Barry C. Lynn's article is one of the most cogent, provocative, and practical statements I have yet read on this matter. If you care about.... Barry C. Lynn's article is one of the most cogent, provocative, and practical statements I have yet read on this matter. If you care about democracy in America, go to Alter Net and read it. Excerpts:

In systems where oligopolies rule unchecked by the state, competition itself is transformed from a free-for-all into a kind of private-property right, a license to the powerful to fence off entire marketplaces, there to pit supplier against supplier, community against community, and worker against worker, for their own private gain. When oligopolies rule unchecked by the state, what is perverted is the free market itself, and our freedom as individuals within the economy and ultimately within our political system as well.
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When Ronald Reagan took power in 1981, one of his first targets was antitrust law. The new administration put forth a variety of arguments -- not least that international competition, especially with Japan, had rendered moot the old fears of monopoly. Yet the driving motive clearly was the philosophical antipathy of the Reaganites to the idea that the American people, acting through their representatives, had any business whatsoever telling business what to do. And the practical effect was to harness the institution of the corporation to that administration's larger project of shifting power and profit from the working, middle, and entrepreneurial classes to the powerful and rich.
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In essence, Wal-Mart has grown so powerful that it can turn even its largest suppliers, and entire oligopolized industries, into extensions of itself. The effects of this practice are most obvious in Wal-Mart's horizontal competition against other retailers. Retail experts sometimes talk of a "waterbed effect," which takes place when a supplier insists on collecting from weaker retailers at least some of the rent a more powerful firm refuses to pay. One recent study of how such power plays out within an entire system shows that a small retailer can expect to pay upward of 10 percent more than a powerful firm for the same basket of items. The effect also explains what takes place economically between communities served by Wal-Mart and those served by less powerful firms -- the more power Wal-Mart accrues, the more it is able to shift costs from, say, suburb to city. And so every day the competitive landscape tilts just that much more in Wal-Mart's favor. And so, every year, the landscape is littered with that many more dead or half-dead retailers -- including such once-big names as Winn Dixie, Albertsons, K-Mart, Toys R Us, and Sears.
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The producers that dominated the American economy for most of the 20th century were geared to build more and to introduce new, to protect their capital investments against overly predatory investors, to raise price faster than cost, to show some degree of loyalty to workers and outside suppliers and communities.

Wal-Mart and a growing number of today's dominant firms, by contrast, are programmed to cut cost faster than price, to slow the introduction of new technologies and techniques, to dictate downward the wages and profits of the millions of people and smaller firms who make and grow what they sell, to break down entire lines of production in the name of efficiency. The effects of this change are clear: We see them in the collapsing profit margins of the firms caught in Wal-Mart's system. We see them in the fact that of Wal-Mart's top ten suppliers in 1994, four have sought bankruptcy protection.

In a world of rising tensions within and among nations, of accelerating climate and environmental change, we would be wise to design the production systems on which we rely to be able to evolve as rapidly as the human and natural worlds around us evolve. Instead, we have programmed the dominant institutions within our economy to eliminate all the wonderful chaos of a free-market system. Rather than speed up the random motion and serendipitous collisions that have for so long propelled the American economy, Wal-Mart and other monopsonists are slowly freezing our economy into an ever more rigid crystal that holds each of us ever more tightly in place, and that every day is more liable to collapse from some sudden shock. To defend Wal-Mart for its low prices is to claim that the most perfect form of economic organization more closely resembles the Soviet Union in 1950 than 20th-century America. It is to celebrate rationalization to the point of complete irrationality.

Again, go to Alter Net, read the entire article, and pass it on!