different colors around the table but people who came from different backgrounds, people who grew up poor like he did, you know, people who had jewish mentors if you will but who connected with people across different ethnic and racial boundaries. that was all of what he was about. and i hope people get a true sense of the man and his character and his humanities. >> now, some viewers are going to heard the word "social justice through journalism" and have an adverse reaction? >> and he would have probably never described it that way. but that's what i saw in that the stories that he was intimately involved in and that he was most passionate about, the theories, how race is lived in america for which the "times" won a pulitzer, one of nine pulitzers with which gerald was connected in his tenure at the "times." i mean, that is -- that was a

theory that described what gerald called the silences in interracial relationships that led to misunderstandings and frustrations and anger. and he, you know -- and his colleague led the reporters and editors to produce that theory that really explained and illuminated the dynamics in racial interactions. so in that sense i call that an act of social justice. to get in there and to explain. children of the shadows, the theories that illuminated children growing up in poverty across the country. and that wasn't a black or white story but how poor kids are living and how are they making it? who's serving them? who's failing them? and again, this was something that he was intimately familiar with having grown up the way he did. but also he wanted to shed light on that. so in my mind, that's an act of social justice using journalism to make people aware.

>> did the sulzbergers participate in editing of this book? >> no >> gerald boyd is the original author "my times in black and white" his wife rob stone is the editor and author of the afterword. >> good afternoon. and welcome. welcome to the annapolis book festival on a beautiful day. i'm the president of the maryland capital advisors and past trustee of this great school.

today we're here to have barry lynn to discuss his latest book, "the new monoply capitalism and the economics of destruction." i think it's safe to say that after our collective experience of the last few years, we've all become a little more interested in finance and economics. and that's a good thing. barry has written a book that makes an important contribution to our understanding about concentration in market power among today's mega companies and how it affects us all. it's a great book. it's a book that will resonate with any of us as we go out and shop for goods and services at the nearby malls or shopping centers. by way of introduction, barry is the director of markets, enterprise and resiliency initiative and a senior fellow at the new america foundation. he authored a previous book entitled "end of the line."

he has presented his work to officials from several countries, the european commission, the white house, and the u.s. treasury department. as well as many corporations, labor, industrial unions and academic groups. he's published several articles in the financial times, harvard business review, harper's making just to name is few. we'll have time for q & a after our discussion but now let's learn more about the "monopoly menace." that's the title of our forum is called. >> thank you all for coming. i note it's a pretty day outside. and i'd actually rather be outside myself. and there's -- i was up on fletcher's boathouse a couple of weeks ago in d.c. and there were lots of shad in the water. but anyway, what i want to start talking about today is not fishing but another thing that happened in the water which is

the tea party. there's been a lot of talk about tea parties in this country recently. and i think it's important for us to get the story of the original tea party right. you know, a lot of folks say the tea party was a rebellion against high traffic tabs. -- taxes. and that's not really the case because the tea that was going to be landed was going to be considerably cheaper than the tea that people were drinking at that time. and then while some people say it's just -- the tea party was against the principle of taxation without representation, which is true, except that we have to remember that for a long time people thought that tax had been entirely rescinded and still they planned to rebel. the boston tea party was a rebellion against monopoly. the folks in america back then

they did not want one company governing their trade in tea. and governing their trade in all kinds of other goods. not even when the company brought lower prices. what they wanted was liberty to trade. they wanted liberty to make it their own markets with each other. the original tea partyiers. the founders of the country, they accepted taxation within reason. what they rejected was monopolization. america was in many ways a rebellion against monopoly. it was against monopolization of our souls by any one church and a rebellion of a monopolization of one or a few lords or

monopolization over our trade and markets. for over 200 years we used our antimonopoly laws to protect us against concentrated economic power, hence, concentrated power, which is what these laws were for. in a way we could look at our antimonopoly laws. it was a way of extending the doctrine the checks and balances into the political economy. in some ways the great misfortune about our antimonopoly laws is the fact that we got the word "anti"it makes them seem negative. at the heart of our laws is a very positive and important vision. and it's a simple and elegant vision. and it's a vision of an independent republic made up of independent citizens. and it's important just take a moment to talk about what that

means. independent republic that requires us to use our government to fight all efforts by monopolyists in other countries to dominate trade over some in this country. the founders understood the word free trade. it didn't mean protection but it also meant that you would never allow any one country to dominate any one thing. and the idea of an independent citizen, the basic idea there is that every citizen of the country or as many citizens as possible would have property. and the liberty to work that property. the liberty to bring that property and their work to an open market. and this property -- you have to understand the word "property" is not just real property. it's not just land, not just machines but it was -- the

concept back then was property included labor itself. this is something that james madison made very clear in his writings. he viewed labor as a form of property. and you had a right to exercise it. free of control by other people. and one of the great things about james madison is that he was very realistic. he understood that not every individual would be truly independent, at least all the time. his goal was to distribute power as much as possible. he wanted to enable as many citizens as possible to make themselves as free as possible at any one moment. over the years, a lot of folks called madison and jefferson naive. they said that their vision of independent property holders kind of impeded the specialization of labor, which is a way to increase the amount

of wealth in the system and make everyone richer. but madison's view is actually very practical politically. he understood that those who preached specialization of labor, what they actually wanted was to concentrate capital. they wanted to concentrate power. they wanted to concentrate control. what he also understood is independent citizens, people who actually saw themselves as independent, who viewed themselves as independent -- he saw these people as essential to the preservation of liberty. he said, and this is a quote, he said these people are the best basis of public liberty. they're the bulwark against the would-be lords. he expressed this kind of in a simple equation. this is an equation that the -- those can't capture.

