John Boehner said the Republicans’ top priority was going to be the jobs issue. But what is the Speaker’s first order of business? Side tracking us with their bogus vote on repealing the health care bill. By focusing on repealing this bill they are doing us a great dis-service; we aren’t paying enough attention to the detrimental effects of too much consolidation of all industries in the US.
The merging mania we’ve seen in health insurance has been happening since President Reagan deregulated hospitals and insurance companies. Once allowed to become ‘for profit‘, insurance companies became monopolies able to fix prices and eliminate competition, part of the reason why this luke warm health insurance reform bill has become a political football.
The merging mania continues to this day; on Monday Feb 11 stocks were up on news of several mergers and the FCC has given GE permission to sell NBC to Comcast, already the nation’s largest cable provider, who will now become an even bigger media monopoly.
Bernie Sanders independent from Vermont said “Once we allow these companies to become this powerful, the FCC does not regulate them. They regulate the FCC.”
And it’s the same with the other huge conglomerates; Big Oil, Banks Too Big to Fail, along with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. We don’t regulate them, they regulate us.
Republicans faithfully kept up the lament that it’s government regulations preventing companies from creating jobs. Shortly thereafter, the president ordered a review of all regulations to see which ones are prohibitive to job creation. Even Adam Smith who wrote the book on capitalism “Wealth of Nations”, said, there has to be regulation to keep the crooks from taking advantage of people.
This is certainly not what Thomas Paine had in mind when he said, “Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; charters by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right by exclusion, in the hands of the few…(They) consequently are instruments of injustice.”
“But charters and corporations have a more extensive evil effect than what relates merely to elections. They are the source of endless contention in the places where they exist, and they lessen the common rights of national society…This species of feudality is kept up to aggrandise the corporations at the ruin of towns; and the effect is visible.”
His words are as true today as they were when they were first written. We’re seeing the ruination of towns, contention over health insurance, millions of Americans without jobs and millions of Americans losing their homes, all due to the evil effects of corporations who have become too big and too powerful to the detriment of us all.
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