Economics | HumanityRenewed

Is Christian Financial Advisor Dave Ramsey a “Jerk” or is He Just “Helping People Stay in Line”?

Several investigations into Christian finance guru Dave Ramsey’s leadership style and business practices hit the Christian press last January.

If you haven’t heard about them, here is an excerpt from Bob Smeitana’s article at the Religion News Service. It’s called “Is Dave Ramsey’s empire ‘the best place to work in America’? Say No and you’re out.”

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) — Dave Ramsey has spent the past three decades trying to build what he calls the best place to work in America.

From his headquarters south of Nashville, the evangelical Christian personal finance guru runs a media and live events empire that includes a popular national talk radio show. Tickets to workshops on topics such as “EntreLeadership” run from $3,000 to $10,000.

Thousands of churches around the country, meanwhile, host Ramsey’s “Financial Peace University,” a 9-week program built around his principles for handling money “God’s way.”

. . . Ramsey’s intolerance for dissent has created what former employees call a cultlike environment, where leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment’s notice. . .

At a staff meeting in July, Ramsey railed at his staff after an employee sued Ramsey Solutions for firing her for having premarital sex, which is against company policy, and said he would pay the price to protect what he had built out of love for his employees.

“I am sick of dealing with all this stuff,” Ramsey bellowed, according to a recording obtained by Religion News Service. “I’m so tired of being falsely accused of being a jerk when all I’m doing is trying to help people stay in line.”

. . . Ramsey’s return to in-person work frustrated Heather Fulk. She has asthma, which puts her at higher risk if infected with COVID-19. After learning employees were being called back to headquarters, she made what she thought was an innocuous comment in a private Facebook post.

“Jon’s company wants to bring all 900 employees back asap when a majority can do their work from home,” she wrote on April 20. “I do *not* understand how people don’t see we are setting ourselves up for a huge second wave. Ugh, people make me so angry.”

Before long, Jon got a call from his supervisor who said a co-worker had reported Heather’s comment. They had a screenshot of the post, sent by the co-worker’s spouse.

A few weeks later, Jon was fired. In his exit interview, Armando Lopez, head of human resources at Ramsey, confirmed that the cause was his wife’s social media comment, according to a recording of the meeting.

Deficit Hawk Hypocrisy Aims to Hurt the People

Once again, Republicans (and many Democrats) are running around like Chicken Little warning about the economic sky collapsing now that Congress has passed the recent covid relief bill.

It is a tired, predictable, knee-jerk, conservative reaction to any government spending that aims to help the average American.

Remember that none of these folks expressed similar concerns about the folly of “deficit spending” when president Trump’s retrograde tax plan added between $1 to $2 trillion to the national debt.

None of these people complained about the CARES Act last March when a vast portion of that relief money, intended for the unemployed and small business owners, ended up lining the pockets of the richest Americans.

The litany of deficit-hawk hypocrisy could go on and on…

[For an excellent analysis of this misguided concern written by a well-regarded economist, I recommend reading the recent book by professor Stephanie Kelton called The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (PublicAffairs, 2021)].

At the DCReport, Bruce Bartlett has a good article exposing not only the

hypocrisy of this deficit fear mongering but also how very wrong the warnings have always been.

The article is titled “Inflation Hawks: Never Right, But Never in Doubt.” You can read an excerpt below or click on the title to find the entire piece:

Predictably, conservatives are once again warning about inflation. This happens every time a Democrat takes office—even if he merely continues the identical policies of his Republican predecessor.

Unfortunately, these concerns, which always receive wide media attention, are costly both politically and economically.

Bill Clinton was forced to adopt a deficit reduction plan in 1993 that led to the defeat of many Democrats in 1994 and the installation of Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House.

Barack Obama was forced to scale back his stimulus plan in 2009 and was browbeaten into deficit reduction in 2011. That kept the economy running in slow gear throughout Obama’s presidency paving the way for Donald Trump.

Now that Joe Biden has gotten his stimulus, the inflation-mongers are just getting started again. . .

. . . It’s been an article of faith among conservatives since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 that inflation is right around the corner.

This conviction follows from a core conservative belief that inflation invariably results from increases in the money supply. As Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist put it a half-century ago in an oft-quoted line: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

Thus, when the Federal Reserve vastly expanded the money supply in late 2008, conservatives anticipated a sharp rise in inflation. It didn’t happen. . .

