Big business

Big business are large-scale corporate-controlled financial or business activities. As a term, it is typically used to describe activities that run from "huge transactions" to the more general "doing big things."

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business. - Walter Lippmann.

Quotes

A to H

• Making movies has become such a golden ring, and it's all such a big business, that the rewards system has gotten totally out of whack. Suddenly, you're treated in a manner befitting someone who is actually an important person.
  • Ben Affleck in: New Again: Ben Affleck, interviewmagazine.com

• War is big business. It's a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.
  • Jon Anderson in: Interview with former Yes front man Jon Anderson (Part One), examiner.com, 27 January 2011

• Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes.
  • Dave Barry in: Your Guide to Self-Directed, Daniel Cordoba, CEA, 19 September 2008, p. 197.

• Big business' was a bad phrase in India. To be accused of being big business was the worst accusation you could make. All that has gone now. The whole mindset has changed.
  • P. Chidambaram in: P. Chidambaram: Introduction to India's Experience with Central Planning, pbs.org, 6 February 2001

• Increasingly, our large corporations have been abusing the awesome power that they have amassed. [...] This abuse of power shows itself in many ways. Particularly disturbing have been the efforts of the corporations to conscript the political process for their own benefit through their large financial contributions, both legal and illegal. Although corporate political influence became more pronounced under President Ronald Reagan, it has long exercised a heavy hand over the White House, the Congress, and the state governments. Former top corporate executives often hold many of the most powerful cabinet and top agency positions in the executive branch of government. Politicians listen when large corporations speak. They have enormous advantages in influencing political decision-makers.
  • Marshall B. Clinard, Corporate Corruption: The Abuse of Power. Greenwood Publishing Group. 1990. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-275-93485-9. 

• We will not have our loved ones killed to protect big business. We will not tolerate their lies, cover-ups and negligence.
  • Neil Faulkner on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, Mass Deaths, Mass Poverty, Mass Repression, co-written with Phil Hearse, 20 March 2020, Mutiny

• We believe that there is one economic lesson which our twentieth century experience has demonstrated conclusively—that America can no more survive and grow without big business than it can survive and grow without small business…. the two are interdependent. You cannot strengthen one by weakening the other, and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the legs of a giant.
  • Benjamin Franklin Fairless, president of United States Steel Corporation, Congressional testimony (April 26, 1950); reported in Study of Monopoly Power, hearings before the Subcommittee on Study of Monopoly Power of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 81st Congress, 2nd session, part 4A, "Steel" (1950), p. 466.

• While big business gain subsidies and political access, small businesses drown in red tape, and individuals now risk being classified as terrorists for complaining about it. Economic globalisation is about homogenising differences in the worlds' markets, cultures, tastes and traditions. It's about giving big business access to a global market.
  • Zac Goldsmith in: Cowards one and all No British politician dares to tackle the dangers of globalization, The Observer, 20 May 2001

I to Z

• The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
  • Walter Lippmann in: Ronald Steel Walter Lippmann and the American Century. [Mit Portr. (2. Print.)], Transaction Publishers, 1980, p.277.

• Hackers are breaking the systems for profit. Before, it was about intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge and thrill, and now hacking is big business.
  • Kevin Mitnick in: Kevin Mitnick, Former Fugitive Hacker, Laments How The Game Has Changed, huffingtonpost.com, 16 August 2011

• Big business increasingly likes to portray itself as socially concerned, adopting the style of civic action through 'campaigns' of varying degrees of cynicism.
  • Geoff Mulgan in: Civil engineering:Technology and globalisation have the power to transform communities - but not always for the good, The Guardian, 24 October 2007

• Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.
  • Ralph Nader in: Carole McKenzie Talking Dirty, Random House, 2 January 2014, p. 46.

• We demand that big business give people a square deal; in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right, he shall himself be given a square deal.
  • Theodore Roosevelt; written when William Howard Taft's administration brought suit to dissolve the Steel Trust. in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 85-87.

• Big businesses can be big in different ways. They can be big absolutely, like Wal-Mart— with billions of dollars in sales annually, making it the biggest business in the nation— without selling more than a modest percentage of the total merchandise in its industry as a whole. Other businesses can be big in the sense of making a high percentage of all the sales in its industry, as Microsoft does with sales of operating systems for personal computers around the world. There are major economic differences between bigness in these two senses. An absolute monopoly in one industry may be smaller in size than a much larger company in another industry where there are numerous competitors.
  • Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 4th ed. (2010), Ch. 7. Big Business and Government

• Most big businesses are not monopolies and not all monopolies are big business. In the days before the automobile and the railroad, a general store in an isolated rural community could easily be the only store for miles around, and was as much of a monopoly as any corporation on the Fortune 500 list, even though the general store was usually an enterprise of very modest size. Conversely, today even multi-billion-dollar nationwide grocery chains like Safeway or Kroger have too many competitors to be able to set prices on the goods they sell the way a monopolist would set prices on those goods.
  • Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 4th ed. (2010), Ch. 7. Big Business and Government

• The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses.
  • Jack Welch (2001) Jack: Straight from the Gut Ch. 3.

• The Internet is the Viagra of big business.
  • Jack Welch in: 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists: Insider Secrets from Top Writers, Adams Media, 1 September 2008, p. 214.

• Government or politics in America today is big business. Everybody makes money involving themselves in one way or the other, whether it's pollsters, whether they are policy wonks, whether they are pundits, whether they are those who believe that they must call it as they see it and then to be fair about it.
  • Douglas Wilder in: Douglas Wilder On Race, Politics And America, 15 October 2008

See also

• Business
• Capitalism
• Corporations