Memories of Antitrust Laws

Health insurance companies are exempt from antitrust laws. Senator Leahy is sponsoring legislation in the Senate to eliminate this exemption stating- “Virtually every company in America has to follow the antitrust rules. They can't conspire to set prices and cut out competition. There's one exception, in all the industries in America, one exception: health insurance.”

“And they can get together, without violating the antitrust laws. They can do what they want in carving up markets without getting involved in the antitrust laws. All I'm saying, if the law applies to everybody else, it should apply to them.”

This is astounding, because it is not the reality on the ground in American society. Every facet of our lives is controlled by monopolies who exploit us. Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-trust laws have been striped bare and precisely why we bailed out banks who were allowed to become “too big to fail“. Ever since the failures of the Savings and Loans, banks have been consolidating. This “financial meltdown” is causing more banks to fail, creating even bigger banks. Talk about getting together, literally.

We used to have hundreds of oil companies, today we have four or five. Competing gas stations used to be plentiful, now there’s very little competition. The price at the pump is fixed by Big Oil.

Big Pharma and Agri-Business control the price and of food and medicine. More people are dying from poison food, and if the government can’t protect us from poison food, there’s little hope they can enforce anti-trust laws.

The media of print, radio and television have been consolidated until there’s just a few news corporations left. Now we have to pay for cable with few choices in cable companies.

Ever since the late eighties health insurance companies have been consolidating and setting prices. UnitedHealth Care alone has 23 million members and the CEO makes one hundred and eight six million dollars a year. No wonder they can’t pay claims, they have to pay the CEO. Airlines and utilities have consolidated leaving us with fewer choices and poorer services.

Much of our over seas military operations are out sourced to private corporations, with companies like Blackwater Security performing missions on the level of the CIA. More and more of our prisons and schools are being run by private companies.

With all this going on around us how can the Senator say every company in America is following the anti-trust laws? Maybe antitrust laws exist in the Senator’s memory, but they certainly do not exist today nor will the insurance companies ever be subjected to them.

Sink or Swim

The 700 billion bank bailout was only the tip of the iceberg, between the capital injections; guarantees; indirect loans, and propping up of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, we’ve invested 17.5 trillion into the country’s financial institutions.

Due to increased earnings the stock market is up for banks like JPMorgan- Chase and Goldman Sachs, who are on track for doling out record bonuses. If it wasn’t for the tax payer these financial institutions wouldn’t even exist. Millions of Americans are in foreclosure yet we’re supporting Wall Street with trillions. There’s something wrong with that picture.

Where is the orchestrated outrage over the trillions we’re pouring into Wall Street causing deficits “as far as the eye can see”?

There isn’t any, we only see the outrage over Acorn, not the morally bankrupt actions of the nation’s financial institutions while our government spurs them on.

Having two bankers in a row as Treasury Secretary’s doesn’t help. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was former CEO of Goldman Sachs and Timothy Geithner headed the Federal Reserve of New York while we bailed out Wall Street Banks.

Secretary Giethner has set aside one trillion to the Public Private Investment Fund, which guarantees the purchaser of “toxic assets” six dollars for every one dollar invested to sell these toxic assets. If prices go up the purchaser wins, if the price goes down the purchaser loses little while the tax payer picks up the difference. That money could be better used investing in ordinary Americans to reduce principals rather than enticing billionaires to buy toxic assets.

FDR's New Deal brought us deposit insurance; stock market regulation, and the separation of commercial and investment banking. Since the seventies our politicians both Democrats and Republicans alike have whittled away these and other protections leaving us in the situation we face today: an economy supported by over inflated values and financing of debt.

In a capitalistic democracy all boats rise not just the yachts. Our economy is experiencing an inverted gravity, only the yachts are rising while all the other boats and dinghies sink in the shark infested economy. This is why earnings are up on Wall Street while Main Street is being boarded up.