Why Teamsters Stormed a Podium to Tell One Another About Their Dead Friends and Relatives 115

Chapter 8 Monopolies Among Banks Are Why There Are Monopolies Among Every Other Economic Sector 141

Chapter 7 Monopolies Are Why America Can't Build or Run a Single Weapons System Without Assistance from China 165

Chapter 8 Monopolies Are Why a Small Business Owner and His Girlfriend Had to Get Permission from Amazon to Live Together 191

Chapter 9 Monopolies Are Why Hospitals Can Give Patients Prosthetic Limbs and Artificial Hearts but Not Salt and Water in a Bag 215

Chapter 10 Monopolies Are Why a Woman Found Her Own Home Listed for Rent on Zillow 237

Chapter 11 Monopolies Are Why a Family Has Seen Only the Top of Their Loved One's Head for the Past Two Years 259

Chapter 12 Monopolies Are Why I Traveled to Chicago and Tel Aviv to Learn How to Stop Them 281

Acknowledgments 297

Select Bibliography and a Note on Sources 301

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

06/08/2020

American Prospect editor Dayen (Chain of Title) delivers a sweeping, deeply researched assessment of the adverse consequences of monopolies on American life. A chapter on the agricultural industry explains how the “concentrated animal feeding operations” of corporate hog farms put smaller competitors out of business, damage the environment, and endanger public health. Dayen also details how tech behemoths such as Google and Facebook degrade online journalism; how pharmaceutical companies prevent people from buying insulin and other essential medications at an affordable price; and how Amazon exploits contract delivery drivers and third-party sellers. Tracing the steady decline of antitrust enforcement across the past few decades, Dayen notes, for instance, that 51 airlines merged between 1979 and 1988, and that four major carriers now control more than 80% of U.S. routes. In the book’s final chapter, he calls for the reinterpretation of existing antitrust laws “to cover the full spectrum of harms, beyond just consumer welfare,” and describes the emergence of antimonopoly movements in the U.S. and abroad. Balancing copious data with profiles of workers and business owners, and writing in clear, accessible language, Dayen makes a persuasive argument that reining in big business should be a priority for American voters and policy makers. This is an incisive, irrefutable call to action. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Monopolized:
"If you're interested in a sweeping but detailed take on the modern landscape of corporate power, you should buy a copy of Dayen's Monopolized; it's enormously well-researched, and you will know more about corporate power after you are done. I learned a lot, even though studying monopoly is what I do."
—Matt Stoller, BIG

"A master storyteller. . . . Dayen eschews the sterile supply and demand charts and instead tells the gripping stories of individuals who have suffered at the hands of monopolists in their daily lives."
—Hal Singer, ProMarket

"David Dayen's new book, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, is a comprehensive look at why its title is an accurate description of our economic life."
—Kelly Candaele, Capital & Main

“A superb book about the rise and rise of monopolies. . . . If telling this kind of complicated, technical story and making it personal and urgent is an art, then Dayen is an artist.”
—Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic


"Blending professional rigor with journalistic flair, Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, takes readers on a comprehensive tour of the American economy."
—BookPage

"A cutting damnation of the monopolization of the international marketplace for well pretty much everything. . . . The author digs deep into the problem chronicling his travels around the U.S. to see not only the macro effects of monopolies but their very real impacts on real people. . . . A powerful necessary call to arms to strengthen the antitrust movement and fight a system whose goal is complete control."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Balancing copious data with profiles of workers and business owners, and writing in clear, accessible language, Dayen makes a persuasive argument that reining in big business should be a priority for American voters and policy makers. This is an incisive, irrefutable call to action."
—Publishers Weekly

"Dayen's investigation is as well-written and compelling as it is disturbing in its detailed and hard-hitting revelations. But Dayen moves beyond the injustice and insult of it all to remind readers that America has faced the threat of monopolies and unfair economic practices in the past and created ways to regulate and rein in such damaging practices."
—Booklist (starred review)

"David Dayen is a master of making important economic trends accessible, and even entertaining, to all. But beneath the good humor is a critical message about American industry's turn toward monopoly. The result across America is high consumer prices, limited product choice, low wages, and inadequate economic growth."
—Jeff Madrick, author of Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Child Poverty

"Americans prosper most when business competition is robust, David Dayen explains in this smart and eye-opening book. In plain English, Monopolized shows how the rapid rise of monopolies thwarts competition, shrivels your paycheck, and tears families apart."
—David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch

"Monopolized is eye-opening, disturbing, and brilliant. . . . It is one of those before and after books: before you read it, you may have vague sense that monopolies are a problem in a few areas; afterwards, you will see them everywhere. . . . Dayen is a great journalist, a vivid storyteller and his flashes of dark humor light up the pages."
—Zephyr Teachout, associate law professor, Fordham University, and author of Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money

"It's not just Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies rule almost every area of American commercial life. . . . The economy, politics, and even community life would be better off if we could break up some of these monsters."
—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

"The idea for Monopolized was inspired but the execution was even better."
—Jim Lardner, journalist and founder of Inequality.org

From the Publisher

2020-03-15
A cutting damnation of the monopolization of the international marketplace for, well, pretty much everything.

As the executive editor of the American Prospect, one of the most progressive publications in America, it’s no surprise that Dayen eviscerates the flawed system that has propped up the modern economy for decades: monopolies, the collection of faceless corporations that manipulate the system while placing the burden of the work on the backs of everyday people, whether they know it or not. The author digs deep into the problem, chronicling his travels around the U.S. to see not only the macro effects of monopolies, but their very real impacts on real people. Each of the chapters begins with the phrase “Monopolies are why...” and proceeds to use painful examples to illustrate Dayen’s cogent arguments. Examples include: “why hundreds of journalists became filmmakers, then back to writers, then unemployed,” or “why a small business owner and his girlfriend had to get permission from Amazon to live together.” The author covers such usual suspects as the banking industry, the communications industry, and big pharma, but he shines a light on the shady corners of the prison system and even the funeral industry, illuminating the breadth and depth of the insidious effects of a multilayered system that follows and controls its victims throughout their lives. Dayen’s main thread is inequality, a natural consequence of one entity having nearly complete control over a market. Readers may know much of this information, but it’s still shocking to read about the damaging consequences of superconcentrated markets. Economists know how to fight it, as Dayen clearly explains, but getting people to recognize how they’re being used is exceedingly difficult. It’s a striking social and economic dilemma that the author thankfully exposes, just as he did with the foreclosure crisis in Chain of Title (2016).

A powerful, necessary call to arms to strengthen the antitrust movement and fight a system whose goal is complete control.

Kirkus Reviews