Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

by Rachel Slade

The new monopolists’ goal wasn’t to control prices by creating value, rather it was to “pit supplier against supplier, and worker against worker, and community against community,” writes Barry C. Lynn in Cornered: The New Monopoly of Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction. “Unlike a generation ago,” he writes, “the purpose of these first is no longer mainly to make things, nor to plan how to keep making things, nor even to understand how things are made. The purpose is to engineer rivalry among the actual people who make things in a way that results in a more rapid generation of cash in the accounts of the rich.”