This Week's Reflections

 I am back this week with a lot going on in my mind.  I want to begin with an experience from yesterday, and then I have some pontificating to do on a couple of issues.

My ex-wife's cat has been very sick lately - he stopped eating and is dropping weight at an alarming rate.  To see what was wrong with him, my ex called a pet food company and asked about it, and they gave her a voucher for a free first office visit to one of the big corporate vet services, Banfield Animal Hospitals.  However, due to corporate head games and technicalities, the nearest and most immediate time she could get the cat in was yesterday at 11 AM in Leesburg, VA (about 50 miles from where I live).  She asked me to ride along with her to help with transporting the poor cat, and due to some factors in traveling, we ended up being 36 minutes late.  The individuals at that particular Banfield refused to see him, despite the fact we had him in the office. So, I basically told them off - my ex's cat was inherited from her deceased sister four years ago, and he is 17 years old, and being I watch him often for her he is like my own and I love the little guy.  This led to a scathing Yelp review for that particular Banfield location, and I plan on inflicting some more publicity damage upon them later as they deserve every bit of it.  Dealing with this has led me to make a few observations about the situation of medical care in general that I feel are needed.

For anyone who has read my material for some time and also knows me personally, I have no love for Corporate America.  I have worked in it, dealt with it with my own personal business, and have also seen some of the effects it has had on society, which are not good.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as a matter of fact, is actually taking on one particular issue the Corporate America is culpable of, and that is the junk that is put into our food.  Mass-production of food for a buck has led to a lot of cut corners as well as the risk of unhealthy additives in our food supplies by greedy corporate oligarchs who only care about the bottom line and not about the welfare of the consumers they market to.  This of course had its roots in the Industrial Revolution, but it also was a problem in other industries with the rise of "robber baron" oligarchs at the end of the 19th century such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and others.  It became such a problem at the beginning of the 20th century that President Teddy Roosevelt sought to rain them in with anti-trust legislation, and he was to a degree successful.  To be honest, I really wish Roosevelt could have finished the job, and then we would not have what I term an "oligarchy of monopolies" in which someone is trying to gobble up every small business, as well as even stable corporations which are not attempting to monopolize markets, just to enrich themselves with inferior quality of product and also unacceptable working conditions for the employees who serve them.   Up to the time that industrialization took over a lot of business sectors, the idea of monopolizing a particular industry was not really a thing - of course there were successful businesses that made their founders and leaders wealthy, and no one would dispute someone pursuing a fortune at all; that is not what this is about.  The fundamental problem is what is called "crony capitalism," where a small group of elitist oligarchs representing certain industries try to swallow up and destroy anyone else in those fields. They do so through buying off politicians who in turn implement onerous regulations to prevent people from starting businesses (this also includes the whole "eminent domain" scams that flout themselves as "laws") by making start-up efforts so rigorous and impossible that it drains the resources of a potential business owner and makes them give up in despair.  When the "big guys" win, they corner the market then and flood it with product that is often inferior in quality yet profitable because it can be mass-produced.  The dedicated craftsmanship of the small proprietor then is diminished, and mass-produced garbage designed to either deteriorate quickly or pose health risks to the consumer that buys them floods the markets, and the greedy oligarchs in charge count on the inferior quality to make the consumer spend more money at their establishments for more junk.  That is what has transpired in American society.  Many of those same megalomaniacal oligarchs (three that come to mind are George Soros, Bill Gates, and Klaus Schwab) then set their sights on trying to gain control of society.  They finance subversive movements, buy off politicians, and then hold "forums" to implement their utopian (or more accurately, dystopian) visions for the world, including Schwab's famous "You vill eet zee bugz and live in zee pods and you vill be HAPPY!!" mentality.  Aldous Huxley wrote of this as a fictional scenario years ago in Brave New World, and it seems like we are seeing it come to pass in real time.  I even read a year ago that the secularist authorities being bankrolled by these oligarchs have banned Huxley's and Orwell's book 1984 in Britain and elsewhere - they understand that if the right people read those, their cover is blown.  It is this backdrop, as well as the personal experience with my ex's cat, that I want to address now in regard to certain industries.