the proportion of this class of the independent property-holders to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be society itself. it's very important for us to remember that this vision is not also a vision that was isolated in time. it is not something that was only of the early 19th century. there was a long period in this country where that vision of an independent property-holder was erased. the long period in the late 19th century when the plutocrats were in control. the long period in the early 20th century where the corporatists were in control. the independent property-holder was kind of shunted aside. but this vision was resurrected in the early 1930s, we actually resurrected this vision in a second new deal.

the people, the populists in the new deal, they prevailed again. and this is -- i mean, at a time -- early 1930s at a time when germany, when japan, when russia were falling deeper and deeper into authoritarian, and even totalitarian horror, in the united states, the people actually resurrected a democratic republic. during the second new deal. and to understand what was accomplished -- and this is after the plutocrats had been in control. this is after the corporatists had been in control, understand what was accomplished during the second new deal, i'm going to turn to the words of supreme court justice william douglas. it's a half century ago. he said these words in a case big oil companies were attempting to capture independent gasoline stations. ... when independents are swallowed up by the trusts and the

entrepreneurs have employees of absentee owners the result is a serious loss in citizenship. local leadership is diluted. he who is a leader in the village or the town becomes the pending on outsiders for his actions. clerks responsible to a superior in a distant place take the place of residence proprietors behold and to no one. in the 20th-century in the middle of the twentieth century we recreated in this country a republic of independent citizens. those of us who are somewhat older remember it this. we remember growing up in a country in which power was really distributed throughout communities and states. two years ago i started writing this book, i told people i was writing about monopolization in america people said you are crazy. there are no monopolies in

america. this is cowboy capitalism, the most competitive system the world has ever seen. as mike suggested we are less serum of that. we had the experience of what happened with lehman brothers and the meltdown and the experience of what we learned from the debate about health insurance and learning how much power is concentrated in private hands. we had the experience of watching films like food ink or reading michael pailin's books and learning what is going on in the food system. most of us think we live in a free market system. but it is important for us to take an honest look at what is taking place in our republic today. one way to do this is to start with books. you guys are here because you actually really deeply loved books. this is a book festival. i spent a lot of time talking to people in the book industry in

recent months and the reason is because last fall there was as some of you may remember a big price fight between amazon and walmart over books. .. 

>> the people who publish our books, the people who protect our editors, protect our writers, these people will not speak about consolidate power in this industry. behind the scenes they will talk about it, but not in front of any camera, not in front of the press. in the book business in the united states right now we see fear. let's think about beer for a second. when you go to the store you see all these different beer brands. seems like one of the great successes in this country, all of these new bottles, all of these new types of beer that sort of come online in the last 30 years, it's true. in 1970 there were 42 brewers in this country. now there's about 1500 brewers in this country. the difference is that to foreign trading corporations control about 90% of that beer.

all of those little tiny breweries, all of them added up together, they control about 4% of the point of beer in this country. last weekend i was speaking at a brewing conference in chicago, all these little crafters, one of the little brewers stood up and he said, he was speaking to the people who run the craft brewer association. and he said, just this, he said i look around and i seek to foreign corporations running the bear market in this country. and what these people said, what they told it is we have to go gentle with these folks we have to go gentle with these giants. it as if disturbed these giants they will disturb us on a lot bigger and a lot more effective way. and i was talking to another to afterwards, one of our biggest,

most successful independent craft brewers in this country. and, you know, what he told me? he told me, how does he get into a big box store in america today? how does he do it? does he call up wal-mart, take my beer but on your shelf? does he call up cost do and say take my beer and put on yourself? no, he has to called anheuser-busch. he says what you use your trucks and distribution arms to carry my beer into the wal-mart, to carry my beer into the costco and place it where you decide to place. that's the open market system in the united states of america today. beer brewing, just like in books, we see fear. it's the same in manufacturing. there's a lot out there right now to change -- there's an effort in the congress right now to change pricing policy in this country. is a really arcane subject. i'm not going to bore you with the issues about pricing policy in this country, but it's a

policy, the way this law could benefit actual real manufacturers, producers in this country. none of them will go out and speak up in favor of this law. because they are afraid. they are afraid that the powers that control our trading companies will take retribution against them. they are fearful. giant manufacturers, medium-size manufacturers are fearful in this country. before i go on i just want, we talk about this country being the paradise of entrepreneurship and small business. we should understand exactly what has happened to small and medium-sized business in this country. the oed see recently came out with a study that was look at sort of a number of people in this country the own the own business. actor in a 20 richest nations of the world. 22 richest nation. where did america come out in that list of 20 richest nations?