. . . Yet, year after year, there was no inflation. In 2009 we saw prices fall slightly, the opposite of these predictions and warnings. The Federal Reserve couldn’t even hit its own target of 2% inflation. The average inflation rate for 2009 through 2020 was less than 1.3% annually.

That did nothing to dislodge right-wing orthodoxy, however. Conservatives continue to say that inflation was right around the corner. No amount of empirical data could shake their deeply held belief. . .

Stockton, California’s UBI Experiment is a Tremendous Success

Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang made a nation-wide

Universal Basic Income the centerpiece of his economic policy platform when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination last year.

Of course, conservatives in both parties broadcast their age-old objection to such social benefits programs by warning that giving people “free money” will automatically encourage them quit work and stay home where they will waste that money on beer and drugs.

Isn’t it funny how conservatives will always demonize the poor by insisting that welfare programs only encourage them to become more lazy and shiftless.

Ronald Reagan canonized this stereotype with his campaign trope of the “ghetto welfare queen.”

However, I have yet to hear a conservative warn against (the much more likely anti-social outcome that) giving the richest of the rich another large tax cut because it will likely make them more arrogant, greedy, and self-indulgent.

Funny how that works…

Well, Stockton, CA ran a UBI experiment where a group of families making below median incomes were given $500/month for two years. (The money was donated by a private contributor).

Below is an excerpt from an AP article entitled “Employment rose among those in Stockton’s universal basic income experiment.”

At least in this experiment, the conservative warnings were shown to be pure mythology:

After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and reported lower rates of

In this Aug. 14, 2019, file photo, Susie Garza displays the city provided debit card she receives monthly through a trial program in Stockton, Calif. A study of people in California who received $500 a month for free says they used it to pay off debt and get full-time jobs. A pair of independent researchers reviewed data from the first year of the study and released their finding on Wednesday, March 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

anxiety and depression, according to a study released Wednesday.

The program in the Northern California city of Stockton was the highest-profile experiment in the U.S. of a universal basic income, where everyone gets a guaranteed amount per month for free. Announced by former Mayor Michael Tubbs with great fanfare in 2017, the idea quickly gained momentum once it became a major part of Andrew Yang’s 2020 campaign for president.

Supporters say a guaranteed income can alleviate the stress and anxiety of people living in poverty while giving them the financial security needed to find good jobs and avoid debt. But critics argue free money would eliminate the incentive to work, creating a society dependent on the state.

Tubbs, who at 26 was elected Stockton’s first Black mayor in 2016 after endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, wanted to put those claims to the test. Stockton was an ideal place, given its proximity to Silicon Valley and the eagerness of the state’s tech titans to fund the experiment as they grapple with how to prepare for job losses that could come with automation and artificial intelligence.

The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration launched in February 2019, selecting a group of 125 people who lived in census tracts at or below the city’s median household income of $46,033. The program did not use tax dollars, but was financed by private donations, including a nonprofit led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

A pair of independent researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Pennsylvania reviewed data from the first year of the study, which did not overlap with the pandemic. A second study looking at year two is scheduled to be released next year.

When the program started in February 2019, 28% of the people slated to get the free money had full-time jobs. One year later, 40% of those people had full-time jobs. A control group of people who did not get the money saw a 5 percentage point increase in full-time employment over that same time period.

“These numbers were incredible. I hardly believed them myself,” said Stacia West, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee who analyzed the data along with Amy Castro Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tomas Vargas said the extra $500 a month was enough for him to take time off from his part-time job and find full-time work that paid better. He said he was depressed at the start of 2019, but now says he is happier and healthier.

You can read the rest of the story here.

America’s Richest .01% Pay Only 1/6th of the Taxes They Used to Pay

Several weeks ago Chuck Collins and Bob Ward (both at the Institute for Policy Studies) posted a brief summary at Inequality.org of their recent study, “Wealth Concentration: The Unique and Dominant Role of Tax Policy.”

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Collins and Ward demonstrate once again that the game is rigged. And it’s not rigged in favor of working people.

