Big Business

33 million Americans—more than 25 percent of the total workforce—worked for corporations with 10,000 employees or more. The largest employer is Walmart, with 1,400,000 employees, followed by the company that owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, and then McDonald's.

 Walmart paid $11.3 billion in  dividends and share buybacks last year. That comes to more than $8,000 per worker. McDonald’s shareholder payouts came to nearly $7,000 per worker.

Walmart aggressively forces prices downward for its suppliers, sometimes below the cost of production. But the suppliers have to make up the difference somewhere, either by over-charging other stores or underpaying their own employees and suppliers.

 0.2 percent of US banks—12 altogether—control 69 percent of the industry’s total assets, while 98.6 percent of all banks held only 12 percent of assets.  The four biggest banks still control 83 percent of the derivatives market, and only 25 commercial banks—out of a total of 8,430 FDIC-insured commercial banks in the United States—control roughly 90 percent of the market.

The philanthropic world is now dominated by a few players. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the mega-player, with more than $34 billion in assets. That’s more than the next three foundations combined. As of 2011, the top five foundations held nearly one-third as much in assets as the top 100 foundations put together.