we came out the second to last. above only luxembourg. meanwhile, wal-mart, one company, now controls in some cases upwards of 50% of various lines of business in this country. 50%. often 30% plus. but let's get back to this issue up here. let's take a look at sort of our independent workers, because not everyone has the ability to run the own business, obviously. salaried workers in this country, let's look at white-collar employees, what's happening to people in this country. just one good example i think what's going on on madison avenue in the advertising industry. not long ago you had a couple dozen large advertising agencies, independent agencies. if you're a worker, if you are

an executive you could go and you could compete your, you know, the different potential employers against each other. you could sort of did a good salary. there's a real market for your labor in that industry. recent years, three giant holding companies have bought up almost every single one of those agencies. they control those agencies. the relative bargaining power, if you are an executive in advertising today, your bargaining power has gone down a whole lot, vis-à-vis the people who control that system. you lived increasingly in fear. not to mention the fact your chance of getting a better salary, more benefits has gone down. we have a fancy name for this. we call it labor monopoly. that's when you have a single buyer, just a few buyers who are essentially in cahoots with each

other. we can also express in a more simple way, which is that when we left them, big monopolies, we see to them the power to govern. the power to dictate terms. this is true as we just learned about doctors and nurses. i mean, here we are worried that creating some kind of a government control over medicine, yet we already have many of our doctors and nurses of our event can sign to governance called insurance agencies, insurance companies. it's true in silicon valley. just last week in "the wall street journal," there was a report, the antitrust division in the department of justice is looking at a buyers cartel for labor in silicon valley. they said google, ibm, apple, intel and another of other companies have quoted the have agreed not to recruit each other's employees. and buyers cartel in silicon

valley. our independent republic, you know, back -- you have heard the battles between hamiltonian san jeffersonians back in early days of our republic. they have fought on two main fronts. they fought on whether this was going to be an aristocratic republican, which a few people, essentially our system would be run by a few lords in charge of industrial states. that was the hamiltonian vision. why was everyone would have property. and then a second front was they fought over what kind of trading relations that we would have. would we essentially be dependent on the british, that's what hamilton wanted. would resort to fit into their system. or would we have truly free

trade which is understood to me, we would trade with anyone, the spanish, french, dutch, whoever. it took 20 years at the beginning of this country to work that out, this addition act, the embargo act of 1807, the war of 1812. these are all steps in cutting ourselves finally free from the british trade system. eventually the madisonian's one. and we managed to keep ourselves free of other peoples trading systems systems for a long time. and after world war ii, we had the power to engineer and international trade system that was really structured around a strange but kind of weirdly perfect amount of energy dependence and independence. in which the nations of the world were kind of brought together in a system in which

they could pursue their own sovereignty, yet there was just enough industrial energy dependence to ensure that it was really hard for them to go to war with each other. our postwar trading system hammered together at bretton woods insured peace and prosperity through energy dependence for many decades. so what have are free traders done over the last 17 years? since the clinton administration came in and signed nafta, since the clinton came in and signed the general agreement on tears and trade? they have essentially sold the key to this empire. this beautiful, this liberal, this cosmopolitan empire, is so carefully structured in. will system. they sold those keys. they turn over control of wall street, and wall street

essentially to turn over control of the wall street great trading copies. wal-mart, what is wal-mart? it is reincarnate. we just got the wrong end on us again. and the result, our injured independent republic is increasingly dependent. food ingredients, vitamin c, escorted acid is used in all these different practices foods to preserve the packaged food. vitamin c was first synthesized in the niceties, was first mass-produced in the united states. were not 100% dependent on chinese vitamin ca cartel. drugs, the ingredient in our drugs, about 90% comes from china. they break and trade with tomorrow tomorrow. we will not have drugs.

when the obama administration looks at china, what do they feel? fear. that's just the beginning. i won't go and belabor this, but in my book one of the things i look at is just to make clear, because we do consider ourselves primarily consumers at this point, the right is down. variety is down. i tell stories about the company -- is one company that dominates our eyeglass business in this country. there's two companies that pollute to tommy our toothpaste business in this country. there's one company that dominates that food production in this country. when they go to the store we see choice but increasingly it's an illusion of choice. the quality of our product is going to the safety of many of our product is going down. our health, if you measure it by, say, diabetes rates in this country, if you measure by life expectancy in certain groups of

people, it's actually going down. prices? they're going up. vitamin c cargo, what they did, the chinese, after they get one of% of our vitamin c, they raise the price by over 400%. beer. laughter was a bad year for beer drinking in this country. a lot of people out of jobs. beer consumption went down. what happened to the price of beer? went up. inputs and beard went down. price of your went up. why? they control 90% of our beer. job creation, that's gone down. monopolies will have to create jobs, they just tax us more. innovation, that has gone down. destructive speculation, that went up. manipulation of choice within our political system, that's got a. got a. on a credit control, that's gone up. vital systems, stability of vital systems, financing of our production systems, that has

