1. Zach Matthews, “A Bird in the Bush,” Arkansas Life, December 11, 2013.
2. Sam Walton, Made in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 40.
3. Ibid., 31–32.
4. Ibid., 66, 237.
5. “1940s: A New Generation,” Timeline, Walmart Digital Museum, accessed April 5, 2020. https://www.walmartmuseum.com/content/walmartmuseum/en_us/timeline/decades/1940.html.
6. The Wal-Mart Timeline, Wal*MartFacts.com, July 10, 2006, Internet Archive, accessed April 5, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20060719071543/http://www.walmartfacts.com/content/default.aspx?id=3.
7. The writer William Whyte coined the term “Organization Man” in his 1956 book of the same name. For a smart take on how the financial and corporate culture has changed, see Nicholas Lemann’s Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
8. For a good example of how working people organized an industry in which power was not centralized, see Steve Viscelli, The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
9. The resulting contrast in land ownership between the United States and Britain is striking. For details, see James Huston, The British Gentry, The Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015).
10. There are 4,756 stores, each of which is at least 30 times bigger (at least 130,000 square feet on average). Liam O’Connell, “Total Number of Walmart U.S. Stores in the United States from 2012 to 2020, by Type,” Statista, April 3, 2020, accessed April 5, 2020.
11. Stacy Mitchell, “Walmart’s Monopolization of Local Grocery Markets,” Institute for Local Self-Reliance, June 2019.
12. Paul Wilenius, “Enemies Within: Thatcher and the Unions,” BBC News, March 5, 2004.
13. Howard Metzenbaum, “Is William Baxter Anti-Antitrust?,” New York Times, October 18, 1981.
14. Howard Metzenbaum and Herman Schwartz, “Merger Madness,” New York Times, August 5, 1981.
15. Jack Welch, Straight from the Gut (New York: Warner Books, 2001), Appendix A.
16. José Azar, Ioana Marinescu, and Marshall I. Steinbaum, “Labor Market Concentration,” Working Paper 24147, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, December 2017, revised February 2019. http://www.nber.org/papers/w24147.
17. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Volume 7, 1960–61, p. 1038, Federal Register, Washington, DC, 1961.
18. William McClenahan and William Becker, Eisenhower and the Cold War Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). See also Raymond Saulnier, Constructive Years: The U.S. Economy Under Eisenhower (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 163–166.
19. John Mintz, “How a Dinner Led to a Feeding Frenzy,” Washington Post, July 4, 1997; “Land of the Giants,” The Economist, June 12, 1997; “Merger Timeout,” Washington Post, March 25, 1998.
20. The only real exception to this thrust was Robert Pitofsky, who in 1995 was appointed by President Clinton to head the FTC and who served until May 2001. He paid especially close attention to mergers that affected the news media, in 2000 telling the Washington Post, “If somebody monopolizes the cosmetics fields, they’re going to take money out of consumers’ pockets, but the implications for democratic values are zero. On the other hand, if they monopolize books, you’re talking about implications that go way beyond what the wholesale price of the books might be.” Alec Klein, “A Hard Look at Media Mergers,” Washington Post, November 29, 2000. Pitofsky in 1979 published one of the last defenses of traditional antitrust philosophy before the Reagan administration’s radical changes in the early 1980s. Robert Pitofsky, “Political Content of Antitrust,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1051 (1979): 127.
21. Dan Roberts, “Wall Street Deregulation Pushed by Clinton Advisers, Documents Reveal,” The Guardian, April 19, 2014.
22. James MacDonald, “Mergers and Competition in Seeds and Agricultural Chemical Markets,” Amber Waves Magazine, U.S. Department of Agriculture, April 3, 2017.
23. “2000 Commodities Act Paved Way for Problems,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, March 20, 2009.
24. Brian Cheffins, The Public Company Transformed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Sarah Anderson, “The Failure of Bill Clinton’s CEO Pay Reform,” Politico, August 31, 2016; Jena McGregor, “This Tax Loophole Led to Massive CEO Pay Packages,” Washington Post, November 22, 2017. See also Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream.
25. From the Civil War until the election of President Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the U.S. tariff system served as a prime bulwark of America’s monopolists, protecting them from foreign competition. The Underwood Tariff of 1913 began the process of eliminating this practice.
26. Beth Baltzan, “The Old-School Answer to Global Trade,” Washington Monthly, April 2019.
27. David Frum captured the idea well in a 2010 interview on Nightline, saying, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.” Media Matters Staff, Media Matters, March 23, 2010.
28. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
29. Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” The Atlantic, May 2009.
30. Laura Kusisto, “Many Who Lost Homes to Foreclosure in Last Decade Won’t Return—NAR,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2015; Alana Semuels, “The Never-Ending Foreclosure,” The Atlantic, December 1, 2017.
31. Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect (New York: Penguin, 2006), 2, 79, 93.
32. For a more extensive discussion on the combination of concentrated private power, see chapter eight of my book Cornered: Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010).
33. The most complete explanation of this system is in Christopher Leonard, The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). Another good source is Lina Khan, “Obama’s Game of Chicken,” Washington Monthly, November 2012.
34. Barry Lynn, “Killing the Competition,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2012.