Mega Giant Corporations Are Very Bad for America

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, published by Wiley Press.

Even with a GPS and a good map, I have a hard time finding Diane Cochrane’s home, which is tucked in the crease of a hill a few miles east of Prescott, Arizona. The one-story green frame building sits at the bottom of a steep driveway that drops from a rocky road that cuts off a maze of streets that, as I drive along in my rented Pontiac, seem more like a mad Motocross track than the arteries of a neighborhood.

Yet it is easy to understand why Diane settled here with her husband after they fled the monotony of a Ford assembly line in Ohio. The landscape is a testament to the creativity of both humanity and God. Every one of the hundred or so houses in the community is unique. There are ramblers, chalets, A-frames, ranches, and log cabins. The terrain, meanwhile, seems to change in character almost inch by inch as the roadway drops and twists vertiginously into deep and scrubby ravines, only to crest a moment later to stunning views of a far shimmering horizon.

A few miles down Highway 69, the Wal-Mart Supercenter at the edge of Prescott is a different world. The parking lot alone is the grandest swath of flat space I’ve seen in the last hour of driving. Then there’s the store itself. To fit the big box into the undulating land, the builders had to cut deep into the side of a hill, carving away as much as six or seven stories worth of dirt and rock.

Once I am inside Wal-Mart’s door, it takes me nearly two minutes, striding swiftly, to walk from one end of the store to the other. Along the way I pass twenty-seven checkout lines and what seems like a whole town -- a savings bank, a McDonald’s, a portrait gallery -- tucked under this one roof. I almost wish I’d brought along some music to entertain myself, because there isn’t much new to look at on my stroll. Other than having a rack of cowboy hats, this Supercenter is filled with the exact same collection of products as every other Wal-Mart Supercenter in the United States, be it in Ohio, California, or Virginia. It also has the same empty feeling. When I arrive, it’s early evening and the parking lot is full. Yet the store seems almost vacant, and the few shoppers I do see wander listlessly and almost silently through the aisles.

Diane, who is sixty and has cut her gray hair short, wears a salmon-colored cotton shirt on this ninety-seven-degree April day. She tells me that until recently, she shopped in this Wal-Mart almost every day, often on her way home from her job managing a party store. She doesn’t anymore, though, and that’s not because filling a basket at the Supercenter can be more exhausting than a trip to the gym. Diane has tried to avoid all Wal-Marts everywhere ever since her two kittens, Bones and Moses, died of kidney failure on the same day in 2007. Diane believes that the food she purchased here -- Wal-Mart private label Special Kitty Gourmet Blend foil pouches filled with whitefish and tuna in sauce -- is what killed them.

My intent is not to blame any one person at Wal-Mart for the deaths of Diane’s kittens, nor to blame the rather abstract entity that is Wal-Mart taken as a whole. It is to reinforce the idea that monopoly exists just about everywhere in America today. It is also to add two new facts. First, today’s monopolies increasingly appear in the shape of giant trading firms like Wal-Mart, which are designed to govern entire production systems, even entire swaths, of our economy. Second, monopoly does not eliminate competition, nor does it automatically result in a rational and efficient governance of the production and service systems under its sway.