Lest you think that "crony capitalism" is confined to just the industrial or tech sectors, think again.  As of the past 30 or so years, the medical field and even prisons have likewise been corporatized.  When I worked for a small diagnostic clinic in Florida 20 years ago, I was in charge of basically maintaining office files. One thing I noticed is that every area hospital my office contracted with was corporately controlled by at least 3 large entities.  And, it was after they were incorporated that way when all of a sudden a lot of controversies arose - patients being refused treatment, malpractice, and even outrageous insurance billing on the part of said hospitals.  Mortality rates of patients admitted to these corporate hospitals rose dramatically, and for some reason they were still allowed to be in business (no doubt due to their CEOs buying off local and Federal politicians to loophole regulations).  While it is bad enough that industrial sectors are being operated this way, it is almost inconceivable to think healthcare would end up like that.  And, it isn't only hospitals - nursing homes, dentistry, veterinary services, and of course the pharmaceutical field have all been impacted.  Banfield Animal Hospitals is a glaring example of this too, as I saw on full display yesterday.  Another company likewise which fits this is Aspen Dental, which itself has been the focus of a number of class actions both by former patients and disgruntled employees in recent years.  Let me tell you some ways this has happened, and there are four things to note from any corporatized medical entity:

1. Increased lack of empathy

2. Incompetent staff, or overworked competent employees

3. Outrageous charges

4. Rigid procedures (like refusing people who are 10 minutes late)

5. Unavailability of services advertised, and ungodly waiting lists

6. A lot of hoops for a potential client to jump through - it is often easier to interview for a job than it is to get an appointment with places like Banfield or Aspen.

Whether it is a corporate-run hospital, dentist practice, or vet clinic, it is still unacceptable to put profits above patients when there could be life-threatening emergencies.  And then, when a situation like the whole COVID-19 mess comes up, these corporate medical entities take full advantage to discriminate further - patients get turned away for not having a vaccine they may not feel comfortable getting, and often a corporate hospital will be getting kickbacks from their bedfellows in Big Pharma to set quotas for the number of people they jab.  That happened before, as the last mandatory vaccines also were coincidentally timed with a rise in conditions among kids like autism, ADHD, and other things.  When Big Government and Big Business start collaborating in schemes like this, it is dangerous and the average person suffers.  I also noticed during COVID-19 in particular how many small businesses were shuttered on Federal mandate while big corporations gained substantially.   It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what is going on, and this is not necessarily just the ramblings of tinfoil-hat conspiracy nuts either - too much doesn't add up.  And then there are corporate prisons now on top of that.  I first learned about those from reading some stuff that (now discredited) Christian speaker Kent Hovind wrote after he was released a few years back from prison after being convicted of some financial misdeeds.  It turns out that corporate-owned detention facilities are now a thing, and like any other business they run on profit quotas - the more people they incarcerate, the more money they get.  This has led to some ridiculous laws being enforced that incarcerate people for huge amounts of time for crimes inconsistent with the penalty.  We need law and order in society, that is certain.  And, there needs to be penalties for serious crimes.  However, when some greedy oligarch profits from the incarceration of others, that is a greater crime.  And, it also goes the other way which is just as heinous - people are incarcerated in these corporate prisons for violent crimes, but then there is a revolving door to keep the prisons getting fresh revenue, so violent criminals are released through legal loopholes, and their cells are filled with others, and then the whole cycle begins again. This is not benefitting society.   Another aspect of this I have read about is the fact that many of these corporate prisons are owned by entities who have stake in other industries, so they used inmates in their prisons as a sort of sanctioned slave labor.   While perhaps some incentive programs should be in place to put convicted criminals to more productive use, justifying slave labor should not be one of them.  This now leads me to how anti-trust legislation could be revised to reform these things and end the grip of corporate oligarchs over our society.