Every since Ronald Reagan sold America a bill of goods called trickle down economics, changing the tax code to lighten (or to sweep away!) federal taxes for the richest among us has become standard, operating procedure.

Their study is shocking enough, so I’ll just get to it:

America hasn’t stopped taxing its wealthiest citizens entirely.

But that’s where we’re headed.

According to a new IPS briefing paper, the richest .01 percent of Americans, about 33,000 lucky souls today, now pay just one-sixth of what they used to pay in tax, when measured as a percentage of their total wealth.

Texas Robber Barons Hit the “Jackpot” While Poor Texans Freeze in Bed

Cristian Pineda died of hypothermia, shivering to death inside his Texas

home curled into a ball beneath layers of blankets. He was 11 years old.

Meanwhile, Jerry Jones, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, declares that his Texas drilling company has “hit the jackpot” as natural gas prices shoot through the roof in Texas.

Jones is only the latest poster child for the evils of crony capitalism.

The rich get richer while the poor suffer, die, and get hit with sky-high price gouging. It’s the American way.

Below is an article by Camila Domonoske at NPR.org. She fills in the details:

The winter storms gripping much of the United States have devastated many families and businesses, with frigid temperatures and power outages causing particularly dire conditions in Texas.

But for oil and gas producers that have managed to keep production going, this is proving to be a big payday. Jerry Jones, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, appears to be one of the beneficiaries.

Comstock Resources Inc., a shale driller that operates in Texas and Louisiana,

ARLINGTON, TEXAS – NOVEMBER 08: Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys watches action prior to a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers at AT&T Stadium on November 08, 2020 in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

told investors on an earnings call this week that the surge in natural gas prices was providing it with a major — albeit almost certainly temporary — financial boost. The company is publicly traded but Jones holds a majority of the shares.

“Obviously, this week is like hitting the jackpot,” President and Chief Financial Officer Roland Burns said Wednesday.

The storm has reduced natural gas output at the same time that demand — for both home heating and power generation — has skyrocketed.

That’s resulted in catastrophic shortages, as well as some truly eye-popping prices for natural gas in the affected regions.

Many in the oil and gas industry have taken a blow because wells and pipelines have stopped working in the unexpected cold.

But Comstock was already ramping up production in anticipation that natural gas prices would increase, and now finds itself benefiting from what it described as “super-premium prices” of “anywhere from” $15 per thousand cubic feet to as much as $179 per thousand cubic feet.

For comparison, the company had sold the same gas last quarter for an average of $2.40 per thousand cubic feet.

Greg Palast on the History of Texas Electric Power

Greg Palast is an investigative reporter who has recently written about the

Texas power debacle (among other things). His piece is entitled “Texas Gets Lay’d: How the Bush Family Turned Off the Lights.”

Palast covers Texas’ history of deregulation and ability it gives the power companies freely to engage in extreme price gouging.

Not only was this crisis anticipated, not only did the power companies refuse to prepare, now those same companies are charging exorbitant prices for power they have failed to deliver.

You can’t make this stuff up. It’s called crony capitalism — and how much capitalism is not tied to cronyism in one way or another?

Below is an excerpt, or you can read the entire article by clicking on the title above:

Maybe because Texas gave us that wet-lipped huckster Ted Cruz, you think the state deserves to freeze in the dark.

I get that, but it’s not their fault, a least not the victims burning family heirlooms to stave off frostbite.

“What happened was entirely predictable,” power distribution expert attorney Beth Emory said of the blackouts. She told me this twenty years ago, after the first blackouts in Texas and California, following the cruel experiment called “deregulation” of the power industry.

Until 1992, the USA had just about the lowest electricity prices in the world and the most reliable system.

For a century, power companies had been limited by law to recovering their provable costs plus a “reasonable,” i.e. small, profit. But in 1992, George H. W. Bush, in the last gasps of his failed presidency, began to deregulate the industry.

“Deregulate” is a misnomer. “De-criminalize” describes it best. With the “free market” supposedly setting the price of power, Texas-based Enron was freed to use such techniques as “Ricochet,” “Get Shorty,” and “Death Star” to blow prices through the roof when weather shut down power plants. (This week was not the first game of Texas Gouge’m.)

Enron was not the only Lone Star power pirate. Houston Power & Light was “ramping” plants up and down at odd hours which whistleblowers said was deliberate.

