Competitive Illusions
Recently, my significant other sent me out to buy a small, travel-size can of hair spray for a short trip we planned to go on. Needless to say, the drug store I went to did not have the specific brand she had requested and I, of course, had forgotten my phone so was unable to ask for further instructions. That led to a 20-minute detailed inspection of the four shelves of hairspray, trying to choose among multiple brands and multiple styles, before finally getting exasperated and deciding on the one that I thought would best suit my wife’s hair, only to be told upon returning home that any one of that myriad of choices would probably have been fine.
To be stymied by so many choices for hairspray was, for me, yet another example of the rampant consumerism that is destroying our planet. The metal and plastic containers, the plastic tops and nozzles, and the poisonous chemicals in the sprays themselves all create external costs that we ignore at our own peril. For others, this array of choices represents the abundance created by the “free-market” where competition responds to the demands and desires of their customers, a perfect display of capitalism at work. Unfortunately, that is an illusion. The hairspray market in the US is dominated by just a handful of companies – Unilever, Procter & Gamble (P&G), L’Oreal, and a couple of private-equity owned Unilever spinoffs – all of whom together control about 90% of the market. Unilever, P&G, an L’Oreal each individually sell hairspray under different brand names giving the impression of great choice and fierce competition but in fact merely reflect the individual conglomerate’s competition with itself, which, you can imagine, is not really a competition that might bastardize its own products at all, but more often an attempt at market segmentation.
In fact, our lives as consumers are filled with these illusions of choice. The entire market of personal hygiene and beauty products, such as hairspray, is largely controlled by just seven firms. The vast majority of consumer goods, food, and drink that we purchase, under hundreds of brand names, are owned by less than a dozen companies. If you are reading this with eyeglasses or sunglasses on, there is an 80% chance they were manufactured by just one company, Luxotica, regardless of the brand name on your glasses. If you flew home to be with family over Thanksgiving, chances are you booked your flight on one of two online booking companies, (Expedia or Priceline), using one of the four dominant cable and internet providers, (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, or Spectrum), and flew on one of four airlines, (American, Delta, United, or Southwest). If you rented a car, it was from one of three conglomerates, (Avis Budget Group, Enterprise Holdings, or Hertz Group Holdings), that offer 16 brands between them. If you had turkey, beef, chicken, or pork at any time over the Thanksgiving weekend, it was likely processed or packaged by one of the four food companies that control over well anywhere from 50%-80% of each market. The other accoutrements of your Thanksgiving meal were probably purchased from one of the four grocery retailers that take in over two-thirds of all grocery sales. If you had french fries or tater tots, you probably overpaid for them since the potato cartel of four companies that controls 97% of that market has just been accused of price fixing. When you brushed your teeth that night, there is a 70% chance that the toothpaste you used came from Crest or Colgate. If you had someone come and feed your cat while you were away, they food they gave your cat was made by just two companies, (Mars or Nestle), regardless of the brand of cat food you bought.
If you decided to buy something on cyber Monday, you probably searched for the product using Amazon or Google, and the product was probably delivered by UPS, FedEx, or Amazon. If it was a product made in China, it probably was originally shipped to the US in a container from one of three maritime shipping alliances made of up ten firms in total that control 85% of the maritime container market. If you instead bought an item for home improvement, you probably went to Home Depot or Lowes. If you paid for that item by credit card, it was probably issued and processed by Master Card or Visa who combined are responsible for 70% of issuance and 90% of processing. When you eventually pay that credit card bill, the money probably comes from your account at one of the four or five banks that control the majority of domestic US deposits.
In virtually all aspects of our economy, every sector, every industry, you will find a cartel, an oligopoly, a monopoly, or a monopsony that controls the majority of the market. (If you’d like to know about the half century effort that allowed our economy to get to this point and how extensive this concentration of power is, I wrote about it here.) The result of this concentrated economic power is that we now have a class of oligarchs who are increasingly interested and, more importantly, able to convert that economic power into political power. Their ability to exert that political power was turbocharged by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that effectively lifted all restrictions on campaign finance and whose theoretical prohibition on campaigns coordinating with outside groups has turned into a depressing joke.
