Multinational Monitor

NOV 1998
VOL 19 No. 11

FEATURES:

Oligopoly! Highly Concentrated Markets Across the U.S. Economy
Amy Taub and Robert Weissman

Terminator Seeds: Monsanto Moves to Tighten Its Grip on the Global Agriculture
by Hope Shand

Financial Deregulation Fiasco: HR 10 and the Consequences of Financial Concentration
by Jake Lewis

INTERVIEW:

The Microsoft Monopoly
an interview with
James Love

DEPARTMENTS:

Behind the Lines

Editorial
Breathing Life Into Antitrust Policy

The Front
Sweating a Labor Rights Deal - Arbitrary in Alabama

The Lawrence Summers Memorial Award

Money & Politics
A Connected Industry

Names In the News

Resources

Corporate Concentration

Oligopoly! Highly Concentrated Markets Across the U.S. Economy

by Amy Taub and Robert Weissman

With the embers still glowing frrom the slash-and-burn merger mania of the 1980s, this decade has witnessed a merger rush of far greater magnitude. U.S. corporate combinations proceeded at a record pace in 1998, smashing the pinnacle established the vcar before. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reports more than 4,700 major Mergers occurred in 1998 (the FTC's reporting year end's in September), with the transactions combined totaling more than a trillion dollars. The 1997 record was 3,400 mergers worth S700 billion.

The result is an increasingly concentrated national economy, with fewer and fewer corporations exerting more and more market - and political dominance. MORE >>

Terminator Seeds: Monsanto Moves to Tighten Its Grip on Global Agriculture

by Hope Shand

Biotechnology/Chemical giant Monsanto stands, on the brink of engineering a massive transformation of worldwide agricultural practices through introduction of suicide seeds - genetically engineered seeds that beget sterile progeny.

The owners of the patent for genetic seed sterilization refer to it as a "technology protection system," but critics have dubbed it "the Terminator." Advocates say it will spur investment in plant breeding worldwide, critics fear it will bring ruin to resource-poor farmers, destroy biodiversity and dangerously consolidate corporate control over plant genetic resources. MORE >>

Financial Deregulation Fiasco: HR 10 and the Consequences of Financial Concentration

by Jake Lewis

Financial Deregulation - the merging of banks, securities firms and insurance companies under common ownership - has become Capitol Hill's longest running and most expensive show. Like a bad Halloween horror movie, the issue appears as a rerun in Congress after Congress. MORE >>

The Microsoft Monopoly

an interview with James Love

James Love is the Director of the Consumer Project on Technology. The Consumer Project on Technology is active in a number of issue areas, including intellectual property, pharmaceutical drug and biotechnology pricing, telecommunications, privacy and electronic commerce, plus a variety of projects relating to antitrust enforcement and policy. Love and the Consumer Project on Technology have also emerged as leading critics of Microsoft. MORE >>

 

 

 

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