Bush’s son “Shrub,” Texas Gov. George W. Bush, signed a law in 1999 forcing the state’s hapless customers to accept any price the “free” market dictated. Enron’s CEO Ken Lay showed his appreciation by becoming Baby Bush’s number one donor for Dubya’s presidential ambitions.

This week, wholesale electric prices in Texas, normally $50 per megawatt-hour, busted over $9,000/MWHR. Again. It happens with every cold snap and heat wave. One shop owner, Akilah Scott-Amos, showed the Daily Beast her electric bills which blew up from $34 per month to $450 for a single day.

Privatization + Deregulation = Texas Nightmare

I am sure that you have already heard or seen examples of the conservative misinformation machine’s attempts to blame the Texas power outages on the inadequacies of wind turbines, solar power, and the Green New Deal.

Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, gave the game away, however,

when he made two different TV appearances on the same day to discuss the problems Texas is facing.

Chris Hayes of MSNBC broadcast the clips back-to-back, highlighting both the conservative, Republican lies about green energy, but also Gov. Abbott’s close kinship to Pinocchio. You can almost see his nose grow in the clip below.

First, Abbott spoke on local, Texas television. When talking only to Texans, he explained the power outages accurately, like a reasonable person. The primary issue was a lack of winterized equipment, especially for the natural gas facilities and pipelines. The gas tanks and supply lines were frozen solid.

Then Abbott spoke to a national audience on the Fox network. In this interview, he spewed his conservative hogwash about the failures of wind farms and solar panels, though (strangely enough) he did mention that these sources only supply about 10% of Texas’ power. (He, obviously, was counting on his conservative coconspirators to be so busy cheering his lies that they wouldn’t stop to reflect on the obvious incongruity of his statement.)

Gov. Abbott’s two-faced appearances demonstrate that he is a sock puppet for America’s fossil fuel industry, as are all the other conservatives spewing the same rubbish. They are exploiting the poor people of Texas by balancing their corporate lies about what went wrong on the frozen backsides of suffering people who have no heat or clean water.

But, hey. That’s what selling your soul to corporate power will do to you.

According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, Greg Abbott has taken over $28 million from fossil fuel corporations over his political career, including $11 million alone in his most recent election campaign.

No wonder he can only criticize the Green New Deal.

The real problem in Texas – aside from unscrupulous politicians – is the inhumane economics of deregulated privatization. Neoliberalism strikes again, but his time it’s the conservative fan base of anti-government, pro-laissez faire capitalism that is paying the price. (As opposed to the South American working class and other species of human cannon fodder typically exploited by US corporations around the world.)

Federal regulators warned Texas officials a decade ago (!) that its power grid was not prepared for extreme winter conditions, the very conditions that struck Texas this week. (Check out this good overview of the issues by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thanks to my friend Suzanne McDonald for bringing this report to my attention.)

Texas had been warned. The CEOs and politicians chose to do nothing.

It’s not hard to figure out what happened. First, the majority of Texas is not connected to the national power grid. Texans pride themselves on their independence. So, they decided to go it alone.

Furthermore, Texan “power independence” is motivated by the conservative hatred of federal regulation. By keeping Texas power separated from the rest of the nation, Texas power companies remained free of regulatory oversight.

Ahem……Sooooo…when federal regulators told Texan power company officials that they were woefully unprepared for future blizzard conditions, Texan politicians remained warm and cozy with their corporate overlords and told the feds to stuff it. No one could force them to do otherwise.

It’s not hard to imagine the decision-making process.

The CEOs and board members of Texas power companies got together and decided that preparing for a “once in a century” winter storm front was not cost effective.

Cost effectiveness is the cold, hard, bottom-line reality that the sycophants of unfettered, global capitalism love to ignore – and what too many of their followers rarely think about. (The economics at play are also known as neoliberalism – check out this good discussion at Jacobin magazine.)

It is ALWAYS a bad idea to hand over control of public services/utilities to private corporations. Private corporations do not work in the public interest, regardless of what the PR department tells you.

Yes, yes, neoliberal propagandists like to talk about the superior services that will supposedly arrive with privatization, and the lower prices made possible by glorious deregulation.