gone down. too interconnected detail is not just true in our financial system, it's also true in our industrial system. pretty much every economic market in this country has been in some way monopolies. i go to in here and i will quote to hear, i go to in the book by will go to here. whether it is grains, metals, energy, retail, services, in production, look at high-tech. at microsoft, intel, ibm, cisco, apple. these companies ruled their systems. i haven't mentioned the folks who have their hands on our brain, and that's like google, at&t, comcast, news corporation. you know, just to sum this part of, i will turn to an outside expert, a guy named jim cramer whom some of you may know from

msnbc. when the justice department a couple years back approved the whirlpool maytag merger that gave whirlpool 75% control over our washers and dryers and berries other things in our houses, this is what jim cramer said, if there was ever any doubt in your mind that we have a government of, by and for the corporations, if you thought for a second that we were not right back in the gilded age, if you had the least ounce of faith and our regulars to do the right thing, you should give that up right now. and then he went on it goes, on tv i play a guy who's just out to help you make money. but when you're not trying to get rich, feel free to get mad. so how did this happen? there's the simplest answer, simplest answer is that we were taught to see ourselves differently. for 200 years in this country,

we saw ourselves as citizens for most. and what you citizens are you? citizens value liberty foremost in a generation ago, however, we were relabeled were we allowed ourselves to be re- labeled consumers. what do consumers value? consumers value not liberty, they value stuff. lots of stuff. cheap stuff. you know, it's important that i'm not making some kind of a hippie rant here. this actually has to do with law. strange as it may seem, the idea that americans are not citizens -- that we are consumers will with actually used to refrain how we apply our anti-monopoly laws. again, for two centuries in this country we use our laws to protect ourselves as citizens from concentrated political power. this is part of the

anglo-american tradition that goes back 800 years. this meant a couple of simple rules that we would use the law to impose competition just for the sake of competition, no matter what, because competition means there's not collusion. and we were just our law to protect our markets. then in 1981, the reagan administration came to power, and they changed this frame. they said from now on bradenton using these laws to help us citizens, we're going to use these lost jobs as consumers. we will use these laws to help promote lower prices, because that's what consumers like. they did that for a very simple reason. they did that to promote consolidation. because the consumer, welfare tested to put into places it simply, it's a thin cover for the old inefficiency argument. some of you may recollect, this is what -- back in the gilded

age, j.p. morgan, john rockefeller, how is it that you should have so much power. it's more efficient this way, competition is wasteful. competition is wasteful. put all the power in my hands and i will dictate what happens in the system in a way that helps to create a more efficient system. it's good for also cited. this is exactly the we could force it. it is the same of many of the people around our corporations they now. people who run wal-mart said same thing. let us use power. it's good for you. in 1776 in this country would turn herself some subjects into citizens. in 1981 we turn from citizens like into consumers. this was not a partisan thing. when the reagan administration

targeting to put in this idea of the consumer welfare, a lot of people from democrats and people who believed in his consumer movement said on in. but we have to be -- we should really understand the basic logic of consumers. consumers, this is the basic logic. consumers are served best by lower-priced. lower prices our g3 economies of scale, ergo monopolies are our best friend. to accept this inefficiency argument has always been, and this is true any 18th century, france, the sister in 19 century, this is true in 20 century soviet union. it's always been to accept a straight line to concentrated political power. and in the three decades since that happened, in this country,

then market after market. in market after market, trading companies run by wall street, financiers have inserted themselves into the relationships between american citizens. and i give you an example of how this works. one of the things i did was write this book as i said i'm going to go find out, i'm going to go buy myself a yeoman farmers, one of the last jeffersonian, madisonian farmers that i went to this place in tennessee, eastern tennessee, the watauga valley. i found this fellow named ronnie hazelwood. he has a deer in his 70 cows on that. mr. hazelwood, where do you sell your milk? he said that's become improper to use to sell in the local community. but now i can't. now i depend -- there's a guy on the other side of the blue ridge since a truck over every day and he picks up my milk and goes to

couple other surviving carries. but what about the people in your community? they all buy the milk at the wal-mart. so i went to the wal-mart. i want to find out where does the wal-mart get their milk if not from mr. hazelwood. i went to this wal-mart in elizabethtown, tennessee. and i went back to the cold case i looked at what was inside the cold case. i seem to be all these choices in there. you could buy milk that has a label on it that said that gary. is another label that said mayfield there goes another label doesn't great value. that's the wal-mart in storebrand. well, what i found out with a little research after the fact was that dairy and mayfield are both owned by company called dean foods. dean foods also provides all of the milk and the southeast that wal-mart puts into its stores. so dean foods actually controls the rising milk which which is the organic milk that was

industry. so basically for brands, one company, and they didn't like to feel like they had to do with a 72 how farm in the watauga valley, even though it's about three miles away. so in the united states, 2010, farmer, dairy farmer, he is locked out of his own community. he cannot sell to his own neighbors. so when you hear the word consumer, i think we should swap in the word, from now on we should swap in a word like p. on. maybe we should swap in word like tenet are made inward a proletarian. i'm a which is should just go back to the word subject. and that's what we are now. were subject to once every five years are patronized by one or the other factions of our elite. when you hear the word consumer, think concentration of power,

someone other than you. and a feed we have seen the's concentration of power in this country that we have seen in more than a century. i wrote cornered for many reasons. in part it was simply to highlight the degree of concentration we have seen. no one has done. i don't know why that is. the indoctrination is so powerful people just really believe them. i did until a few years ago. i want to show how this power affects real people. i wanted to show how does power affects real companies and real systems. i want to illuminate the political arguments that they used to concentrate this power. i wanted to make clear the stakes. you know, what are the stakes? the stakes are we increasingly see in this country a combination of private public power, blurring together private public power. it's already corporate image.

it's feudal in nature. it's increasingly authoritarian in nature. so what to do. kind of seems hopeless, doesn't it? you know, it ain't going to be easy. but i am absolutely, completely certain that we will prevail. we will break up and harness, or harness these goliaths. we will redistribute this power. we will rebound our american republic, a third time. now, why am optimistic? first, we have no choice. in my previous book instead of this book i look at how these systems have been made to interconnected to fail. it's a simple engineering issue. there's nothing complex about this issue.

look at the systems and you can prove that they are fragile and they can be made safe. so if you look at it you can understand. you have to do it. we cannot live in a system with systems that are going to collapse. the second reason i'm very optimistic is that we have very powerful tool but we have not been using. this tool is called commonsense. you know, what the language, if you read the language, you read medicine, he resembled, if you read brandeis, they speak in the words of commonsense. they don't use the words of the academic economists. they don't use the words of the social scientist. they don't use mathematics to describe political systems. you know what takes place in this country, every single relationship and our political a

comment is political in nature. it is political in nature. there's nothing fancy about it. it's just like the end of the wisdom off. most of you have seen that. they pull back the curtain. and what did they find? they found a little short guy pulling a bunch of leaders. the academic economist in this country, what they do, what they serve, they are the ones who we've the curtain that hides the people pulling the levers. such as top listening to them. use our common sense. when we say commonsense, commonsense tells us do not put all your eggs in one basket. academic economists tell you put all your eggs in one basket. third reason i am extremely optimistic. is that we have is very, very powerful political philosophy.

it's in our own past that the books are all there. the documents are all there. the laws are all there, to be dusted off. for 200 years, for most of 200 years this was a democratic republic. you can be made so again. the models are there. we have a model in the second new deal that shows us exactly how to distribute power. this is a deeply conservative philosophy. is based on the idea that we should never have faith in any tiny elite to lead us in one direction or another. it's based on an idea that the only way we can move forward is by dispersing power sufficiently so that the very slow wisdom of the people can figure out when someone is doing something bad, and block it. fourth reason i am extremely

optimistic is that we have the power. i have spoken a lot recently to all these different groups. i spoke to the book so that i've been speaking to farmers. i have been speaking to the brewers as i mentioned. everyone is in their little corner, and they're looking up and they seek the local bad goliath. and they feel like they are all alone. when we bring all of these people together, with the opticians, with the pharmacists, with the software engineers, with the scientists, with the advertising executives, with the doctors and the community bankers and the venture capitalists, and all these people have been excluded from the system, we have really, really really big numbers. we all have the same enemy. it's very simple. we just need to come together.

and there's a fifth reason that i'm actually very optimistic, and that is that a lot of them are going to help us. you know, we always talk about them as people are sort of out to get us. a lot of them, we kind of a loud them to do what they did. so when we stand up and organize and say what you are doing is really dangerous physically, it's dangerous politically, its dangers economically. a lot these people are going to help us take apart this concentrated power. i know this. there's people who really believe in the democratic republic of america. but it's not going to happen until we organized. now, the good news, and here's more good news, is that it's already started its starting in the u.k. is starting in the tory party. starting in the liberal democratic party. i spent a lot of time talking to

both of those parties in last two years. to some extent it's our happening in this country. there are pockets within the congress. there are pockets within the administration. there are people, individual people in the congress and administration who are doing really great things. i can't say i'm fortunate the administration as a whole is doing great things yet. i can't say that congress as a whole is doing great things, but there are people who see the light. and there are people -- so the issue is to empower those people. one thing though, i start talking about a tea party, you know, and in some ways that's another sign that good things are happening. a lot of the people who are in the tea party are out in the street. these are very, these are the people who are out there leading an effort to make change.

in some ways i think they may be being misled. i think one of the most important ways that they may be being misled is to attack government. they know something's wrong. like we know there's something wrong. we all know there's something wrong. but what we have to understand, we have to remember, and this is the thing, this is the thing about the democratic republica republicans, madison and jefferson, brandeis, what they understood his there is no such thing in this world, and this is what the libertarians are really at fault. there is no such thing in this world has no government. there's always government. it's even run by us aren't it's run by someone else. and if we ain't using government, someone else is using government against us. that's just the way it is. so in many ways i actually think

the fact that we have people out in the streets in this country now, that's a good thing. so you add all these things up, and the change is happening. the other side does not have the power to stop it. it looks really bad, but there's a great awakening that's taking place. so anyway, i thank you again for coming out, and it's, you know, we have a little bit of work but i think it's going to be fun. [applause] >> by the way, berry does that in the book as well. really bums you out. [laughter] >> and then shows that there is potentially some hope to get out of this mess. we have some time for q&a if there are some questions.

