Incompetent FTC

The FTC in the United States has been completely incompetent for several decades now and just like any Ponzi or plunder scheme, it takes a crises to expose it. I have been railing for years how outdated the FTC is.  How their use of economic theory that is at least a century old / outdated should have been trashed a very long time ago.  Their decisions over the years to allow the US economy to become pretty much an oligarchy have been the most instrumental in American history and at this point.

I have been hearing for weeks about the lack of basic supplies, really basic supplies, to the health care industry.  I have heard NOTHING about why these supplies are in short supply.  I have read about how some of the shortages have been made up on a small scale but NOBODY is asking, "Hey, why or how did every major industry end up having so few suppliers?"

There is no way I am going to cover this topic in depth here. It is dissertation material.  However any idiot (who does not work for the FTC obviously) that has been alive at least 50 years has seen this process unfold even if they can't "see" the supply chains and producers disappear as obviously, they have seen it in their interaction with the world every day on at least the retail front.

While the FTC has been applying way out dated "rules" to every merger let's just look at a basic example, DIY or Home Improvement sector.  Mind you, what I say here goes for every industry the consumer touches and every supply chain, wholesale channel, manufacturing etc.  When top end, ie; retail, mergers happen a great deal of repercussions happen down stream.  These repercussions have been completely overlooked and utterly missed even though the same dynamics happen over and over again.  The mergers create immediate oversight of suppliers.  The desire for "economies of scale" mean the merged retailer looks at it's supply chain and tries to reduce costs, first by pitting suppliers against each other then eventually by offering monopoly positioning of the winner's products on their shelves.

What happens in this scenario?  If you make locks and have served say a tri-state area or some regional area for decades it is likely your existence is due to the consolidation of even smaller producers in the generations before you, before your product was mass produced in your factory.  Now you have a "market" that has served the retailers in your market, hardware stores, home improvement stores and the like. After a retail merger your company gets a call asking you to compete for continued access to the stores you previously served (along with other suppliers / competitors who operated in your market as well). The demands for cost reductions are pretty steep.  In order to be able to meet these demands you are going to need to increase output; get your cost of production down.  To do this quickly you call your competitors, who are getting the same demands from the retailer.  A merger is created and new investment to increase production / reduce costs between the suppliers.  This also creates another down stream effect on the providers of inputs to these manufacturers and down whatever chain exists in the making of your product.  For a while you win continued shelf space.

Meanwhile, the newly merged retailer is trading on the message of more variety, lower prices etc. to their customers and touting this great benefit to the idiot regulators who look at the market from a national perspective and sign off due to their outdated useless academic "models".  What happens over time?  Simple answer, desire for increased profits creates additional pressure on suppliers.  Retailer decides to shrink the number of suppliers over time going through additional rounds of requests for lower cost product.  Suppliers are forced to merge again, consolidate production more.  This further drives out the down-line supply chain.

Next, additional retail mergers and buyouts.  Those DIY retailers that serve regional markets start to merge. Private Equity firms step in and demand mergers or selling out to new "national" players in an ever drive to increase profits and squeeze out competitors.  FTC sits back and watches this slow train wreck.  Consumers see fewer choices on the store shelves.  Slowly the lower priced competitive products begin to disappear, being replaced by the mega suppliers who by now have merged, bought out competitors and managed to restructure to supply the entire nation from a much smaller supply chain.

Most manufacturing has been off shored by the surviving companies as the retailers go to them and say "hey, some factory in China can get me this product for $.05 cheaper".  Now this small margin would not mean so much in the past but now we are talking about thousands of locations where a nickle means millions of dollars when selling an item on a national scale.  Of course the final step is straight out monopoly shelf space where the retailer goes to bed with the suppliers to guarantee a designated profit on every item sold.

Monopoly shelf space, guaranteed profits, where to go next?  Increase prices, lower quality to squeeze more profit out of each unit of sale and most importantly, now you have monopoly suppliers with a "predictable" demand selling to oligopoly retailers all production is coming from one or two factories somewhere on the planet, ordered months or years in advance, sold into a radically shrunk supply chain, while engineers spend all of their research dollars figuring out how to cut costs and effectively dumb down products to increase margins.