Except, this predictable PR palaver is all smoke and mirrors.

The truth of the matter is that the #1 priority of any corporation is PROFIT, making as much money as possible for its shareholders. Cost effectiveness is judged according to increasing profit margins.

Winterizing Texas was not economically feasible if these corporations were to continue raking in the dough.

Predictably, then, the rich made more money while the majority of Texans were set up to suffer. But, hey, it’s only once a century, right?

This, folks, is neoliberal chicanery writ large.

Jacobin Magazine — Jeff Bezos: Your Legacy is Exploitation

Jeff Bezos has gotten considerable attention lately in the MSM lately due to

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – OCTOBER 15: Jeff Bezos speaks onstage at WIRED25 Summit. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED25 )

his decision to step down as Amazon’s CEO.

However, he has not left the company altogether. He has made a lateral move to become Amazon’s Executive Chair. A chair from which you can bet he will continue to rule the roost in both Amazon and the global marketplace.

Jacobin Magazine has published a good article explaining Bezo’s longstanding predatory, exploitative business practices — the obscene practices directly responsible for making Amazon the mammoth monopoly power that it is today.

The last thing Jeff Bezos is is a business genius who deserves admiration. Rather, he is a textbook example of how the rich make themselves richer by exploiting and devouring smaller fry further down the food chain.

The article’s author is Paris Marx. It is entitled, “Jeff Bezos: Your Legacy is Exploitation.” The entire piece is well worth your time. I have posted an

excerpt below, or you can find the entire article by clicking on the title above.

Read it and get angry at over the way US predatory, crony capitalism works.

Jeff Bezos is stepping aside as Amazon’s CEO having made a fortune of almost $200 billion. It’s an attempt at reputation rehabilitation — but he can’t escape the legacy of exploitation he leaves behind.

Jeff Bezos, who you might also know as “the richest man in the world” or “that guy who ate a lizard one time,” is stepping down as the CEO of Amazon after twenty-seven years at the helm — or maybe it’s better to say he’s stepping to the side. Bezos will instead take on the title of executive chair, which means he’ll still have an influential role in company decisions, but will no longer be the face of Amazon. Yet there’s no reason to believe that means Amazon will become the friendly monopolist its smiling logo might suggest.

With Bezos at the helm, Amazon grew from an online bookseller started from a garage in Bellevue, Washington to one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world that not only controls key e-commerce and cloud platforms, but has extended its reach into a growing number of sectors. However, it’s important not to get distracted by the triumphalist historicizing of tech companies and their chief executives that’s become far too common since internet businesses exploded in the 1990s.

It’s often said that Amazon was started in Washington so it would be close to Microsoft and try to attract some of its talent, and while that’s partly true, it was hardly the deciding factor. Before founding the company in 1994, Bezos was the senior vice president of a hedge fund, and it’s said he made sure the first house he rented in Bellevue had a garage so he could spin the kind of founding story one would expect of a tech company. He was hardly poor, and he knew how to minimize his tax burden.

The real reason Bezos was drawn to Washington was because the state had no personal income tax and no corporate income tax, and at the time, Amazon only had to charge sales tax on purchases made in whichever state the company was headquartered in. With a population of just over five million in 1994, Washington was the perfect base from which to ship the other 260 million Americans all the books they could buy — not because Bezos had a particular love of books, but because they could be bought wholesale, were easy to ship, and independent bookstores had been decimated, leaving a market to be captured.

As Amazon began to attract customers and expand its product offerings, it took a different approach to growth. Instead of seeking to turn a profit as quickly as possible, Bezos played the long game, reinvesting Amazon’s earnings in the business to such a degree that it didn’t turn its first quarterly profit until 2001 and its first annual profit until 2003. For years to follow, Amazon’s profit margins remained slim as it expanded its empire.

This was undoubtedly a great business strategy, but it came with consequences. By operating at a loss for a decade, Amazon was able to provide goods and services below cost to drive out its competitors and dominate the markets it operated in. This only became easier as it grew, as the case of Diapers.com shows.

