10 Corporations Control Nearly Everything You Buy ...

[donnay]

10 Corporations Control Nearly Everything You Buy – 6 Media Corporations Control Nearly Everything You Read or Watch

Freedom Outpost
www.FreedomOutpost.com
By Mike “Mish” Shedlock

PolicyMic has a very interesting chart that shows how 10 Corporations Control Almost Everything You Buy.

The chart was posted on Reddit as illusion of choice. I could not locate the original source.

PolicyMic explains …


Ten mega corporations control the output of almost everything you buy; from household products to batteries.

These corporations create the chain of supplies that flow from one another. Each chain begins at one of the 10 super companies.

Here’s just one example: Yum Brands owns KFC and Taco Bell. The company was a spin-off of Pepsi. All Yum Brands restaurants sell only Pepsi products because of a lifetime deal with the soda-maker.

$84 billion company Proctor & Gamble owns companies that produce everything from detergent to toothpaste. Unilever produces everything from Dove soap to Klondike bars.

It’s not just the products you buy and consume, either. In recent decades, the very news and information that you get has bundled together: 90% of the media is now controlled by just six companies, down from 50 in 1983, according to a Frugal Dad infographic from last year.

It gets even more macro, too: 37 banks have merged to become just four — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and CitiGroup in a little over two decades, according to this Federal Reserve map.

The nation’s 10 largest financial institutions hold 54% of our total financial assets; in 1990, they held 20%. As MotherJones reports, the number of banks has dropped from more than 12,500 to about 8,000.



Media Consolidation

Everything You Think, Read, or Say

I always try to find a link to the original source, but none of the links to a Frugal Dad article work.

Regardless anything you read, watch, or buy is in the hands of fewer and fewer companies. The same applies to banks.

This is another reason we need an independent news network. One is actually in the works, started by Jeremy Scahill, National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine, and Glenn Greenwald who broke the NSA spy story.

For details, please see 4th and 1st Amendments Under Fire as The War Against Journalists Continues

Question of the Day

How long will it be, before everything to think, read or say is in the pill you took today?



http://www.thedailysheeple.com/10-c...ol-nearly-everything-you-read-or-watch_112013

 

[Natural Citizen]

I was going to post this but decided it was probably a waste of time with this group. Good share, donnay. Thanks for flipping the switch on. Sometimes we need to see.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Yep^^ This is pretty well known around here, but I like the visuals.

 

[DamianTV]

Yep^^ This is pretty well known around here, but I like the visuals.

Well known around here, but worth knowing in case you have neighbors or co-workers or friends or family who believe the lies they sell to us. Ask your Neighbor if they've ever heard of Yum Co. Yeah, they own Pepsi and Taco Bell. No conspiracy there.

 

[MRK]

Even when I lived in the US, I didn't buy any of the overpriced brands shown in the infographic.

 

[FrankRep]

They make products people want to buy.

 

[FindLiberty]

When it comes to having too many "free market" choices out there, K.I.S.S. is easier to remember. (keep it simple stupid)

 

[Acala]

Happy to say I consume essentially NONE of the above. Neither the simulated food products nor the infotainment.

 

[cajuncocoa]

Not only do they control everything we buy, but they also control our government. The people who are supposed to represent us are bought and paid for by these corporations and the millions they spend to get our representatives in their back pocket (they donate to "Ds" and "Rs" alike, too).

 

[specsaregood]

I must be weird then, cuz that only counts for at most 10% of what I buy.

 

[FrankRep]

I must be weird then, cuz that only counts for at most 10% of what I buy.

I usually buy off-brand products because they're cheaper. Nothing weird about that.

 

[Matt Collins]

The word "control" in the OP title is used loosely. The better title would be "these 10 companies own more than you think"... there really is no news here, and it's not a conspiracy. If anything, it's a lesson in branding and corporate holdings.

 

[Tod]

I usually buy off-brand products because they're cheaper. Nothing weird about that.

A lot of times the same company makes both the name brand and generic, to capture both markets (rebels and non-rebels)

 

[MRK]

I found a misleading part with this graph.

It implies Monster is controlled by Coca Cola. This is not true. Monster is an independently owned company and changed its distributor to Coca Cola (it was previously distributed by Anheuser Busch).

I wonder how many other brands qualified to appear on the infographic based on the same criteria?

 

[Uriah]

I found a misleading part with this graph.

It implies Monster is controlled by Coca Cola. This is not true. Monster is an independently owned company and changed its distributor to Coca Cola (it was previously distributed by Anheuser Busch).

I wonder how many other brands qualified to appear on the infographic based on the same criteria?

The graphic is an oversimplification for viewers to grasp the bigger picture. There certainly are corporate and legal structures that would make that graphic much more complicated if it were to show them but ultimately a few companies do own most of the products most people buy.

 

[lib3rtarian]

Higher resolution version:

 

[Cleaner44]

Happy to say I consume essentially NONE of the above. Neither the simulated food products nor the infotainment.

I don't either. Garbage food products. Garbage television products. Not interested.


Edit: I will buy Band-Aids and Oral-B toothbrushes.

 

[Cleaner44]

Dupe post

 

[familydog]

The word "control" in the OP title is used loosely. The better title would be "these 10 companies own more than you think"... there really is no news here, and it's not a conspiracy. If anything, it's a lesson in branding and corporate holdings.

Corporations control access to the market via lobbying for regulations and taxation. Small producers can't compete with million dollar legal departments and political favors.

 

[helmuth_hubener]

I was going to post this but decided it was probably a waste of time with this group. Good share, donnay. Thanks for flipping the switch on. Sometimes we need to see.

Come on, man! Be happy! Just because there are some people who disagree with you doesn't mean the world is a horrible place. It doesn't mean the group those disagreers are in is horrible and a waste of time. It doesn't even mean the disagreers themselves are horrible and a waste of time.

There's a lot of different ideas out there, and a lot of different ways of looking at things.

For instance, I am dually skeptical when it comes to this topic.

I am skeptical of your view, which is that big corporations should be assumed to be bad (perhaps even evil). Why should I assume that? Couldn't it be that these companies got big because they were really, really good at executing their business? They simply outcompeted everyone else. There is a wide range of abilities and aptitudes in humans. Some people are so tremendously good at, say, managing finances, or managing logistics, or designing products, why shouldn't they manage extremely large quantities of money, or help many, many factories to reach astounding levels of productivity, or design exquisite and brilliant products that will bring joy to billions of people? Why should they be limited in their scope? Why should their talents affect the lives of only a few? I am glad that Steve Jobs was designing for a world market, and not just selling amazing home-built computers to people in Mountain View. I am glad that my washing machine was built by the millions in a factory, not hand-crafted in someone's workshop. That means I can easily get parts for it, for one thing! It also means I can buy it for the equivalent of a single day of labor. Say what? Build a washing machine in a day? That seems impossible, but it's true, and it's true because of mass production and big business. Small business is terrific, but the fact is that the vast majority of the productive output of the world comes from very big businesses. Voluntarily organizing ourselves into very big umbrella institutions appears to be a very effective way of getting things done.


I am also skeptical of the view that big corporations should be assumed to be good. How did they get to be so big and powerful? Maybe in many cases because the nation-state was backing them, helping them, and creating barriers to competition. It could be that the natural size of businesses (on average) on a free market would significantly smaller than the average size in today's interventionist economy. We don't know for sure.

But what we do know is that monopoly government doesn't work, and so we should certainly not look for solutions by adding more monopoly government. We should instead eliminate that monopoly and let people be free to choose to associate with, buy from, and sell to whomever they wish.