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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Everybody is talking about "merger mania" and once again it has hit Staten Island as the Fleet Financial Corp. announced its purchase of Nat West's two branches located here. In 1980 Nat West bought Bankers Trust here and now Fleet has purchased Nat West.
That's what is happening in cities around the country. Huge corporations are buying out other corporations and forming even larger corporations. Why is this happening? What is its purpose? What effect does it have on people like us, ordinary people? Should it be our concern?
Yes, it does affect us directly. It is the main reason that our living standards have gone down for the past 20 years. It is the reason that people who have had good-paying jobs have been forced to take lower-paying jobs. It is the reason that things are tight for all of us. It is the reason that governments are forced to cut people's entitlement programs.
There is simply not enough money left after these huge super-efficient profit-making corporations take their lion's share of the national production. Every buy-out, every merger, every purchase by these corporations means greater efficiency, greater corporate profits, less jobs and lower pay for others somewhere down the line.
Every merger, purchase or buy-out is either the result of or its main purpose is cutting down on the labor force and replacing part of it with higher technology. This lowers their production costs and increases their profits. Clearly the net result of the mergers, buy-outs and purchases is to drive down people's living standards and to increase the profits of the corporations.
Mergers, buy-outs and purchases are a clear warning to people who are employed by large corporations to watch out, as the ax is about to fall on them. Millions of workers tremble for their jobs as mergers continue and even multiply. That is the reason why Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently stated, "It has now become a class war between the people and the wealthy corporations."
The problem we face is that these huge efficient modern dinosaurs know no other way. They are caught in the fiercely competitive struggle with each other over the ever-shrinking number of buyers for their products. The dinosaurs know only cutting costs with new technology, firing workers and expanding with new mergers and takeovers.
They must continue to compete, to increase their size and holdings or be taken over by their eager competitors. That is the law of the "survival of the fittest" in this jungle of dinosaur corporations.
If the corporations are allowed to continue on the uncontrolled path, we will be faced with more unemployment, lower living standards, more homelessness and hunger as millions sink into desperate poverty.
Ed Rothberg Staten Island, N.Y.
It's nice to see the people of Russia taking back their land from a few rich people who rule as gods and slaughter those who oppose them. As long as it's capitalists killing in Russia it's OK. But heaven forbid if communists arrest, try and imprison those mobsters who terrorize the people of Russia for a profit. Maybe Lenin was right about the capitalist class?
Keith Wyatt via Internet
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