Est. 1995

Tag: #Facism

The Crisis of Monopoly

Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US. Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories. Why is this? Monopoly.

The average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax”—in additional costs for pretty much everything—of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon. And things are steadily getting worse as monopolistic concentrations continue to tighten their grip on every American industry from banking to telecom to food.

Monopoly (using the term in its broadest sense, to include everything from a single company controlling a market to a half dozen companies working in a cartel-like fashion) is why working people’s pay hasn’t gone up since 1982 when President Ronald Reagan’s Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly laws. The rich have gotten fabulously richer since then. Consumers, when harmed or ripped off, have largely been stripped of their legal powers to hold businesses accountable. America now lags behind other countries in innovation, which is why (as one small example) we have the highest pharmaceutical and healthcare costs in the world.

The crisis of corruption is deep and covers every known strain from political, media, business, sexual, moral, and economic. Whatever particular variant is eroding the American way of life, the common denominator is that all serve as a marker of collapse, decay, and rot within the systems, institutions, and organizations that are vital to the sustainment of American society.  ~Steve Schmidt

Our streets are filled with guns, our schools have been stripped of books and school supplies, and our food is so deficient in nutrients (vegetables today have about half the nutrients they did in 1950) that we are experiencing a malnutrition-induced obesity epidemic.

Because of monopolies, billionaires pay lower tax rates than you do, and the nation’s largest companies not only usually pay no taxes at all but also get billions every year in subsidies funded with your tax dollars. So many families have fallen out of the middle class that this country is experiencing epidemics of suicide, opioid addiction, and divorce. Our defense budget is bloated, while our returning soldiers find it harder and harder to get jobs or services.

Although it’s almost never discussed in our highly monopolized media, monopoly is why right-wing radio and TV are found in every nook and cranny, every town small and large across America, while progressive media is marginalized. It’s why our politics are broken and foreign governments have been able to manipulate our elections and seize control of so many of our politicians.

Source:

Cancer and Monopoly

DeSantis staff and members of Moms for Liberty kicked and dragged a 16-year-old girl in a wheelchair for displaying a pride flag.

 

Recently, at a Ron DeSantis presidential campaign rally in South Carolina, staff and attendees kicked, bruised, threw to the ground, and violently dragged three teenagers for the “crime” of holding up a rainbow flag to urge DeSantis to respect LGBTQ equality. Reportedly, some of the people who committed violence against the teens are members of Moms for Liberty.

Two of the Charlotte-area teens were 19 years old. The other was a 16-year-old girl in a wheelchair.

After observing the violence from the podium, DeSantis shouted at the kids, “We don’t want you indoctrinating our children! Leave our kids alone!”

According to recent reporting in Vice News, “Moms for Liberty chapters have forged close relationships with far-right extremist groups” like the Proud Boys, “the AK-47-worshiping Rod of Iron Ministries church in Pennsylvania,” Q-Anon conspiracists, and various extremist Christian Nationalist groups and other groups renowned for white supremacy, antisemitism, and above all, violence against LGBTQ people.

But they don’t stop there.

‘Moms for Liberty’ Kick, Drag, Bruise Three Kids with Rainbow Flag

GOP wages an asymmetrical war on democracy because it can’t get the votes

The conservative movement doesn’t really believe in the liberties laid out in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It believes in the divine right of its preordained hierarchies — white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. — and will stop at nothing to maintain them.

“I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” Kelly told his supporters on election night. “But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.” He claimed without evidence that Protasiewicz is “a serial liar” and that the Democrat who defeated him doesn’t believe in the rule of law but “the rule of Janet.”

It should have been a banner week for democracy. But it wasn’t.

Anyone doubting Republicans’ impeachment bluster in Wisconsin could take a look around to Nashville, Tenn., where white GOP lawmakers stunned the nation by expelling two Black colleagues and disenfranchising their roughly 140,000 predominantly African American constituents because the men had, from the floor of the Capitol, joined a thousand or so young people protesting gun violence.

It would be easy to dismiss Kelly’s election denial as unusually sour grapes, except that some lawmakers in the GOP majority in the Wisconsin legislature are — and this is hard to believe — already talking about impeaching Protasiewicz even before she takes the oath of office. A new state senator who won a special election to give Republicans a supermajority in Madison said he’d “seriously consider” impeaching the new justice, citing the flimsy pretext of her record as a circuit judge in “failing” Milwaukee.

GOP wages an asymmetrical war on democracy because it can’t get the votes

It was the highlight reel of what should have been a banner week for American democracy – scores of down vest-wearing, smartphone-gazing students at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in a line that snaked around every corner of a campus building as they waited to cast a ballot for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

© 2023 CounterPoint