Excerpts from "When Corporations Rule the World" by David C. Korten

Page 113 - From 1977 to 1989, the average real income of the top 1 percent of U.S. families increased by 78 percent, whereas that of the bottom 20 percent decreased by 10.4 percent. [16]

Thus the pooerest among us became not only relatively poorer but absolutely poorer. What these figures don't tell us is that these absolute decreases occurred in spite of the fact that those who were employed in 1989 were working longer hours than they had in 1977, and far more families had two people working full time as more women entered the workforce. For many U.S. families among the bottom 60 percent, even longer hours and an extra breadwinner were not enough to make up for the decline in wages.

Notes page 349 -- 16. Mishel and Bernstein, The State of Working America, 46; based on data from the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, 1991. Figures are in 1992 dollars.[Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein, The State of Working America: 1992-1993 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993).]

Page 207 - ... when markets are global, the forces of monopoly transcend national borders to consolidate at a global level. As soon as borders are opened, the pressure mounts to allow domestic firms to merge into ever more powerful combinations in order to be "competitive" in the global marketplace ...As a rule of thumb, economists consider a domestic market to be monopolistic* when the four top firms account for 40 percent or more of sales. Through a series of mergers and consolidations, the top four major appliance corporations in the United States (Whirlpool, General Electric, Electrolux/WCI, and Maytag) controlled 92 percent of the U.S. appliance market as of 1990, and four airlines (United, American**, Delta, and Northwest) accounted for 66 percent of U.S. revenue passenger miles. Four computer software companies (Microsoft, lotus, novell/Digital, and WordPerfect) controlled 55 percent of the U.S. software market in 1990, and two of them (Novell and WordPerfect) merged on June 27, 1994. [6]

When five firms control more than half of a global market, that market is considered to be highly monopolistic. The Economist recently reorted five-firm concentration ratios for twelve global industries. The greatest concentration was found in consumer durables, where the top five firms control nearly 70 percent of the entire world market in their industry. In the automotive, airline, aerospace, electronic components, electrical and electronics, and steel industries, the top five firms control more than 50 percent of the global market, placing them in the monopolistic category. In the oil, personal computers, and media industries, the top five firms control more than 40 percent of sales, which shows strong monopolistic tendencies. [7]

The argument that globalization increases competition is simply false. To the contrary, it strengthens tendencies toward global-scale monopoly.

Notes from page 357 -- 6. "The Age of Consolidation," Business Week, October 14, 1991, 86-94. "Making the Perfect Connection," WordPerfect Report, Summer/Fall 1994, 2.7. These estimates are from "A Survey of Multinationals: Everybody's Favourite Monsters," The Economist, March 27, 1993 (special supplement), 17.

*[I assume Korten means oligopolistic, since it's not just one but a few firms - JH]

** [My father is a pilot for American Airlines. Formerly he had been a pilot for Trans World Airlines (TWA) before American bought that company. -- JH]