Monopoly Eggs, Supporting Corruption, and the Actual Use of AI
Links for Friday, January 30
To stay ahead globally we don't need to protect our monopolies from innovation. We need to protect innovation from our monopolies.
—Lina Khan here (via comments)
Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era.
—Cory Doctorow
Don’t get fooled again.
—An unheeded cry
Today we look at a few surprising monopolies, some actual AI tales, and how people get sucked into supporting the deeply corrupt. Plus music, of course.
Links
• Monopolies are everywhere (Cory Doctorow)
This is from a Twitter thread by Cory Doctorow titled “It's not a crime if we do it with an app” (essay-formatted link above). The piece focuses its fire on criminal collusion by industry involving, well, apps. But it also contains some surprising revelations about the extent of bipartisan (i.e., rule by the rich) permission to create cartels and monopolies.
Examples (emphasis mine):
You might know that pretty much every packaged good in your grocery store is made by one of two companies, Unilever and Procter and Gamble. Both CEOs boasted to their investors about their above-inflation price increases:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering
And:
It may seem like your grocer's eggs department is filled with many different companies' products. In reality, a single company, Cal-Maine Foods, owns practically every brand of eggs in the case: Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes. They made record profits after the pandemic and through bird flu[.]
Also:
In The Lever, Katya Schwenk describes how four companies – Lamb Weston, JR Simplot, McCain Foods and Cavendish Farms – have captured the frozen potato market and all that comes with it (fries, tater tots, etc):
And did you know:
[F]our firms controlled nearly 80 percent of the almond milk market, for instance. Three companies controlled 83 percent of the canned tuna market, and four companies controlled more than 86 percent of the microwave popcorn market.
We’re owned, folks, thanks to our “leaders,” who don’t work for us.
File under “Money before people. Are you surprised?”
Corruption and Hating the State
• The enemy of your enemy may not be your friend (Cory Doctorow)
Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era…
This will create a trap for people who hate Trump but don't pay close attention to anticorruption cases. It's a trap that Trump sprung successfully in his first term, when he lashed out at the "intelligence community" – the brutal, corrupt, vicious, lawless American spy agencies that are the sworn enemies of working people and the struggle for justice at home and abroad – and American liberals decided that the enemy of their enemy was their friend […]
Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selectively punish crooked companies. He won't target them because they're crooked: he'll target them because they aren't sufficiently loyal to him.
[But] If you let your hatred of Trump blind you to the crookedness of these companies, you lose and Trump wins. [bolded emphasis mine]
There’s a lot more on this tendency here (David Graeber alert). More later perhaps.
File under “It happened once; let’s not get fooled again.”