Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. Today's program is going to be

devoted to large U.S. corporations, what they are, why they're there, what their impact is.

It's a topic many of you have asked me to address on many occasions, and instead of doing it a little

here and a little there, which has been my approach so far, I thought I'd take today's show

and offer it as an analysis not only of what mega corporations are and do in our society,

but what can be done about? How can it be challenged

and contested and changed? So let's jump right in. Mega corporations, and by that I simply

mean the one, two, three large corporations that dominate so many different industries in the United States, typically

use their economic power, strength, and size to buy political and cultural influence

and power. They do that by buying mass media, being the great advertisers whose words and ideas

you see all the time on the mass media, by donating to political parties and politicians

much of the money they need to maintain their activities, hiring and firing and organizing lobbyists

to work with the elected officials between elections and thereby to control political power.

We know all of that. You don't need me for that. What I'm doing is responding to their reality.

And that reality has recently been brilliantly analyzed over and over again by Ralph Nader, Chris Hedges,

and many, many others, well known to many of you. So let's begin with a thumbnail critique of the mega

corporation in our culture. Most of them, many of them, are monopolists. That is, they are the

only big fish in their industry. And in that position, once they've acquired it, they can then jack up the price

of whatever it is they sell because they're the monopolies. There's nowhere else to go.

You know, the famous example from American history, which I'll come back to, is the telephone.

At a certain point, one company called AT&T, American

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