FIVE BIGGEST BANKS CONTROL ALMOST HALF OF ASSETS

“The odds are that, a year from now, Bernie Sanders won’t be in the White House pushing the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act. Still, the 2016 Presidential campaign has demonstrated that many Americans don’t feel that the system—the dominant institutions in government and in business—is working for them. Then, there’s the fact that economic power, especially in finance, has become much more concentrated in the past twenty-five years: during that time, the five biggest banks have gone from controlling about a tenth of assets to close to half. That makes for an obvious target for people’s stalled-out feelings.”

Nicholas Lemann, “Notorious Big, Why the Spectre of Size Has Always Haunted American Politics,” in the New Yorker, March 28, 2016, pp: 72-75.

OLD BOYS NETWORK SPREADS INFLUENCE

“Our campaign-finance laws allow big businesses to buy a great deal of influence in Washington. The sociology of the American élite means that the people at the higher rungs of government and the people at the higher rungs of business often went to school together, live in the same neighborhoods, and move back and forth between the two sides during their careers. That dulls the edge of their putative opposition. The European Union, which can go after monopolies under an “abuse of dominance” standard that doesn’t exist in the United States, has been rattling its sabre at Google and Amazon. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, has not. And so the ‘Trust problem’ has become a trust problem.”

Nicholas Lemann, “Notorious Big, Why the Spectre of Size Has Always Haunted American Politics,” in the New Yorker, March 28, 2016, pp: 72-75.

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY RISING FASTER ON EAST AND WEST COASTS

“A recent article by Phillip Longman, in The Washington Monthly, demonstrates that inequality in America has risen alarmingly not just by race and class but also by region (the coasts get an ever larger share of income, at the expense of the middle), and he attributes this development to the demise of economic-republican legislation like Glass-Steagall [Act] and Robinson-Patman [Act].

Nicholas Lemann, “Notorious Big, Why the Spectre of Size Has Always Haunted American Politics,” in the New Yorker, March 28, 2016, pp: 72-75.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE

“Sandra Day O’Connor, a veteran of the Arizona legislature, has expressed outrage at the Citizens United decision and the [U.S. Supreme] Court’s other deregulatory actions on campaign finance, because she knows firsthand what it means to raise money to run for office. When you understand the real reasons that people and corporations subsidize candidates, as O’Connor does, the Court’s pious invocations of ‘freedom of speech’ sound almost comically oblivious.”

Jeffrey Toobin, “Court Politics,” a Talk of the Town essay in the New Yorker, March 28, 2016, pp: 21-22.