consolidation

Monopolies across the grocery supply chain squeeze consumers and small-business owners alike. Big Data will only entrench those dynamics further.

The venerable movie studio once defined the industry's zeal for consolidation, pioneering vertical integration and serving as the model for its major rivals.

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.

Rail deregulation led to consolidation, price-gouging, and a variant of just-in-time unloading that left no slack in the system.

Over 30 years, dramatic consolidation has meant higher prices, fewer treatment options and less incentive to innovate.

Thanks to decades of misguided policy choices, the U.S. has an astonishing lack of maritime capacity.

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.

The push to make students into customers incentivizes faculty to seek visibility through controversy rather than through traditional scholarly achievement.

In 1978, Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act. It gave rise to some truly miserable air travel—and neoliberalism.

How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert.

How the younger brother of the famous general set out to destroy the scourge of monopoly power.

Jefferson's vision of the family farm is a myth that won't die.

Every five years, the farm bill brings together Democrats and Republicans. The result is the continued corporatization of agriculture.

How Lincoln's administration financed the Civil War and transformed the nation's decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the postwar centuries.

How the WWE chairman warped pro wrestling all the way to WrestleMania 39.

A 40-year saga of kickbacks, threats, political maneuvering, and the humiliation of Pearl Jam.

How the unsustainable growth of the container ship industry led to the supply chain crisis.

Rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics are the culprits.

East European Jews and the lost world of immigrant banking.

How a sitting, elected national government found itself in the position of having to buy its own country.

Consolidation aimed to bring cutting-edge reforms to rural schools. Instead, it hurt kids and communities.

The 1918 flu pandemic helped to usher in the Hollywood studio system. Could Covid-19 transform the industry?

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work.

Protecting the food supply chain means protecting workers.

Matt Stoller charts the shifts in American attitudes toward corporate consolidation.

In an era of social media and fake news, journalists who have survived the print plunge have new foes to face.

A history of modernity as a history of factories struggles to see beyond their walls.

How today's media landscape was shaped by a 1920s decision to privilege corporate broadcasters over noncommercial ones.

On September 18, 1977, Youngstown, Ohio, received a blow that it has never recovered from.