It was about American industry in the fifties, “the big three” auto manufacturers — Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford — concentration of power the US steel oligopoly and how now, since the nineties, ThyssenKrupp and some almost anonymous Asian firms pretty much eat our lunch in that market and how if we’re going to look at oligopolistic concentrations in restraint of trade we pretty much have to do a global analysis. It was about oligopolies yielding oligarchs and it was about Martin Geddes’ brilliant insight regarding “regulatory capture” and about applying that more broadly than the telecommunications industry, because almost all American business is tied up in the game of attempting to lasso and hogtie government in the service of the shareholders. It was about the shareholders, the lobbyists, and Marvin Bush. It was about the oligarchy, and I was going strong until that darn dog broke my concentration and I navigated away from the composition pane to google something related to Marv and damned if I didn’t lose it. But it really was a good post. It had quotes from a December 2024 article in the Toledo Blade and all kinds of other good stuff. You would have liked it.
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