Does government have the power to break up gigantisaur corporations into smaller entities?

If so is it time for government to do so?

Corporations define the word UnAmerican.

:patriot:

Anti trust laws.

Any corporation especially a bank that is large enough to hold such an economic monopoly over our country that we cannot allow them to fail should be broken up.


It is the only way we can ever prevent this from happening again..

.. all of their competition. Walmart hardly has any competition left.

Thanks for the reply. What you said is what I thought but I wanted to hear what others had to say.

Very informative.

Peace

:hi:

In a few markets they may be the only real choice, but in most of the country there are plenty of other choices for shopping.

In fact, I can tell you in more than one market around the country, Walmart is gaining MORE competition, not less. An awful lot of Americans - yes even the Freepers - especially the freepers - are sick up to their eyeballs with Chinese everything and no American jobs. Developers are being forced to cut up their strip malls into smaller units for more Mom & Pop type places - and when the Developers do a decent job of attracting a nice variety of businesses they parking lots are packed full - even now - even in Michigan. There are places in America where Walmart sales are dropping like a rock. That would not happen if they were a monopoly.

They tried - got pretty close - but America will only put up with Bullshit for so long (longer than other country's people but we do still have a bullshit limit)

plenty of choices for shopping, perhaps - but low cost shopping? Hell no -- thanks to those gargantuan stores they are growing like viruses all over the place.

We have couple of them hanging on around Atlanta but every one I've been in is gawdawful. Aisles too close together, product one big damn mess, half of the sale items not stocked - this has been going on for more than a decade. They suck. Period - and getting bought my Sears did not help.

Walmart kills local business and undercuts local economies. They pay their workers a slave wage vs Walmarts overall profits.

This slave wage further undermines local economies.

Walmart is the perfect example of a monopoly and exemplifiies all that is wrong with America.

But terrible things is not the definition of monopoly.

The local power company is a monopoly. You have NO choice. You want power. You buy from the only power company.

I haven't stepped foot into a walmart in a very very long time.

yet I still clothe and feed myself and have various consumer trinkets.

If walmart were a monopoly, that would not be possible.

they are far from a monopoly.

The FACT remains that Walmart drove them OUT of my area. Kmart had customers here (north Atlanta) and the superstores drove them out. PERIOD.

You have no other choice BUT to shop at Walmart??? In North Atlanta???

Seriously.

PUBLIX?? Hello --- KROGER ??? --- WHOLE FOODS??? TARGET ???? The dollar stores? Belk? Marshalls? TJMaxx? HomeGoods? Macy's? JC Penney? Best Buy? They are all thriving just fine in North Atlanta. If they can thrive just fine with Walmart as competition and Kmart CAN'T that should tell you something.

Do you even KNOW what a monopoly is?

I, along with thousands of other DU'ers proudly never shop at Walmart.


If walmart were a monopoly, this would simply be impossible.

break them up.

That would be the a way to solve the HCR issue. Just break them into little pieces and let them compete. The problem is that BCBS "owns" states and at that level the Feds have no control. Other corps own other states, BCBS isn't the only monopoly, AETNA certainly.

Standard Oil was before my time but I remember the Bell Telephone breakup. Telephone rates rose rapidly. You would have thought that competition would have resulted in a reduction of rates. Someone with more knowledge may be able to explain what happened.

There has been so much written about AT&T, and it's very important, complicated and interesting.

I think the most interesting thing about it is that it was one of the few cases in which a corporation basically said to the government, maybe you're right; maybe we should be broken up. It was their outside lawyers who famously went through all their options, and did all this analysis and said, you should consent to this. It was so complicated that they then hired that lawyer to be their CEO for a while.

Here was the problem. There was basically one telephone company nation-wide. There were small local companies, but basically AT&T was almost the entire phone company.

Lily Tomlin became famous for lampooning telephone operators on Laugh In by not taking customers compaints seriously and saying, we don't have to do that; we're the telephone company.

AT&T controlled both local and long distance calling. Two companies, Sprint and MCI developed ways of creating long distance phone services. The big problem was getting the right of way to lay wires. Sprint was originally part of "Southern Pacific Railroad" --hence the SPR -- and had rights of way to lay wires next to their tracks as rail traffic declined.

Sprint and MCI sued AT&T as a monopoly and after years of litigation, AT&T agreed to be broken up into a long distance company -- AT&T -- and local companies called the "baby bells", which became Verizon, Pacific Bell, etc.

It turned out that when AT&T controlled everything they charged very high rates on long distance to subsidize local calling, which was extremely cheap.

When the broke up that subsidy no longer existed. Local rates went up very, very fast, but long distance rates plummeted. If you remember those years, people timed long distance calls because they were ruinously expensive. But the actual cost to the phone company is little different from local calls.

So when you say rates went up, it was local rates that went up. Correspondingly, long distance rates went down dratstically.

I remember Lilly Tomlin on Laugh In. Hilarious but also spot on right about the way phone companies used to and in many ways still do treat their customers and consumer complaints.

