So now we have the most powerful and cohesive organizations on Earth devoted to the pursuit of profit above all else and frequently at the expense of public interest.
And their unprecedented wealth threatens to
neuter democratic checks on their behavior. In theory, corporations are
still responsible to their shareholders. In practice, they’re beholden
to no one but boards of directors handpicked by senior managers.
As capitalism enriches capital at the expense of labor
and Wall Street at the expense of Main Street the winners are busily
erecting anticompetitive toll gates all across the economic landscape,
be they in the form of lower borrowing costs enjoyed by the still-too-big-to-fail banks or the higher health insurance premiums facing small businesses.
This is not a recipe for long-term economic success. If capitalism
means lots of private ownership and fair, transparent markets, then its
future remains bright. But if a zero-sum, winner-take-all struggle for
leverage is the name of the game, those games seldom conclude as the
winners might hope.
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