B (4:55)
To use their language. Profit is our bottom line. In simple English, profit is the goal. Profit is the priority. Safety isn't. And when we fly in something, or when we drive something, or when we take something into our bodies, the number one priority shouldn't be the profit of the producer, it should be the safety of the consumer. The profiteers are few, the consumers are many. It's not democratic, it's not human, it's inappropriate and they ought to be called out. What's common to Boeing, to Audi and to Juul is that they are profit driven capitalist enterprises. And therein lies the common problem. My next update has to do with the decision of the Department of Justice in Washington to begin an inquiry, an antitrust investigation, into large high tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and so on. The name of the game here is ready shock and awe that these companies may be operating a monopoly. What's a monopoly mean? It means that instead of having many competitors, many companies competing with one another, instead what you have is simply only one. That's literally a monopoly or a very small number. And the reason that's bad is if it's one or a very small number, they can manipulate the market, they can jack up the prices higher than what they would otherwise be because you've got nowhere else to go but that one. Or the few because there aren't many. This is not rocket science, friends. What's the problem here? Here's the Capitalism always proceeds to Monopoly. Here's the when you have many competitors, each one trying to beat the other one, some win and some lose. That's what competition means. And guess what happens? The winners get bigger and the losers go out of business. And when the losers go out of Business. They lay off workers, they sell off their equip. You know who hires those workers, and you know who buys that equipment? The winners. And slowly, over time, what competition does is reduce the many to the few. So if you don't like Monopoly, you got a problem. You don't like capitalism. Cause that's what it is. It's the competition that produces the monopoly. And why is monopoly attractive? Because then businesses can get two kinds of profit. One, what they get off their workers, who they pay less than what those workers produce for the company. But now they have a second way to gain. They can jack the price up way beyond what it would otherwise be because the buying public, whoever they are, have no options. That's why companies want to become monopolies, because they make more money. It's built into the system. So an investigation to see whether it's happening for the umpteenth time is an investigation into the likelihood that. That tomorrow the sun will rise. Not really need an investigation. And here's an even more rich irony. No sooner do monopolies take over in an enterprise, in an industry like cigarettes or cars or machinery or whatever you name, than pretty soon they're making so much money that there's an incentive for other companies to come in with a new product to substitute because it's so profitable. So, ironically, monopoly generates competition again, as others want in on the enormous profits that monopolists make. In other words, capitalism displays, as it always has, the transition from competition to monopoly and the transition back. The only thing that makes this even more ludicrous is when the government investigates. That means the Department of Justice is going to hire and use a vast array of lawyers, accountants, economists like me to come in and push about why is this happening and it shouldn't happen? And the companies will have their irony, excess of lawyers and accountants to argue why they should. And they might not. And it should take some time, and they have to adjust. And you know who pays for the lawyers on both sides? You and me. The taxes we pay pay for the government lawyers. And the companies that are defending themselves, they'll jack up the price, which they're monopolists, and they can do to cover the cost of their lawyers. We get to pay the lawyers on both sides. And you know what ends up happening? One possibility, nothing, and just keep going. Second possibility, we break up the company into many small companies to resume competition, which we do, and that produces. Then again, monopoly. This is crazy, what we're doing. Our problem isn't monopoly or competition. Our problem is a system that displays the transition from one to the other during which we are are overcharged for the monopolized goods, overcharged for the legal shenanigans in which they argue with each other for the umpteenth time. How many times do you need to get ripped off before you recognize a ripoff? I want to call out a remarkable development. Cooperatives have been formed, worker cooperatives across America. But there's a new thing happening. It's called Brightly. It's a system that franchises worker co ops. You know, like you franchise a fast food joint or you franchise. You create a model that lots of people can easily get into that business. That's now being done for worker co ops. One of the supporters of it is the center for Family Life. If you're interested, go look up Brightly. Go look up the center for Family Life. Look up this phenomena of franchising of worker co ops as they spread. Another good example of this is the Arizmendi association of Cooperatives in the Bay Area of California that is also helping to spread this model so it develops in America even faster in the future than it has been in the recent past. The last thing I want to talk about today that we'll have time for, or perhaps we'll have time for two we'll see is the problem of inequality in the United States. I wanted to make sure that people understand the history of all of this. If you pay some people systematically more than other people, certain things follow. Those who are better paid can afford better housing, better schooling, better transportall of that. And as a result you get two different kinds of neighborhoods, two different kinds of childhoods, two different kinds of schools. And if you don't deal with that inequality, it becomes baked into the society. People who live in the nicer neighborhood want some distance between themselves and those who are not. Those with children in the better schools don't want them to be reduced in quality by having to deal with kids that bring more problems. Why? Because their parents earn less money and can't live in the nice ne. You get the picture. Because we all know what this is about. And then it becomes self reproducing over time. That's the real terrible part of all of this. So I was struck when I recently learned the two school districts in Long Island, New York exemplify this. And I wanted to simply tell you about it. In Hempstead, the Hempstead Union Free School District and the Garden City Union Free School District are a very few miles apart. Enrollment in Hempast Schools is 2% white, while immediately to the north, the school district in Garden City is 87% white. Get the picture? White people paid more than non white people. And now these arrangements have happened. Now what's at stake here? Well, you can get many implications of it. I'm just going to give you one. Ready. In Hempstead City schools, they get almost 5,000 more per student per year. Other wealthy districts get even more, 7,000 more per student per year. In other words, the whole quality of what's happening to the children reproduces the inequality that exists in the society. You can't blame people for this inequality. You're blaming conditions that determine what happens to those people. That's why you've got to deal with the inequality at the base, at the unequal access to the resources that shape the community. Housing, schools, transportation and all the rest. We've come to the end of the first half of our program. For those of you that follow us on YouTube, please become a YouTube supporter. It's very important to us make use please of our websites rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info where you can communicate to us. And of course, as always, thank you to our Patreon audience for the support and encouragement you constantly provide and we depend on.
