“Cornered is a real eye opener for American’s business community. Barry Lynn details how the concentration of power in large global corporations can hurt entrepreneurs, stunt innovation, and slow growth. This book is essential to understanding how we got into our current mess.” – Michael Mandel, chief economist, Business Week
The following are excerpts from the Preface of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction by Barry C. Lynn, Wiley, 2010. The Watchdog will publish additional excerpts daily during his vacation with family. He considers Cornered to be the most important book on economics since John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory.
“…The Meltdown or 2008 even delivered my punch line for me: that American financiers had erected a particular form of socialism that enabled them to dump all the risk in the industrial and banking systems they control onto us, even as they jetted away with all the profit.”
“A generation ago a highly sophisticated political movement appeared in the United States. This movement was decimated to taking apart the entire institutional structure that we had put into place, beginning in the mid-1930s, to govern our political economy by distributing power and responsibility among all the people. The goal of this movement was to enable the few, once again, to consolidate power entirely in their own hands.
“That’s why one of their very first targets was our antimonopoly laws. To justify this action, these revolutionaries preached an alternative philosophy of political economics – sometimes call free-market fundamentalism. This philosophy depicted our political economy not as political in nature but as a sort of organic mechanism that worked best if left untouched by human beings. The revolutionaries also promoted an alternative language of economic inquiry – based on the idea that economics is a science. Rather than describe the interaction of people in our economy as a function of law and politics, they preferred the languages of mathematics and mysticism.
“I use the language of political economics not to make us angry at any person or group bugt to help us see the political lies that have been framed by the free-market fundamentalists and the economically deranging effect of those lies…If we wish to stop the rich from ruining, we must speak honestly of how they rule.”
