Monopolized

Life in the Age of Corporate Power

David Dayen

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781620975428
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

From the airlines we fly to the food we eat, how a tiny group of corporations have come to dominate every aspect of our lives—by one of our most intrepid and accomplished journalists

"If you're looking for a book . . . that will get your heart pumping and your blood boiling and that will remind you why we're in these fights—add this one to your list." —Senator Elizabeth Warren on David Dayen's Chain of Title

Over the last forty years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market.

This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications. If you are sick you can go to one of three main pharmacies to fill your prescription, and if you end up in a hospital almost every accessory to heal you comes from one of a handful of large medical suppliers.

Dayen, the editor of the American Prospect and author of the acclaimed Chain of Title, provides a riveting account of what it means to live in this new age of monopoly and how we might resist this corporate hegemony.

Through vignettes and vivid case studies Dayen shows how these monopolies have transformed us, inverted us, and truly changed our lives, at the same time providing readers with the raw material to make monopoly a consequential issue in American life and revive a long-dormant antitrust movement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Monopolies Are Why People Keep Contracting Deep Vein Thrombosis on Long-Haul Flights
• Chapter 2: Monopolies Are Why a Farmer’s Daughter Is Crying Behind the Desk of a Best Western
• Chapter 3: Monopolies Are Why Hundreds of Journalists Became Filmmakers, then Back to Writers, then Unemployed
• Chapter 4: Monopolies Are Why Students Sit in Starbucks Parking Lots at Night to Do Their Homework
• Chapter 5: Monopolies Are Why Teamsters Stormed a Podium to Tell One Another About Their Dead Friends and Relatives
• Chapter 6: Monopolies Among Banks Are Why There Are Monopolies Among Every Other Economic Sector
• Chapter 7: Monopolies Are Why America Can’t Build or Run a Single Weapons System Without Assistance from China
• Chapter 8: Monopolies Are Why a Small Business Owner and His Girlfriend Had to Get Permission from Amazon to Live Together
• Chapter 9: Monopolies Are Why Hospitals Can Give Patients Prosthetic Limbs and Artificial Hearts but Not Salt and Water in a Bag
• Chapter 10: Monopolies Are Why a Woman Found Her Own Home Listed for Rent on Zillow
• Chapter 11: Monopolies Are Why a Family Has Seen Only the Top of Their Loved One’s Head for the Past Two Years
• Chapter 12: Monopolies Are Why I Traveled to Chicago and Tel Aviv to Learn How to Stop Them
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography and a Note on Sources
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright