1 Introduction 7
the boot of corporate power. He described the formation of an emergent system as, “One Big Union made up of partners, auxiliaries, subsidiaries, extensions and purveyors of traffic.”13 In other words, what Veblen was describing was an evolutionary trend toward corporate hegemony, which like so many other creations of capitalism, it has developed a kind of mind of its own. Veblen’s Secular Trend inspired institutionalist economist William Dugger, who decades later to produced his comprehensive work on corporate power titled, Corporate Hegemony (1989). Dugger introduces his work, [The] capitalist corporate is an inherently narrow and short-sighted organization. It has not evolved to serve the public purpose. It has not evolved to monitor and coordinate economic activity for the benefit of society at large. The corporation has evolved to serve the interests of whoever controls it, at the expense of whoever does not. This is a simple but profound truth. The corporation, not the market, is the dominant economic institution in the industrialized West.14
By the time Dugger conveyed this message, the Greenspan Era was already underway. For a good century and more, corporate evolution was given free passage to stitch together a network of behemoths that collectively brought government and central bank institutions everywhere into its sphere of influence. This became among the most powerful club of wealth and influence in modern history. The dominant institution controls the markets in retail, auto, pharmaceuticals, media finance, and every other industry either through oligopoly, virtual monopolies, or joint ventures—which are basically legalized cartels— though nonetheless still largely viewed in economic and business theory as mere business models. And all of this is sugar-coated for mass consumption with neoliberalism propaganda. Politically captured, policymakers are lulled into complacency and dismissiveness toward the most pressing dangers that have been building in the system for decades, not least of which are instabilities on gargantuan scale, the punishment of climate change, and a chasm of economic inequality.
