They run the venture capital industry, CNN, Sony Pictures, all Hollywood
and Silicon Valley media companies and part of Congress. Who are these
frat boys?
By Franklin Porter
They can blacklist you from all jobs, all financing, social clubs, media
coverage and opportunities.
They control 80% of government policy making.
They have nothing to do with any religion and everything to do with
organized crime, stock market manipulation and the strategic control of
social interaction.
They own companies that spy on American's and collect their data in massive
shared databases. They use this spy data to manipulate political opinion,
elections and the news.
They want you to think that they are part of a social dynamic that you are
never supposed to talk about out-loud. This is their trick. The only social
dynamic they are part of is the mobster dynamic shown in the feature film: The
Godfather.
They are all male and they went to the same 'elitist'
fraternity houses at one of six snooty colleges.
How much do you know about their cartel? Should you educate yourself and
know more?
A cartel is a group of apparently
independent producers whose goal is to increase their collective profits by
means of price
fixing, limiting supply, or other restrictive
practices. Cartels typically control selling prices, but some are
organized to control the prices of purchased inputs. Antitrust laws attempt
to deter or forbid cartels. A single entity that holds a monopoly by
this definition cannot be a cartel, though it may be guilty of abusing said
monopoly in other ways. Cartels usually occur in oligopolies,
where there are a small number of sellers and usually involve homogeneous
products. Bid
rigging is a special type of cartel.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and
diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or
in some contrivance to raise prices.
—
Adam Smith, The
Wealth of Nations, 1776
A survey of hundreds of published economic studies and legal decisions of
antitrust authorities found that the median price increase achieved by
cartels in the last 200 years is about 23%.[1] Private
international cartels (those with participants from two or more nations)
had an average price increase of 28%, whereas domestic cartels averaged
18%. Less than 10% of all cartels in the sample failed to raise market
prices.
In general, cartel agreements are economically unstable
in that there is an incentive for
members to cheat by selling at below the agreed price or selling more than
the production quotas set by the cartel (see also game
theory). This has caused many cartels that attempt to set product prices to
be unsuccessful in the long
term. Empirical studies of 20th century cartels have determined that
the mean duration of discovered cartels is from 5 to 8 years. However, once
a cartel is broken, the incentives to form the cartel return and the cartel
may be re-formed. Publicly-known cartels that do not follow this cycle include,
by some accounts, the Organization
of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Price
fixing is often practiced internationally. When the
agreement to control price is sanctioned by a multilateral treaty or
protected by national sovereignty, no antitrust actions may be initiated.
Examples of such price fixing include oil whose price is partly controlled
by the supply by OPEC countries. Also international airline tickets have
prices fixed by agreement with the IATA,
a practice for which there is a specific exception in antitrust law.
Prior to World War II (except in the United States), members of cartels
could sign contracts that were enforceable in courts of law. However, today
price fixing by private entities is illegal under the antitrust laws of more
than 140 countries. Examples of prosecuted international cartels are lysine, citric
acid, graphite electrodes and
bulk vitamins.
The
printing equipment company
ATF explicitly
states in its 1923 manual that its goal is to 'discourage unhealthy
competition' in the printing industry.
OPEC:
As its name suggests, OPEC is organized by sovereign states.
It cannot be held to antitrust enforcement in other jurisdictions by
virtue of the doctrine of state
immunity under public
international law. However, members of the group do frequently break
rank by exceeding their agreed production quotas.
Many trade
associations, especially in industries dominated
by only a few major companies, have been accused of being fronts for
cartels or facilitating secret meetings among cartel members.
Although cartels are usually thought of as a group of corporations,
some[who?] consider trade
unions to be cartels, as they seek to raise the
price of labor (wages)
by preventing competition.
For example, negotiated
cartelism is a labor arrangement in which labor
prices are held above the market clearing level through union leverage
over employers.
An example of a new international cartel is the one created by the members
of the Asian
Racing Federation and documented in the Good
Neighbor Policy signed on September 1, 2003.
- Bishop, Simon and Mike Walker (1999): The
Economics of EC Competition Law. Sweet and Maxwell.
- Connor, John M. (2008): Global
Price Fixing: 2nd Paperback Edition. Heidelberg: Springer.
- Freyer, Tony A.: Antitrust
and global capitalism 1930–2004, New York 2006.
- Hexner, Ervin, The
International Steel Cartel, Chapel Hill 1943.
- Kleinwächter, Friedrich, Die
Kartelle. Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Organisation der Volkswirtschaft,
Innsbruck 1883.
- Levenstein, Margaret C. and Valerie Y.
Suslow. "What Determines Cartel Success?" Journal
of Economic Literature 64 (March 2006): 43–95.
- Liefmann, Robert: Cartels,
Concerns and Trusts, Ontario 2001 [London 1932]
- Martyniszyn, Marek, "Export Cartels: Is
it Legal to Target Your Neighbour? Analysis in Light of Recent Case
Law", Journal of International Economic Law 15(1)
(2012): 181–222.
- Stocking, George W. and Myron W.
Watkins. Cartels in Action. New York: Twentieth
Century Fund (1946).
- Stigler, George J., "The extent and
bases of monopoly, in: The American economic review,
Bd. 32 (1942), pp. 1–22.
- Stigler, George J., The
theory of price, New York 1987, 4th Ed.
- Tirole, Jean (1988): The
Theory of Industrial Organization. The MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Wells, Wyatt C.: Antitrust
and the Formation of the Postwar World, New York 2002.