The big corporations control many aspects of life, and most of us depend on some product they produce on a daily basis - usually there are many things we utilize.  I understand that it would be impossible to boycott or ban the products themselves because they are integral to the function of both society and the individual household.  However, the benefit of anti-trust legislation is that it decentralizes mega-corporations and limits the reach of corporate oligarchs without necessarily sacrificing things that are integral to functioning life.  I am all for, as an example, resurrecting the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which would be a start by making things more affordable without the artificial inflation of prices as well as limiting restriction of trade and/or supply of goods and services to benefit oligarchs.  Then.combine those measures with the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, which regulates pricing to prevent monopolies or negatively impact a competitive market.  This would also regulate mergers and acquisitions, allowing for a prevention of monopolies in certain industrial sectors.  The Tunney Act of 1974 would also further expand the antitrust regulations introduced by the Sherman Act, and it would impose stiff penalties on oligarchs who willingly violate it.  However, as good as those original measures were, a new antitrust act should be proposed, and two things I believe should be included in this:

1. A restriction or prohibition upon entities such as medical facilities, correctional institutions, and educational institutions from being corporately owned or operated.  These types of facilities provide important benevolent services to others and should not be utilized as a profit scheme.

a. In the case of medical facilities, they should be owned and operated by non-profit sector organizations or be private practices.

b. In the case of educational institutions, they should not be owned or operated either by big for-profit corporations nor by governments.  Instead, schools should be operated by religious organizations, private foundations, local cooperatives, and even by the military (an exception to government operation). 

c.  In the case of prisons, the old penal system of operation and management by local, state, and Federal jurisdiction is to be restored, and in doing so, no corporate interests should be allowed in prison operations or anything which is the rightful jurisdiction of the government. 

2. Much like the Sherman Antitrust Act proposed, large monopolies in a certain industry should be broken up into smaller independent entities, preferably under their former "legacy" identities.  This entails three things:

a. A prohibition upon one entity trying to buy out another to gain some sort of fiscal advantage.  Only in the case of extreme hardship for one of the parties or a perceived benefit in enhancing quality of the product should this be allowed.

b. Price regulation - no super inflated costs for profit or gain.

c. Smaller entities can be encouraged with tax incentives and other benefits to produce quality product free of the inferior and/or unhealthy aspects that characterize many corporations now.  

More ideas - the removal of the government to determine minimum wage rates, not taxing tips or other incentives for employees, and the complete eradication of the income tax - would benefit this as well, and it just means that societal and economic reform has many dimensions that interconnect with each other.  Measures like these would benefit businesses of all size and would actually incentivize economic growth.  Until we get rid of corporate oligarchs and political radicals messing in economics, none of this can become reality on a large scale.  The tax system as well would need reform too - it would be in the best interest of the US as well as other nations to eliminate taxes on income, property, and estates (just for starters) and instead only tax sales and other transactions.  This would necessarily require a decrease in the bureaucratic cabal/administrative state which overreaches and creates unnecessary spending for things that mean little to the majority of the population.  A decrease in government would necessarily lead to a decrease in taxes, as government spending would be cut significantly.  Social programs could then be the domain of nonprofits and the local governments rather than federally funded. While this may sound utopian, it really isn't - it is common-sense polity which has been in place for centuries and only recently radically done away with by globalists and corporate oligarchs (those two are often one and the same as well).  If we started using our brains to reform these areas of society, other things would fall into place naturally.  It doesn't mean a perfect society by any means, as there is always room to improve upon things, but it would be better.  We start though by curbing the megacorporations and their monopolies first, and then the political and social reform would follow. 

That was a lot to say today on these issues, but I wanted to just get them out there.  They have been proposed in bits and pieces by others, but a more concrete agenda/manifesto is necessary to implement these ideas.  Thank you for allowing me to share, and will see you next time.