I could go on, like explaining how these dynamics also mean sales forces look to the developing world to decimate any and all local production by flooding markets with their cheap mass produced products made in sweatshops by workers under some authoritarian regime as the markets in the developed world stagnates along with the population. But I will stop here.

Now apply the above dynamic to everything the consumer touches... Remember 2009 when the infrastructure spending bill resulted in shortages of seemingly simple products like the paint to put lines on roads?  Well now we are seeing how fragile this new dynamic is.  We (the FTC allowed) the total decimation of  manufacturing, driven by the consolidation of retail, producers, suppliers etc. and we now have the resulting repercussions. With now a full 70% of the US economy driven by consumer expenditure it does not take a genius to see how the incompetence of the FTC in allowing the rapid consolidation of every sector of the economy has created a recipe for disaster not only for the future of our nation's well being as a producer of goods, but now as a consumer of goods as these dramatically reduced supply chains have exposed the food supply in the same way.

Where are the MSM "reporters" or "anchors" that are asking "why are there only 2 companies in the country producing XYX?"  "Why are there 3 or 5 companies supplying 80% or more of our food on any given level, from retail, to production to distribution?"  Where are we as a nation when everything has been relegated to oligarchy?   I don't see the questions being asked.  Why, the oligarchy pays the MSM.  They would not challenge them. Nor would the incompetent government agents we have "elected" or those heading up the government agencies that have overseen this progress for half a century as they round trip from government to industry in just about every category of "regulation" the government has.

So now the "government" has to step in and procure basic supplies and force other companies to produce products because there are mass shortages of necessary supplies of, well, just about everything needed to meet the needs of the medical community.  Why don't we just ask the FTC?

Wake Up America?

I was recently referred to this article in an email.  It's by Gates, Bill Gates, the one we all know.  It seems it's been floating around and referred to by quite a number of publications.

Gates IS the anti-Christ right now.  He is THE DEFINITION of the problem we are in.  He is 15% of WHO budget and 85% of it's mouthpiece. He is the mouthpiece of the billionaires and his foundation has the influence of a nation.  He is one of the most frightening people alive!

 

This is the biggest piece of PR I have ever seen coming from Gates.  He knows he is the MAN NUMBER ONE in the drive to shut down the world and this is his "excuse / justification" letter to the world to cover his ass.   I don't even have to pick it apart as I intended.  I can see it for what it is.

I was in Asia for 6 months from August to March.  The Chinese and other parts of  SE Asia were fighting a pig pandemic, bird pandemic and then a people pandemic.  The pig and bird ones were extremely deadly on those populations. There were quarantines all over Asia and Millions of pigs were killed in China and other countries.  It was a huge disaster (and still is).  In the Philippines there were restrictions on travel, transport etc on pigs.  Huge!  They were lucky the bird diseases were not present.  

Where is Gates in recognizing these pandemics?  Are they not relevant? Do these pandemics that massively affect food supply and need huge investment by governments to track them, cull massive herds of animals and quarantine entire regions and countries to control these pandemics not instructive of what needs to be done? Are they not exactly what we should be focused on and learning from?  Why does he not even discuss what we have learned from these other animal diseases?  OMG I am just fuming right now.

He is defending himself to the hilt in this letter!  Reading it is like a summary.  It is a waste of time.  Sorry I have been reading alot about this virus and associated situations around the world and trust me, this virus is not anything like what he is talking about.  Ebola, yea, MERS, yea, the earlier version of SARS, yea, HIV, yea... This NO WAY.  They missed it.  Sorry, this was a huge mistake and he is trying to justify his panic and destruction of the global economy.

Sorry, I know enough about many of our self important billionaires and they don't often have the common sense of a doorknob. The amount of influence in the US government by billionaires and their think tanks are a direct example of how completely dysfunctional a nation can be when these idiots run it.  I don't give a damn how many billions he made by accident, luck, the network effect or whatever you want to call it.  That does not give him the right to shut down the world.  He is in his bubble and he has been instrumental in derailing the progress of 40 years of efforts by every international organization on the planet to reduce poverty.  Even though many of those efforts are blatantly fraudulent, self serving, useless and downright detrimental to the people they are supposed to serve, at least with half a century of offshoring our dirty industrial production we have managed to lift a couple billion people out of poverty (while keeping our own stagnant at best). Though with the global population exploding over that time the absolute numbers from a practical standpoint are still precarious at best.  Where is Gates in recognizing how badly he has f&*%ed things up?  There is NO RECOVERING from what he has done for tens of millions if not billions of people who tomorrow are starving, relying on menial handouts from their governments to survive! 

