Reviewed by Alan F Kay
My great-grandfather, unused to automobiles, five years before I was born in 1920, was killed stepping off a curb without looking. He owned a horse plowed farm in Newark, NJ. Later I lived with my grandparents in East Orange on 15th Street where the chock-a-block houses were separated by slight alleys. Once in 1930 grandma walked me a few blocks to a butcher shop to buy a chicken. To the best of my recollection, the butcher wrung the head off the selected chicken (amazing me to see a headless chicken running around the floor), picked it up and plunged it into a hot water barrel to pluck out its feathers and cut it into pieces with a knife the way grandma wanted. We were not on a farm. We were in the suburbs.
As Barry Lynn’s book Cornered examines in exquisite detail during the 80 years since my childhood, stores established countries like the US have come a long way. Lynn examines how all this happened as capitalist societies evolved. He shows how countries are now loaded with stores of all sizes. Giant Wal-Mart sells thousands of different items to over a hundred million Americans. How did that happen? Store owners and would-be owners wanted to grow. Why? To make more money. That’s capitalism, and the US has evolved to become one of the most capitalist countries in the world.
Are there limitations to what the public wants, or should want, for its food from stores? Yes, there are many examples of standard foods that cut costs but lead to bad diets and poor health like obesity and other common afflictions. Then there are ingredient mistakes that get covered up or minimized so as not to be widely noticed. And finally, problems arise because big food sellers sell under many different labels once owned and sold by different companies and now increasingly acquired by a monopoly selling under its acquired brand labels. They’re now so huge that there are virtually no alternatives for buyers but to buy from the monopoly. Lynn explores what can be done to improve the situation for buyers. Growing rapidly, as in our small town in Florida, includes more growing of local produce and local farmer’s markets.
But it is not food alone that is the problem. Wal-Mart sells almost everything bought by the general public. Monopolies are almost everywhere and unrecognized except by the tiny few who are knowledgeable enough to understand and contest the hundreds of diverse monopolies. Lynn discusses how the anti-trust rules and regulations have been gradually corroded. Unfortunately economists are trusted to explain why this happened. The fact is that economic textbooks and obsolete theories have indoctrinated generations of economists to see no problems with eliminating anti-trust regulations and ignoring monopolies.
Lynn’s Cornered is a uniquely useful book for references, easily found in the index, endnotes and selected bibliography that touch on thousands of examples of successful, wealthy companies that seek anonymity avoiding both anti-trust regulations and the stigma of a monopoly. This book belongs on every activists bookshelf as well as in economics courses and public libraries.
