Corporate conspiracies

There is Constitutional law regulating fair interstate (i.e. national) trade in the USA. Sadly, there is no international law regulating fair trade. Individual countries enter into joint pacts to behave fairly and then immediately seek to bend the rules knowing there is no effective world court to upbraid them into behaving fairly. This is particularly true with companies doing trade internationally.

OPEC is a perfect example. There sit representatives from oil producing countries regulating the price of, supply of, and political leverage of oil. Other prime examples are the airlines, giant food companies, car industry, steel manufacturers, etc. Want proof? None of these companies meet on U.S. soil in annual conferences. Why? Because, if they did, either the Sherman Antitrust Act or even the Rico criminal statute could be levied against them. I remember meeting with Jeff Krindler, VP at PanAm, in 1987, when he bragged, openly, that he had just come back from Bermuda where IATA airlines had their annual price-fixing meeting, sorting out routes, and dividing up the airplane slots at Kennedy and other airports. What, you honestly thought the airline industry was open, fair, and competitive? Believe their statement that they reach pricing in open and fair competition if you like, but then you would be helping them build their effective monopoly — a monopoly, I would remind readers, that comes on the back of huge military spending (your tax dollar) to develop the technology, planes and airspace. What technology you ask? Well, how about the Internet and connectivity (as seen this last week as United experienced a computer glitch). That’s U.S. taxpayers’ infrastructure their business is built on, all the while they collude in secret, gobble up smaller airlines, all to allow them to control the effective monopoly of air travel.

There once was an American president and his successor, Teddy Roosevelt and Wm. H. Taft, who believed that the disparity of wealth in America was dangerous and bred revolution. Teddy put the blame on that disparity of wealth on the colluding by corporations to price fix and manipulate the so-called free enterprise system. Roosevelt and then Taft invoked the Sherman Antitrust Act over and over, breaking up these cabals of crooked wealthiest Americans. They didn’t raise taxes to soak the rich, they didn’t destroy industries to allow smaller industries to fill the gap. What they did was stop the price fixing, stop the wage fixing, what they did was bring the Sherman Antitrust Act into play, allowing the Supreme Court to approve the definition under Constitutional law, and break up first the oil giant Standard Oil and then went after American Tobacco and, in a legacy of their action almost a century later, Bell Telephone and Microsoft.

Whoever the next president is, he or she will face one great challenge that people like Elizabeth Warren and even some Republicans are openly talking about: the disparity between the wealthy and the majority of poorer Americans. What the next president will have to contend with is the power of money over the laws of the land. The Sherman Antitrust Act is the perfect weapon to make free enterprise open and fair once again. The cabal of Wall Street cannot be beaten by raising taxes because they are better and smarter than the Feds at hiding real wealth (note Apple has, for example, $158 billion in overseas banks, in cash) and maintaining the leverage that money affords. However, if you remove their ability to collude, to manipulate control on the exchanges and to price fix in overseas secret meetings, then they can be brought back into compliance with the American ethic of fair play.

This is not about who has the money, you or them. This is about, as Teddy Roosevelt said, “The great corporations … are the creatures of the state, and the state not only has the right to control them, but it is duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.” I’d say most airlines flying from New York to LA with prices that are within 2 percent of each other is pretty clear evidence.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.