At the turn of the century the robber barons were able to do what they did because there was little or no competition. The railroads, steel, oil concerns and other large industries had little competition and were able to exploit the masses.

With each passing decade - from 1900 on up, prices were coming down and competition spurred better products at better prices. All this before unions. The unions helped back then, but today unions are woefully underequipped to bargain with employers. Employers have a nation full of illegal workers to tap should the need arise. So unions have no real bargaining power.

Here we are again and history repeats itself. 1907 or 2007, take your pick. Mergers have destroyed competition in the retail work place and within ten to twenty years Wal-mart and Target will probably have a complete lock on everything from supermarkets to appliance sales. They hire illegals in flagrant violation of our laws and yet can grease the right people's palms to make all legal friction dissipate or drag out forever depleting the funds of those who would pursue them. And now we see folks like the ACLU are going out of their way to defend the Wal-marts, and other businesses who exploit illegal, cheap labor, throughout the nation.

So we had a sweetheart period of capitalism from about 1945 to 1979 and I remember how many big retailers started disappearing or cutting back during the Carter malaise years. The Reagan era coincided with the computing revolution which, along with some needed tax cuts, helped to carry the economy through most of the eighties. By 1989 the retail decline began again in earnest. Not surprisingly Wal-mart was already underway with its seek and destroy mission across the nation.

Competition is simply not there for too many industries. From banking to gasoline, the mergers have taken their toll. Our automotive industry is dying slowly and our dot.com revolution trained a generation of corporation destroyers who use capital to acquire controlling interest in companies and then loot them. The dot.com revolution couldn't beat publicly held brick and mortar companies, at their own game so they decided to invest in them and loot them, via stock, and move on to the next brick and mortar company to destroy.

Who is there to stop them? And for every company they loot and leave filing chapter 11 or having to merge with another company, there is that much less competition and that much more exploitation, and that many fewer jobs and lower wages all around.

Public companies are targets of these corporation looters and private companies are targets of these large corporations. The food chain is being consumed and soon only the largest whales will be left inhaling tiny, tiny fish - and then even the whales will starve.

I wish I knew the way out of this one...but it looks pretty bleak.

About the only option America has is a new technological revolution - a breakthrough invention that transforms nearly everything and requires a plethora of new companies and industries to service it.