>> there's a microphone at the end of that row, please. >> i really appreciate all of the things you talk about. but i think you kind of missed the big granddad, and that is right now six banks own -- represent 60% of our gdp. which is i was shocked when i found that out. and they are spent over a million -- a billion dollars a day with congress trying to effect the change in laws to regulate wall street. and when wall street and turned around and sell to their investors stocks, and then turn around and take, you know, the derivatives, or add up the derivatives are what is and that against it, and make themselves a lot of money, and that's perfectly legal. and they have that kind of

clout. and 60% of the gdp. that's a monopoly that is really hard for us to deal with. and on top of that, there's one other thing that i don't understand, that there's a movement to try -- i know in europe they're trying to do it, and that is tax wall street. i heard that if we got a half a% mac sales tax on all the transactions in wall street, that is the equivalent of all of the bailout money that we got. that we paid out. if that is a half% mac, if we tax them at 5% which is what we all pay for sales tax, i think i would get paid off pretty quick >> these are both great comments. you know, one of the reasons i don't focus on the financial consolidation and to focus somewhat on the this on the book

but i also knew there's a lot of other papers looking at that. so when i joined his book, especially the financial collapse with the front, they're all these books and research topics that were sort of being launched, being written. and what i plan to do is, no one has been looking at how wall street as a group, you know, how does it exercise its power, how do they affect the real economy? these large corporations, large trading copies, these are their institutional tools. these are the levers that is used to reach out and affect us, to tax us, to govern us, to determine who does what were. who makes the product into doesn't make the product. what they get paid for it. so that's what i wanted to show is this is how wall street operates in the real world.

in terms of the concentration in banking, we do, its act in ways last dramatic than it was in, say, 18 '90s. with j.p. morgan, when j.p. morgan was about to they should talk on the organized different system. one the organize was wall street. wall street basically gave him a loan. he and his two cronies the ability to determine who did what were in this economy. he was essentially the king. he distributed favor. he distributed property as he saw fit. so we don't see on wall street quite that sort of concentration that we saw back then. but it is a big issue. i absolutely agree, and -- but again, it's something that we are going to be able to do with the interns like taxing wall

street, if you tax just the banks, and the way things are structured out the tax will just end up affecting it being passed on to us somehow someway. the other issue, you could also tax the bankers. unit, there's a difference between taxing banks and taxing bankers. if you tax them were taxing us of that if we tax the bankers, then those are the people who are getting wealthier using this present system. when people are talking in europe about taxing banks, that's not such a great thing. i would like to see them taxing the bankers. one of the things, if these banks need to be bailed out, if these banks are so big, that they will need to be bailed out again as it looks like this deal that were creating with the financial bill right now,

believe them, then these banks, went to recognize that are essentially part of our government structure. they are agencies. they are parts of the state. if they are parts of the state, then the people who run these, why would the people who run these things be earning any more than, say, the head of nasa? why we, the people, who run these banks earn more than the president of the united states? if these guys are not taking real risks, then they are not in private business. they are doing the public's work. so what i would like to see is if these banks are that big, that saying too big to fail, the people running it are essentially public servants. they should be paid as public servan >> i'm looking forward to reading your book and getting more information, but i'm also

confused about the painting of the public as helpless victims waiting for it to fall down from the sky. i'm a little worried about this idea that, yes, if we change what we want, if we value of the things differently, if we decided, no, i want to pay 10 cents more for a gallon of milk. if we do that then i'm quite confident we will respond. but i'm not quite so sure we have actually done this to ourselves intentionally. your comments? >> you know, i think that, i mean, it's an interesting comment. it's something that friedman base of the road a lot about in the 1960s which is sort of the way that we can exercise power through the system by how we

buy. it was a very big part of his philosophy was trying to make us see ourselves -- welcome everyone something different we should use our dollars to determine how the system operates. you know, i think when you have this much power concentrated in the hands of the few, the people who have had a hand on those mechanisms, you know, like milk. there's two companies in this country that control about 90% of the milk supply. they openly cooperate. if you take your dollar and you try and buy, affect how the system operates by buying from pet gary as opposed to mayfield dairy, you are buying from the same company. and this point is why i can't see how this is something that we wanted. it was something that was sort of an imposed upon us. it was imposed upon us as it's

been opposed in the past. this is not the first time this has happened. this is just part of human nature. certain groups of people try to use these institutions to rule other groups of people, rule out. so he'd know one of the things i never tell people, i never say take your dollars and try and change the system. if, say, wal-mart is the cheapest place for you, i think in certain cases like milk in tennessee, it's not a market system and, therefore, it's not cheap. but if it really is the cheapest place for you, be very careful. check the prices very carefully, but go there. never do anything a rational with your money, but then you should vote, usual power as a citizen to remake the system so that it works for you. >> i can it's not just a matter of consumption. it's also a matter of what kind of jobs we have. it's like it is a guy in tennessee. he's got cows. he's got milk.

