Inequality might seem like old news. Occupy was beating that horse in 2011, and we’ve surely seen some graphic or other on the massive bank consolidation taking place since 1990, resulting in four bank monopolies: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. Inequality has always existed in America, anyway. Why is it so urgent now?
Not only is the wealth more uneven than it has ever been, but unequal distribution does not stop at wealth. We are living in a time when a handful of corporations control wealth, media and food.
There is $24.7 trillion in mutual funds in the world, and $1.24 trillion of this is directly invested in index funds, according to a 2011 Fact Book that the Investment Company Institute released. That means the rest of that vast sum of money is in actively managed funds. But according to Brendan Coffey at Forbes, “an internal study [a chief investor at a hedge fund firm said] his firm recently found that the vast majority of mutual funds defined as actively managed see 95 percent of the assets they hold determined by an index.”
Coffey goes on further to say indexes are controlled by “McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor’s, Northwestern Mutual, which owns Russell Investments … CME group, which owns 90 percent of Dow Jones Indexes, and Barclay’s, which took over Lehman Brothers and its Lehman Aggregate Bond Index.”
These four corporations, then, hold in their hands the investment future of roughly $23 trillion. But hold on, because we’ve only just begun our journey into inequality.
The seeds from which our food grow are now consolidated in the hands of ten multi-national corporations. The proprietary seed market has grown tremendously because these corporations can run an exclusive monopoly on them. These monopoly seeds “now account for 82 percent of the commercial seed market worldwide,” according to Context Network.
An article in Cereal Secrets found “that in 2003 … the ABCD firms controlled 73 percent of the global grain trade.” The ABCD firms include ADM, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus. These four corporations control more than half of the grain grown and eaten on Earth, so essentially they control the global grain trade.
We believe we maintain control over our lives, but this appears to be but a cognitive dissonance that enables us to ignore the reality of our situation — we are increasingly controlled.
In fact, a handful of corporations even control the media.
Looking at visual data Jason at Frugal Dad collected, just six companies control 90 percent of the media. These companies include General Electric, News Corp., Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS. The question that needs to be asked is whether the media still controls only what we think about, or whether the media now controls what we think.
These mega-corporations might not own our lives, but they certainly control us. But knowledge is power, and knowledge also heralds action. Like the Occupy movement, we need to protest a new corporate control of our vital institutions.