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Break ’em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
Top of the pile
84
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
90/100Critics
67/100Scholars
94/100Author:
Zephyr Teachout
Publisher:
All Points Books
Date:
July 28, 2020
Anti-corruption scholar and activist Zephyr Teachout makes the case that monopolies are the root cause of many of the problems that today's progressives wish to solve and, that in order to build a better future, we must eradicate monopolies from the private sector and create safeguards that prevent new ones from seizing power.
What The Reviewers Say
Teachout’s thesis is provocative and simple: that monopolistic corporations operate a despotic parallel governmental system, or as she writes in her refreshingly brusque style, 'monopoly is tyranny'.
Teachout, a dogged scholar, lays out a comprehensive list of damage done to American consumers by monopolized industries like Big Pharma, fossil fuels, Silicon Valley, health insurance, banking and communications giants from Verizon to Facebook and Google.
Wide-ranging, well-organized chapters are full of unsettling tidbits, such as Amazon’s courting of the surveillance state via commercial data-sharing. Finally, the author looks back at the original populist antitrust movement, but she also makes the salient point that 'we shouldn’t require people to boycott essential communications infrastructure like Facebook and Google in order to demand that they be broken up.' Teachout confidently wields energetic, urgent prose and stark research, adeptly blending subtopics including law and technology. Deserves wide attention in our current political landscape..
... a passionate and persuasive case for a revitalized antitrust movement to strengthen democracy and improve the lives of middle- and working-class Americans.