In 2009, Bezos saw that Diapers.com was gaining popularity with parents, so Amazon set up a meeting with its founders. When they refused to sell, Amazon set its prices on diapers and other baby products 30 percent below those offered by its competitor, and when Diapers.com adjusted their prices, the ones on Amazon changed accordingly. Amazon was using the profits from its other products to sell baby products below cost so Diapers.com would have to sell itself to Amazon or go out of business. Amazon even launched a service called Amazon Mom to offer baby products at even steeper discounts until, on November 8, 2010, Diapers.com finally sold to Amazon. Not long after, Amazon Mom was terminated, and prices returned to normal. . .

Oklahoma Congressman Evicts Tenants During the Pandemic

This story is from freelance journalist Emma Rindlisbacher at The Daily Poster. The headline is “Congressman’s Companies Evicting Renters During Pandemic.”

The wealthy Republican is evicting tenants despite the eviction moratorium passed by Congress. Once again, rich property owners do as they wish while others suffer.

Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above.

Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., drew ire for voting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, as well as for refusing to wear a mask to keep COVID-19 from spreading when lawmakers locked down during the U.S. Capitol insurrection. His nonchalance about the coronavirus did not end there: Eviction notices have been filed against residents of two rental properties associated with Mullin during the pandemic.

The eviction filings come as coronavirus case counts have steadily increased in Oklahoma and the United States. So far, Oklahoma has seen 3,323 deaths from the coronavirus. In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a national moratorium against evictions as a public health measure to prevent the spread of COVID. . .

. . . Mullin’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The CDC took action to curb evictions by issuing an eviction moratorium, which took effect on September 4. But the moratorium has been criticized as weakly enforced and has allowed evictions to continue despite the pandemic. The moratorium was set to expire on December 31, before Congress took action and extended the moratorium until January 31. President Joe Biden then extended the moratorium until March 31.

The Strange Nature of the Current Conversation About Censorship

Since the attack on the Congressional building last week, talk about censorship has increased markedly.

The most notable example has been the Parler app which became the conservative alternative to Twitter after that site began to moderate, and sometimes censor, political postings.

After Wednesday’s Trump rally/demonstration, several support platforms (such as Google) that make programs like Twitter and Parler available online, have refused to support the Parler app any longer.

Congress has been calling the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram into its chambers for months to give lengthy testimony before comically ill-informed congressional people. Representatives and Senators primarily scold these men and women for not implementing the particular species of censorship that they happen to believe is needed.

The CEOs bow and scrap appropriately and then go home to do as they please.

Now conservatives are whipping themselves into a panic over targeted, corporate censorship directed specifically against them and their movements.

In fact, Joe Biden has already begun to discuss the need for new laws to clamp down on “domestic terrorism,” which will certainly include additional provisions for warrantless surveillance, wiretapping, and censorship for “inappropriate” political speech.

But there is a deep irony in these conservative complaints about corporate giants like Facebook monopolizing online communications, and the growth of government censorship.

Oddly enough, politicians, journalists, and the public commonly discuss these issues as if Facebook and Twitter were public service providers!

They are not.

They are private companies that can do anything they darn well please in the area of content control. Their only real obligation is to make more money for their shareholders.

It’s called capitalism, remember?

And conservatives have always insisted that markets should not be regulated, unless of course it somehow improves the bottom line for the corporations we are now complaining about.

As a result, the American people face a barren, public communications landscape dominated by a few behemoth-sized corporations that have consumed and destroyed all competition.

It’s called unregulated capitalism. The kind conservatives adore.

People forget that all of these companies became the giant monopolies they are today because of government DE-regulation policies going back to the Reagan presidency — deregulation policies dear to the heart of conservatives.

Now everyone gets to reap what “they” have sown.

Category: Economics

Deficit Hawk Hypocrisy Aims to Hurt the People

Like this:

Stockton, California’s UBI Experiment is a Tremendous Success

Like this:

America’s Richest .01% Pay Only 1/6th of the Taxes They Used to Pay

Like this:

Texas Robber Barons Hit the “Jackpot” While Poor Texans Freeze in Bed

Like this:

Greg Palast on the History of Texas Electric Power

Like this:

Privatization + Deregulation = Texas Nightmare

Like this:

Jacobin Magazine — Jeff Bezos: Your Legacy is Exploitation

Like this:

Oklahoma Congressman Evicts Tenants During the Pandemic

Like this:

The Strange Nature of the Current Conversation About Censorship

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: