Are all the companies controlled by a couple corporations?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Are all the companies controlled by a couple corporations?

Necrobama: Aug 4, 2006; by the sex ghost

The video in the OP does a good job at identifying certain trends in the macro-economic topology of the US, and some of it is even on display very publicly in, for example, the tech industry where buyouts and mergers seem to almost always be occurring in some sense or another - in 1997 The Simpsons was lampooning on the practice in an episode where one of the plot sublines was a Bill Gates buyout of Homer’s product simply because it was easier to use their considerable market position to buy them than it would be to compete with them - while this is of course a fictional plotline, its inspiration comes from Microsoft’s early business practice of doing just that - Consumers Software in 1991, Fox Software in 1992, Softimage, NextBase, One Tree, and Altamira in 1994, RenderMorphics in 1995 and so on and Microsoft continues this practice through today, with their sights most recently set on Activision Blizzard.

Microsoft of course isn’t alone - one of the most well-known software companies in the nonprofit world is a company called Blackbaud - their signature product being a software suite called Raiser’s Edge. Some of Blackbaud’s latest acquisitions include three of its former competitors - EVERFI, Convio, and Smart Tuition, all valued in the hundreds-of-millions category. Whatever profits those companies were bringing in, are now Blackbaud’s profits.

And I want to stress - absolutely none of this is remarkable in any way - it is how our system is designed to function. The capitalist success story ends in one of two happy endings: you compete and knock out the kingpin, or you become enough of a threat for them to buy you out and finance the rest of your natural life.

And let’s be clear - these buyouts aren’t simply to end the competition - they also serve the purpose of acquiring a customer base and securing a revenue stream. Convio still exists at https://www.convio.com - it is now simply labeled a Blackbaud product, and the revenue from that product is now part of Blackbaud’s revenue, and their senior leadership are paid out appropriately*. This is a consolidation of wealth in action - every single tech merger or buyout that happens, happens in service of consolidating wealth and, again, I want to stress that this is normal - this is the success story - this is how our system was designed to function.

So, while the video in the OP certainly touches on some salient points, I think it’s an unfortunately overbroad picture of the US’s corporate topology that lends itself to far too easily having various holes punched through it - and there’s a whole thread’s worth of stuff in relation to that to unpack from how the medium of TikTok itself shapes the message and its receipt to the use of ‘entertainment’ content disguising itself as essential economic news.

All of that being said, what’s more troubling is the question of what exactly these corporations who work to consolidate profits into as few silos as possible do with all of that money. Coincidentally enough, renowned Economics Professor Richard Wolff put out a segment on this just today - the full video is linked here, and I’ve transcribed the “meat” of the argument he advances below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlGdNJU1El8

quote:

We have a government of a capitalist economic system and what that means is, that the discretionary wealth, what the corporations call profit, is in their hands. We all work to produce the profits, but they get them. We get a wage, they get all the rest of the value we produce when we work. They get the profits in their hands and that enables them to make themselves very wealthy because they take a healthy chunk of the profits we all produce for them, they take it for themselves.

The richest people in the United States are not the athletes, or the movie stars that you hear about, they are the run-of-the-mill top of the corporate empire - the people who pay themselves on average these days 10, 20 billion dollars a year, that's the core of our wealthy populations [...] and they use that money to control the government - they always have. They don't want to pay taxes, they use their power to keep their taxes low; they want to shift the burden of taxes from themselves to the mass of the population. They've done that forever - that's the way the system works, and it has real consequences.

One of them is that the corporate leadership [...] have the wealth - they don't take it all for themselves, they use part of it for example, to grow the business. They use another part of it to purchase the political system that services them, and how do they do that? I think most of you know - they donate. They are the big donors to this or that candidate, to this or that political party. They don't just donate to each political race (they do that!) but they also buy an army of what are called 'lobbyists' who literally work with the elected officials throughout the time of their governmental service giving them ideas, suggestions, maybe some threats about what to do politically, and the politicians all understand, that's literally where their bread is buttered. They have to do what the corporations and those who they enrich want, because they know what will happen if they don't: if they turn against those [corporations], the [corporations] will give money instead to their political enemies. In one case it will be to this candidate running in the primary against that one, or it's to this candidate running in the general election to that one. You cannot afford to oppose your donors because you will be gone.

I can't tell you how many offices I have sit in personally, having the elected official tell me, "Look, I agree with you, I would like to do what you're suggesting, but if I do, I'm out of here, and I will be replaced by someone who won't even meet with you to hear what you have to say," and you know something? I don't like to hear it, but I understand what they're telling me and I know that it's probably the truth.

[...]

But here's what's generally not available in our politics: a position for a politician to really go against the capitalists of the donor class - he can't, she can't. You see it very graphically in environmental or ecological issues of climate change, of global warming, all of that because there most capitalists kind of agree - they don't want regulations, they don't want anything that costs them money, they don't want any interference in what's profitable for them and so they will use their money to buy politicians allow them to block, as long as possible, regulations to help the environment; if they can't block them, delay them for decades. When that is exhausted, go in to the congress of the United States or the State Houses and buy the repeal of the legislation, and when all of that that doesn't work (and all of that means decades and decades in which they can continue to pollute or whatever else they're doing) then when finally they can't prevent a law, they can make sure it isn't administered by the government (again using their political power) or they evade it by having the laws be written so they can do something they couldn't do before.

Until and unless you have in the United States a real political opposition, that is an opposition to Capitalism and the Capitalists, then politicians if they have that alternative to use, to rely on to ally with, then we'll be able to see a different story of behavior from what we have seen.

I’ve got some research I put together on another machine for a “labor issues” newsletter I occasionally contribute to that shows some pretty damning links between NRA (not that NRA) uses its army of lobbyists to suppress wages both at the federal and state levels if it’s something readers of the thread are interested in reading more about.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2023 23:48

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:01

Necrobama: Aug 4, 2006; by the sex ghost

Google Jeb Bush posted:

I, for one, would love to hear more of that, Necrobama.

and actually the tiktok analysis thing too, whether in this thread or tech nightmares or what have you, but if you've got a topical research thing on quasi-organized wage suppression ready to go, even better

As to the shallowness of the argument prevented, I would largely echo this sentiment (though probably not quite as aggressively) -

Discendo Vox posted:

Blackrock and Vanguard don't loving own all the world's corporations. They're investment companies.

and add in the criticism that under such an over-broad argument anyone who has a retirement plan through their employer in the US is part of the ruling class which can be very easily dispelled by...looking at the balance of that employer-sponsored retirement fund. To the capitalist, you've essentially teed up the counterargument of "that's just your retirement money working for you!" which is Not Wrong - if you've got an agreement with someone that you'll give them $400/mo every year for 40 years and they'll return that to you after those 40 years at twice the amount you invested, that return has to come from somewhere - you invest money in [John Hancock/Fidelity/etc], that investment firm invests the money you (and others) have given them and then pass on some pre-negotiated % of their returns back to you. This is all true, this is how the capitalist retirement system works, and is a counterargument that any Marxist that has spent any amount of time trying to elucidate other members of the proletariat about how the system is tuned against them is ready for it and should preempt in their criticism - and with nothing more than a single TikTok video, it's impossible to discern if the presenter is A) uninformed, B) inexperienced, or C) controlled opposition whose sole job is to tee up the easy capitalist defense of the system I outlined (admittedly this is a claim that would require an extraordinary amount of evidence to seriously consider, it's a media actor archetype that Marshall McLuhan often spoke about, succinctly summed up with "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.")

And that all speaks to part of the problem with the medium itself. At just under three minutes long, you're already stretching the expected engagement time of any particular social media post. It's something you stop to watch a bit of while you're standing in the checkout line, or waiting for your latte, or sitting on the john - a TikTok is, I would argue, unquestionably one of the worst format to attempt to convey a full and defensible idea - there's a hidden fourth option to the ones I gave above here and that neither A, B, nor C are true, but rather D) the requirements to make a fully-founded, defensible criticism are antithetical to getting your message seen on the platform.

We don't know what TikTok's specific algorithm for promoting content is but there's lots of "crowdsourced" evidence (for whatever that's worth - the content creators themselves certainly seem to think it's worth something and thus tailor their content to fit) that says dancing, erratic movements, overexpressive facial expressions, and certain lengths of video seem to do best, so a content creator has to keep all of those things in mind and balance them with their message - "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." Ultimately, the performative feeling that comes through as a byproduct of playing to what (a creator thinks) will boost their ranking with the algorithm takes away a degree of seriousness from the entire message.

Succinctly: TikTok sucks for anything other than entertainment. It was never meant to be a tool to disseminate meaningful institutional awareness.

I'm pretty well burned out for the night, so I'll probably go digging through my poo poo some time tomorrow or even over the weekend depending how the next few days shake out at the old spreadsheet factory, but "The Other NRA" (National Restaurant Association) is a great example of an org with an incredibly powerful lobbying organ that's incredibly brazen and open in its goals, so it's not super hard to put together a really solid caulk-and-string board if it's salvageable in the state it's in (our original newsletter never got published, Ask Me About How Much Market Unionism Blows!)

# ¿ Apr 20, 2023 02:29

Necrobama: Aug 4, 2006; by the sex ghost

watho posted:

i’ve seen first hand that it’s used as dogwhistle to imply that jews control everything. there’s obviously criticism to be made against firms like vanguard and blackrock as with all of the capitalist system but saying that they own everything always rubs me the wrong way because at best it’s inaccurate and at worst it’s a radicalization tactic

Yeah, this is one of the metrics by which the claim that Senator Sanders is anti-Semitic despite being Jewish himself. Again: "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."

By making "the consolidation of wealth is a Jewish plot to control the world" a thing a group believes, it poisons the well for critical discussion of wealth consolidation by opening an escape hatch to argue against an anti-Semitic straw man despite the business landscape we see with our lyin' eyes.

eta) it also provides a pathway to portray basic class solidarity among the wealthiest as a grand conspiracy when no such conspiratorial effort is required - Capitalists know what's good for Capitalism and thus good for the Capitalists themselves

Necrobama fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Apr 20, 2023

# ¿ Apr 20, 2023 11:48

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Are all the companies controlled by a couple corporations?