The impact of the decision began to be felt in the 2012 Republican primary campaign where the viability of a candidate depended on lining up a billionaire benefactor – for Rick Perry, it was Texan Harold Simmons; for Rick Santorum, it was Christian billionaire Foster Friess; for Mitt Romney, it was a group of four hedge fund managers; and for Newt Gingrich, it was casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. In fact, Adelson basically funded Gingrich’s doomed candidacy from its beginning to its extended end in return for a promise to move Israel’s capital to Jerusalem. The billionaire backing became even more pronounced in the 2016 primary campaigns where the top 100 donors gave 30% more than the 2 million smallest donors combined. By 2022, we saw billionaire or billionaire-backed candidates with no government experience like Blake Masters, J.D. Vance, and Mehmet Oz parachute into states where they had only recently established a residence in order to run for the US Senate. This year, we saw the most expensive primary race for the House in history, one of a number of House races where dark-money funded PACs spent millions targeting incumbent progressive Democrats.
The spiraling amounts of money spent on primary campaigns are especially problematic since we have sorted ourselves into essentially one-party districts and states, meaning winning the primary is almost equivalent of election. Finding a billionaire sugar-daddy or amassing an enormous war chest as an incumbent now makes it almost impossible for a less well-funded candidate to launch a realistic challenge. Too often in the last decade we have seen a big-money candidate literally “clear the field” in primary campaigns. The result is the elimination of democratic choice, which is already severely restricted by our winner-take-all two-party system, and even that limited choice is now largely determined by the millionaire/billionaire class.
Of course, things are no better when you get to the general elections. According to a just-released study, the share of donations by the top 400 donors to the entire combined congressional and presidential elections in 2008, the last elections before Citizens United, was around 5% and that of the top 0.01% of donors was just under 30%. By 2024, those numbers had ballooned to just above 25% for the top 400 and over 50% for the top 0.01%. A preliminary report from Open Secrets for 2024 showed that the top 10 donors to outside spending groups such as PACs gave around $970 million combined, with almost all of that going to support Republican candidates, primarily Trump. That number is probably understated because Elon Musk apparently gave about $150 million more than Open Secrets reported, and that also totally ignores the $44 billion he and his Saudi partners spent turning twitter into a propaganda platform for Trump.
A decade and a half after Citizens United, the oligarchic takeover of our political system is complete. So far, eighteen of Trump’s cabinet and top advisor selections are billionaires. By 2020, the majority of the 535 members of Congress were millionaires or more, either by being one when they arrived or becoming one by getting re-elected long enough to become one using the legalized insider trading allowed only to Congress. It has only gotten worse over the last four years. These oligarchs are now intent on looting the public sphere in much the same way they divided up the private economy over the last 40 years. The next few years may well resemble the robber baron era of the 1920s or, worse, the oligarch looting of Russia earlier this century.
The democratic backsliding in this country has reached the point where we might be more accurately described as a competitive oligarchy. This does not mean that the person with the deepest pockets automatically wins – the campaigns of Scott Walker, Ron DeSantis, and even Mike Bloomberg prove that. Nor does this mean that there is no difference between the two parties or within the parties themselves. The system allows for opposition and differing views on governance, but the ability to enact those views and policies or even have them seriously debated is restricted by the whims of the one percent. This is especially true now that the major media sources – the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, X, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, the three cable networks – are themselves owned by oligarchs or corporate behemoths that have already show their willingness to censor reporting that conflicts with, and boost that which coincides with, the desires of their owners.
There is no reason this competitive oligarchy can’t continue for the foreseeable future. At this point, the system itself ensures there can be very little political or legal opposition that can challenge it. It is, so far, willingly complicit in Trump’s autocratic efforts to suppress any such dissent. It has shown the ability to manipulate public opinion to create dissension within any groups that oppose it or outright censor their views. It delivers the illusion of bounty and choice to the majority of citizens. The bureaucratic functionaries within these oligarchic organizations that are critical to perpetuating the system are often well rewarded and supportive. The methods the oligarchs use to siphon off and steal their billions is largely opaque to the average citizen. In short, it is able to keep the majority contented and distract or ignore those who are not. And, after all, this country contentedly lived with the racial fascism of Jim Crow for nearly a century.