does he not have a right to sell to his own community? >> i think you're missing the role of the consumer in getting the process started. i can concede that once it gets rolling it will stop until the extra nose of the economist. but it's important to realize that if we keep going through life optimizing our price, you're going to guarantee to get monopolists are. >> isn't part of the solution, barry, you're advocating to enforce the anti-monopoly laws that we have, such that you're not advocating that consumer change the behavior. you're advocating that we don't let the producer get as large and powerful as they are? >> absolutely. i mean, i think -- you actually -- people will in many cases just respond to price. that's what we do. i mean, price, when you look at

quality, when you have a real open market, we have real many choices, there's all these issues as you look at this tomato versus this to mayor and there's a lot of subjective decision-making that goes on. so the idea that -- i mean, one of the things happening in this country is that the prices are actually being used, this idea of lowering prices are being used as weapons against the people who actually produce. and one way to look at this is, you know, again it's like we are consumers but we are also producers. and women trying to see ourselves only as producers and -- i mean only as consumers.

and that's a relatively recently phenomenon. you say things like, yeah, it's a strong impulse, but for more than 200 years in this country with ourselves men as producers but we didn't talk so much about lowering prices. most of the time we talk about raising wages. we talked for keeping prices up for the commodities that the coming, the stuff we grow on our farms. so it's like this idea that lowering prices as opposed to raising return, that this is going to be the only way, this is the only thing we will respond to with a bunch of chickens in which throw out he. i think that really truly, deeply miss apprehends what we are as human beings. what it does it turns us into animals as opposed to people who can use our own reason. [inaudible] >> which is an international economy, particularly with a

different regulation, regular party states and lack of regulation and free for all. you know, you cannot establish the boundaries that used to be able to protect wages in one country from price competition overseas. >> there's a now the myth. the idea that there's a free for all globally is locked. i was a myth that has been created by the people who control our borders. we control our own borders for 200. we use our borders to on shore, what we want. to offshore what we wanted. to manipulate what was important to us or to preserve our independence. and we haven't done that for 16 years. and the thing is, this idea that all this activity is going to slide out to china because they have cheaper wages. that is a mythical structure. that is a lie that has been posed upon us by a particular set of people who benefit through this relationship.

>> can i ask why you think we stop defending our borders? i have my own theory. >> let's hear your theory. [laughter] >> my theory is that it is predicated on project the way we use foreign policy in some cases. we hand out cash. what's happened late is where and at contracts and defense staff and we're encouraging capital to flow to countries to create jobs for the people there. and it's part of our foreign policy to do this. it's one of the ways we have been buying friends around the world. it's sort of not using cash directly, but it has the same effect. >> that's what i tried to get to within the presentation. i do this within the book, is that we -- were the hegemons of an internal system. i mean, let's just pull the blade off of this.

we were the rules of an imperial system. and that system worked really well. it created opportunities for individual people in the united states and in other countries to develop, to grow wealth and develop companies, to bring new ideas to the floor. it was a fantastic success for about 40 to 50 years. now, a certain group of people decided after the end of the cold war that there was an opportunity to take over the cold war apparatus that we used to govern this system and turn it into a profit-making system rather than a peacemaking system. so the people on wall street took over our imperial system and they use it to make profits. part of the way they do is they take machines that are here, they take technology that are here, they sell them to china. who gets the money? they do.

so what we have seen is we saw a system that works remarkably well, and it has been turned into a system that basically is being used by people who are not us, to exploit us. the thing about an imperial system is there's no one at home, and there was no one at home in washington right now when it comes to our imperial -- anything that has to do with international industrial strategy, there is no one home. which means that our industrial strategy in this country is the strategy of china, japan and germany. >> i agree with that. one question is, do you think the people of the united states want to be in this hegemons? >> i think that might be a second book. [laughter] >> on a much narrower question, first of all, i'm a little bit of changes that i wasn't aware

of the concentraconcentration, for example, of the eyeglasses manufacturers, things like that. so i'm wondering whether it might just be very helpful to have out on a website, is there a website where you sort of just document this? you know, these folks are controlled by these folks over here. this is just a brand a difference. and the other thing is, how hard is it for us, for you, to find out what these relationships are? >> it would be great. i would like to work with people to put together that kind of website. people have talked about this in the past. this idea, i didn't go into details, but with eyeglasses, just so, you know, when you go to the mall and you go to, you know, you say you need a new pair of five classes and go to provision which is a big chain, or lenscrafters which is a big chain, or some less expensive,

you go to target optical or go to sears optical, or maybe go to the sunglass, you're going to the same company. it's all a chemical exotica which is an italian eyeglass manufacture and retail. lex auditor also, if you say i'm going to go to a local boutique and buy some fancy set of classes that's much more expensive. the funny thing about lex on it is they also manufacture glasses, most of the parts you find that's also two foreign corporations three your there's other companies around but they essentially governed a system in this country. but this idea of finding out how it is, that's very difficult that it did me a long time to put that information together. and it's the information, the people who run these companies make it very difficult to find out. a lot of the new beers that we see in the store that look like

they are craft brews are actually from anheuser-busch. but you can't find a word anheuser-busch on any of it. they hide it. it will be a huge, be hugely helpful but it would also a huge amount of work. some of this stuff is hidden so well that it's almost impossible to find. >> i hear the need for cooperation with the research department. >> i do think we're living in the gilded age and so on and so forth. but you seem to be using a very broad brush two, unit, to in effect charactercharacterizes a lot of companies as monopolies. one example, google. google didn't use the law to swing things their way. they just had a better search engine. so people went to it, right? and if that wasn't so good, people go elsewhere.