Sadly, the corps you mentioned that resulted from the breakup of AT&T and Bell have now grown into their own status of gigantisaur corps and may need to be broke up again.

The more I think about it, the more I realize the impotence and ineptitude of our government.

Obama needs to grow a f'n spine, fast.

Thanks for the very informative reply.

Peace

:hi:

Long distance subsidized local phone service. And in the pre-breakup days, who made the most long distance calls? Businesses. It was a sort of wealth transfer from well-off firms to the little folks who just wanted a cheap telephone line in their homes.

My mother still has the phone book that she took from our old hometown in Indiana from forty years ago. There's a chart of long distance rates in the front of the book, and it was startling to see that people would, in some cases, pay over a dollar for a minute of calling. This was in the day when you could mail a letter for eight cents!

But it is not a fair comparison to look at the breaking up of a "natural monopoly" company with a corporation in at least a theoretically more competitive market. I can avoid Wal-Mart quite easily, even if they are the only game in town for a lot of rural customers, the fact remains that a sizable majority of Americans have choices besides Wally World where they live.

He did a lot of that sort of thing.

Yes, it needs to be done. But don't expect it to happen. The corporations finance the political campaigns. And the government continues to show a willingness to bless and sanction large corporate mergers. There is nothing to indicate any willingness to break up the mega corporations.

In many cases, corporations are also struggling. We all know a failing corp has the power to bring down national economies. We're seeing it happen worldwide.

Put these facts together and govt may have no choice but to reign in corporations.

It seems like all hope is lost.
But there is a tiny part of me that believes that govt will pull it's head out of it's ass and act out of necessity.

We're reaching the boiling point. Our dollar is becoming worthless.

Maybe it has to completely crash first. Which would most likely kill our nation.

I see about a 1% chance of govt acting before it's too late.

Thanks for weighing in. Your spot on correct about TR too!

If only we had a govt with that much spine nowadays.

:hi:

the politicians we elect to run the government are incentivized to protect and serve corporate interests. Voters are largely unable to compete with those incentives. Voters aren't organized and even if they were they lack the ability to compete with the levels of campaign funding that corporations make available to the politicians.

And the managers hired to run those corporations are compensated beyond comprehension for the most spectacular failures. The politicians are not going to do much to change that. And the shareholders have had much of their ability to bring suit to enjoin and prohibit such insanity stripped by the court system.

Globalization and a global economy will inevitably result in a single worldwide standard of living. The process of getting from where we are to that eventuality means that more prosperous nations will see their lifestyle lowered and that less prosperous countries will prosper.

People are expendable to the powerbrokers that pull the strings. One can suffer throughout their life for taking a principles and courageous stand.

I don't have much hope that anything will improve for the average US citizen during my lifetime.

Our "saving grace"- even corporate ownership of our government won't be able to overcome a weak and crashing dollar.

If our dollar becomes worthless then I'm guessing that'll kill corporate power.

Bad thing is, it'll probably kill our nation and alot of us as well.

That's quite a "saving grace". (megasarc)

At least people like you and me will die knowing we were right. If that matters.

At this point, that's about the only solace that I can offer.

Again, thanks for adding to the debate. I hope people read what you have written.

Peace.

:patriot:

Come to think about embracing bipartisanship (without throwing up): late-Eisenhower needs to be celebrated, shared and embraced. His final public speech, his Farewell Address to the Nation was extraordinary.

Today's Trusts most needing to be busted are global icebergs with private paramilitaries. Amoral crime syndicates; mostly invisible. The darkside industries ALL profit from misery. Enormous profiteering.

Republican (Traitor to his Class) Roosevelt I (TR) had both the will and the courage (and a successful secret service).

IN 1999, a federal court ordered Microsoft to be broken up because of its anticompetitive practices in internet browsers. Microsoft was able to modify the ruling on appeal and prevent the breakup.

The ruling is actually a very simple and clear read in the definition of a monopoly and what what constitutes the abuse of a monopoly. IMO the original ruling was correct.

Now breaking up monopolies may or may not correct problems in a particular industry. Mortgage companies were not dominated by a Microsoft or Walmart during the real estate boom, but similar abuses were practiced by many smaller companies.

In technical industries competition and changes in technology have served to break up monopolies pretty effectively. IBM is no longer the 800-pound gorilla. Local telcos are losing their grip. Ten years from now, Google will probably have lost its dominance.

The inevitable orchestrated media counterattack and the rightwing tilt of the Supreme Court would prevent it.

unusable. Part of that was encouraging very conservative Dems in Congress. Nowadays Congress is so pwned by corporate and conservative interests that even the mention of breaking up businesses which are too large and therefore predatory is dangerous
politically. They have to pussy foot around making half-gestures--or be destroyed by the behemoths who pull the strings.

It needs to be used, a lot, ASAP.

There are many smaller corporations, if there was no such thing as corporations, it would be hard on small business. This hatred against the form is crap. You're thinking only of the monoliths and throwing a baby out with the bathwater. This is insane. Don't you know anyone who owns their own business?

The anti-trust laws apply to huge entities.

Those who retain that power on paper are already owned by those same corporations.