Goliath
The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy
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- £12.49
Publisher Description
“Every thinking American must read” (The Washington Book Review) this startling and “insightful” (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has transformed American politics, and business.
Going back to our country’s founding, Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power—whether by government or banks—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal.
In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment.
The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. “An engaging call to arms,” (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An excessive concentration of power in a few hands has undermined the U.S.'s well-being, according to this passionate, ill-focused history of the country's economic policy. Stoller, a journalist and former Senate Budget Committee analyst, recounts the rise of antimonopoly policy, culminating in the New Deal regime of regulation and antitrust action to tame or break up overmighty banks and corporations. The result, he contends, was a postwar economy of independent farmers, mom-and-pop retailers, and mid-level manufacturers a paradise of populist, human-scale capitalism championed by Democratic Congressman Wright Patman, who fought epic legislative battles against Wall Street from the House Banking Committee, and about whom Stoller writes admiringly. Then Stoller traces the emergence of his villains antiregulation "Chicago School" economists, new Wall Street empire-builders such as Citibank's Walter Wriston, monopoly-friendly liberals such as John Kenneth Galbraith, and post-Watergate Democratic Congressmen who dismantled antitrust and financial regulations to create today's monopolistic economy of giant banks, agribusiness empires, social media behemoths, and Amazon. Stoller attacks "the beast of monopoly," pillorying chain retailers for lowering prices too far and dismissing the Chicago critique of antitrust regulation as "pseudoscience." Ultimately, he lapses into a baggy jeremiad that blames "concentrated power" for everything from fascism to obesity. This account of once-potent populist politics probably won't convince those who aren't already in sympathy with Stoller's worldview, but it's lively history.
