Large corporations masquerade as small businesses

A column at Counterpunch cites the example of California's wine industry:

These activities are capital-intensive. For those with enough pre-existing wealth to shoulder the heavy up-front costs, the profits can be enormous... ownership of the industry has grown increasingly concentrated. Most vineyard acreage in the region is ruled by a small collection of massive multi-national corporate conglomerates, which typically boast annual revenues greater than a billion dollars.

To hear the patriarchs of the wine industry tell it, by contrast, the typical area wine-making operation is a “bucolic,” family-owned business...

In reality, while there remain some area vineyards that possibly fit the Wine Commission web site characterization, a huge portion of Mendo's vineyard acreage is owned by corporate conglomerates that belong to the billion-dollar-a-year set. Most of the other wine-grape plantations are remotely controlled by decidedly non-local corporations with revenues of at least $50 million a year...

Over the years, wine industry robber-baron Jess Jackson has gone to perhaps the most absurd lengths of all to garb his company in a rustic wine-maker mystique. The company no longer refers to itself as Kendall-Jackson, but rather as Jackson Family Wines... “Little Guy” Jackson landed in the upper half of Fortune magazine's 2003 ranking of the world's 500 richest people, with personal wealth of $1.8 billion...

More to the point, the profits generated by local vineyards accrue almost entirely to the wine industry big boys. Just seven global wine conglomerates purchase the vast majority of wine grapes grown in the United States. The majority of these are grown in California. These companies produce 82 percent of all wine sold throughout the country. The majority of these enormous companies are integrated with other units of Big Alcohol; namely, spirits and beer.

The upshot? Regardless of who runs the actual grape production side, it's the large multi-nationals that ultimately reap the benefits of the local wine-growing economy – just as with virtually every other sector of America's agribusiness enterprise – at the expense of just about everyone and everything else...

As Wendell Berry has written regarding the corporate agribusiness model in general, “To put the bounty and health of our land, our only commonwealth, into the hands of people who do not live on it and share its fate will always be an error. Whatever determines the fortune of the land determines also the fortune of the people. If history has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that.”

More at the link, and more articles coming on this topic.