by Libby Conn and John Dankosky – Today, we talk about jobs. But, really, everybody’s talking about jobs right now. It’s the anniversary of the Obama administration’s stimulus bill, which packed neither the job creation, nor the political punch the President was looking for. Gubernatorial candidate Ned Lamont kicked off his run officially yesterday…and job creation was the main focus of his speech (Listen for Jeff Cohen’s report here).
In fact, during yesterday’s show, we talked a bit about jobs. How monopolistic American companies actually drive jobs away from small business, and then destroy them through mergers and off-shoring.
This is just a part of the scary outlook presented in Barry Lynn’s book, Cornered. Keep an eye out for an upcoming piece he’s got in Washington Monthly about monopolies and job loss. He argues that lawmakers can debate jobs legislation until they’re blue in the face, but that they won’t be taking a serious stab at the problem of unemployment unless they take a hard look at the “new monopolies” that control our economy.
We noted an interesting exchange between a Lynn, and a caller who suggested that big government regulation of corporations wasn’t going to help anything – in fact it would make it harder for small businessmen like himself. He charged Lynn with being an “academic.” Here’s his response:
Barry Lynn
“I don’t want big government. One thing I think that people should understand is that I’m not an academic. I actually don’t have a graduate degree. I worked, managed a business for many years– an independent magazine that’s made its money in the market. So I know about keeping the cash flowing to keep people in their jobs. I know how tough it is. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because I want to help the entrepreneurs in this country figure out who their friends are and who their enemies are. Their friends tend to be each other. They cannot count on government as an entity to save them. They cannot count on big business to save them. What they can do is use government to fight big business and make a space for themselves and their brethren in other sectors…..One of the reasons that we have regulations that make it very hard for small business to start up is because government is controlled by large business…. If small businesses want to compete, the first targets they have to take on are the large businesses that use the government against them.”
(In case you feel like you’ve heard this before, it might have come from this guy.)
But listener Todd Vachon wondered if any real such competition is possible:
“I just wanted to suggest that the natural tendency of capitalism is monopolize. The end goal of “competition” is always to defeat all competitors. While the government can regulate they can also deregulate. This is a never-ending cycle of corporate profit versus public interest. Can there ever really be an end to monopolization without actually changing the whole economic system to one that is based on different values, other than maximizing profit.”
All interesting stuff. But, we left wondering whether anything in our political system would ever change to break this “never-ending cycle.”
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