i don't know what, philosophically why do have a problem with that? you know, if monopolies do what's called rent seeking, do have a problem. if they're going to raise the price of milk by dollar because 90% of it is controlled by one company, yes, we have a problem. but if it is pure efficiency what is the problem? >> that's ask a great question. in the case of google, google, they had a great, unicode had a great product. early on one of the things they did, they bought a whole bunch of server capacity early on after the nasdaq crash. but google is a great company and i love google. i use it all the time. google interns arrive this book, in turn the right my previous book, it's telescoped amount of time it took me to do this

immensely. so on the other hand, once they have this power, they have this project, and they also use the capital they have to do things like, you know, by of a whole bunch of other companies. that conceivably could have come up and compete with them and provided a much wider variety of products and choices, more competition, so it's kind of like what you become successful, what do you do with your power? like apple. apple is inviting microsoft and intel for all of these years, and now they finally, suddenly everything is flourishing now after all of these years. everyone is carrying around macbook. how can you deny mr. jobs, you know, his reward at all the people at apple the rewards for doing this? we shouldn't they fought and they thought. but there were a few cases all along the way where apple may be misusing his power. itunes for instant. that was their way to capture

all these people and get them inside the ipod. and in the process, they have got a huge amount of control over the business of distributing music in this country. probably -- so you kind of have to go on a case-by-case basis. especially in the industrial system. on the industrial side where there's lots of innovation. there's this principle in antitrust enforcement which is you kind of look at it, you don't set of rules that you don't set up a strict rule. you don't set of formulas that you just look at each case on a case-by-case basis and you can't make your best way, your best guess about trying to make, you know, figure out what's the best solution for long-term competition. but you're right, when it comes to the industrial system, is always going to be a complex, you know, question. >> i have a follow-up, may i? the other one, the other question that i had was what's

happening is with the internet, there is to some extent a monopolization that is taking place and having commented about that, which is book publishing. up until 90 depended on a publisher to take your book, pay you in advance, print the books, put it in stores. but today you could write your book, publish it electronically on amazon or in the apple bookstore or many of the other bookstores. because it's very fresh and less. you don't need it to be in print form. i could very well we did it electronically. so that in effect give power to authors and individuals rather than take it away from them. >> this question about the internet is also an important one, and actually for a long bit of time the internet really did seem to be sort of creating these opportunities and shifting power out. what we have seen in a number of cases, however, is the internet

is also a way to concentrate power in a way like with amazon. with netflix. the ability to grab power over some business, concentrate power over some business. you can do it much more slippery than ever in the past that is taking wal-mart for years to get where wal-mart is. it's taken amazon to get tenure to get 25% control over the book business, or in some cases much more than that. and the thing is that the internet precisely, when the marketplace is distributed geographically, it takes a long time and a lot of capital to buy up all those outlets, to buy up all that land on which congress takes place. on the internet it takes place in one place. there's massive concentration of power. this is not necessarily a problem, if we understand that internet, a company like amazon

or a company like comcast. if we start to look at them as railroads and restore to treat them as common carriers, and we start to, you know, but they can be left private or they can be made public. but we have to treat them as common carriers. and we have to make sure that all, that there is absolutely no discrimination by these companies in pricing or in terms of who gets delivered first. and again that's also with google. google is also a shoving device. the front page of google is a shoving devised. there's an immense amount of money, the difference if you like number one or number two or a number 1 10 on the next page. so, and i don't we have the tools in our past. we need to apply them on the internet right now. >> sorry. with come to the end of our session. thanks for joining us today. the book is "cornered." the man is better than. thanks for the discussion and for listening.

[applause] >> berry will be over on the side signingooks and books will be available also. thank you. barry lynn is the director and senior fellow at the new america foundation. for more information visit and nablus book festival.com. >> new yorker magazine editor david remnick talks about the life and political career of president obama with npr's michele knows that politics and prose bookstore hosted the hour-long event at the avalon

theatre in washington, d.c.. >> host: this is such a treat for me because david and i are old friends. when we worked at the "washington post" you always knew when you wrote a particularly delicious piece of copy because david would send love notes. and i still remember that. this book was so wonderful to dive into. most people in this room have read much about barack obama. and in every chapter you learn new things about him, but you also learn much about this country. when i first talked to you about this, it wasn't clear that you were writing a biography. i want you to tell me a little bit about the process. how you came to write this particular. was at the book you plan to write? >> guest: i think probably