You know what kills more people in the world then all disease put together?  Poverty. What has Gates done?  Think about it.  More people in the Philippines will die from ulcers this year then this stupid virus.  You know why?  They are to poor to afford the medicines produced by the multinationals that have been pumping out the same medicines for years and continue to increase the prices every damn year no matter how long the technology has been around or how cheaply they can be produced.  It is about profit.  Where is Gates on talking about this?  He is in bed with big Pharma.  He is one evil billionaire bastard who we would be better off if he would just go self-quarantine for the next 10 years!  

The Medical Industrial Complex of America is near 20% of our GDP. This is up from 5% 50 years ago.  How is this even possible?  We are the most medicated people on the planet by a factor of 5x or more.  We pay 4-10x what other nations do for every damn thing we get in return for our money in medical care and there are NO statistics that show we are better for it! In fact with the opioid epidemic of the last 20 years (70,000 dead a year) we have metrics that have worsened.  Add the fact we are the guinea pigs of the world to the Industrial Agricultural Complex with the horrible health effects to show for it (digestive issues are a virtual epidemic here, along with preventable diabetes, hypertension etc.) and we are arguably the sickest population of any industrial world as well.  

Then what do you see on Mass Media?  Glorification of medical workers.  NO MENTION that its THE Medical Industrial Complex that bankrupts more people in the country then any other source, that steals billions form taxpayers by overcharging for these absolutely ridiculously useless "health plans" under the "Government Health Plans" that are nothing but massive middle man HMO's that rake billions out of the system and fuel huge profits. The billionaire CEO's, the massive buy backs, the idiots that run the FTC allowing mergers for years to the point there are just a few companies left that manage and run everything from wholesale drug sales, retail drug sales, insurance, health maintenance organizations, corporate health plans, actual medical services and hospitals; all integrated into giant oligopoly companies!  These firms will not even do business where they can't guarantee huge profits, they just walk!  Add big pharma..Don't even get me started there!  And these IDIOTS could not handle this virus!

Why has NOT ONE "reporter" called out the industry on this?  Why do you see nothing on this?  Cause the billionaires in the Medical Industrial Complex are HUGE advertisers for the oligopoly media and huge financiers of our politicians and there is NO WAY in hell either will embarrass the industry that feeds them.  Instead there are millions of dollars in PR money to fog the public and give them another round of "hero" BS to cheer on... Look back just over the last 20 years... 9/11, solders are heroes and Military Industrial Complex gets a "blank check" to invade everywhere and anywhere to "kill them terrorists"  What do we have now?  $11 trillion in debt directly attributable to their adventures around the world, drones killing indiscriminately, thousands of dead and maimed Americans and tens of thousands dead everywhere we went, almost all of that money spent killing people that literally live in mud huts!! And nobody calls them out!!! NOBODY! Then financial crises... Do we get angry and go after the criminals?  No!  Millions of dollars in PR money go in to a global campaign to glorify entrepreneurs and I could go on for pages about that distraction... Now we have this latest shit show and the PR that deflects again... Where will this BS end. When will people wake the f&%k up? 

Where is Gates in making all this obvious?  Why is the same government that says government involvement in health care is socialist taking over the procurement of necessary medical supplies?  Why are they granting billions to the industry that is stealing the life out of our people and economy and bankrupting our nation?  All this is so f&*$ed up I cannot even fathom putting it all in here!

So yea, the letter is informational and right between the lines of EXACTLY how "educated" people should be thinking (being distracted) about this shit show Gates has put on the planet cause you sure don't want people really thinking about what the f&%k is going on cause they might get right out of their chairs and away from their tiny little screens and start some kind of revolution!