Monopolizing

IN THE EIGHTEEN EIGHTIES John D. Rockefeller the first, the world's first billionaire, who lived from 1840 to 1938, enjoyed a daily income of approximately one million dollars, in the 1880s. One million, daily, in the nineteenth century. Mr. Rockefeller lived a long and fulfilling life, for he had a lot to live for. He retired at forty, and devoted the rest of his life largely to philanthropic endeavors. Standard Oil of Ohio was the tip of the spear of the industrial revolution in America during the immediate post Civil War era, when swords were beaten into ploughshares, and the United States joined the nations of Europe as engines of economic growth and prosperity. Although many of the inventions which have been wrongly attributed to American inventors, such as the automobile, actually originated in Europe, The United staes can rightfully claim to have invented the assembly line, the forty hour work week, and the five dollar work day. Renowned anti-Semitic racist Henry Ford invaded the American south, and brought cheap labor back to Detroit with him. But Standard Oil, over the decades, became a monopoly, a combination in restraint of trade, which necessitated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1892, and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. Monopolistic corporate capitalism lay in abeyance until well after the post World War Two period. In every primary area of the economy would have been monopolies were kept under control until the 1980s, until a new era of corporate mergers manifested. It seemed as if the anti-trut lawshad been forgotten. As historian Gore Viadl asked: "Didn't there used to be somethig called the "Sherman Anti-Trust law". Whatever happened to it? What happened to it is that it was cast aside and ignored in an era dominated legislatively by pro business neo-liberal Republicans, during the era of Ronald Reagan. The spirit of Rockefeller was reborn in the person of Jeff Bezos, who started selling books on the internet, and rapidly branched out into other consumer products. A newly published book by long time Wall Street Jouranal journalist Dana Mattioli details the rise of Bezos and his Amazon dot com company in a seminal work of great fascination: "The Everything War: Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power". Bezos and his corporate managers use every trick in the book to elevate his company to the status of the world's larget online retailer, a worthy opponent of and competitor with mighty Wal Mart. Competitors, online and in real brick and mortar were under priced out of existance. Those competitors included small town American Mainstreet. In 2017 a perceptive and enterprising lady, Linda Khan, published an article in which she detailed Amazon's monopoly status, a status worthy of comparison to Rockefeller's Standard Oil. She later became Chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission, and filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the mega firm, which is ongoing today. Although the ultimate outcome of this litigation remains somewhat in doubt, it seems reasonbale to assume that anti-trust action will in some form, to some degree, take place, and this gargantuan corpoation will be brought down to size,broken into smaller pieces, and that competition in the online marketpalce will be, to at teast some extent be restored. We the consuming masses of the global economy can only hope, for the sake of our pocketbooks.