Why do American businesses get out of control and why do we let them?
Deregulation of the airlines, supposed to create cheaper fares and better service has done the reverse. Programs have been shown on TV concerning passenger mistreatment, aircrew abuse, airline neglect to improve conditions for either and no law requiring them to report incidents of violence aboard aircraft.
The automobile industry produces defective cars, such as the SUV with it’s chronic rollover problems, uses cheaper materials, charges higher prices and has hidden dangerous defects until forced to recall the vehicles containing them.
It became ‘good business’ for certain types of large companies to forcefully take over smaller, weaker ones, fire everyone, then sell off the assets and materials at a profit. More people were hurt by this than benefited.
Major mergers by various companies have placed tremendous amounts of consumer goods under the control of just a few, who then regulate the prices to their benefit. Campbell’s soup also owns Progresso and runs ‘competition’ commercials against itself for the higher priced, single serving food over the cheaper, two serving product.
Where once there were dozens of gas companies, mergers, forced acquisitions, down and out deliberate ‘fuel wars’, and whisper campaigns have reduced the number to just a few, who now control all of the fuel in America.
Major drug companies, once concerned with developing products for the health of the nation, now are profit oriented and have priced drugs vital to life and health up so high that many people have to virtually give up their homes and savings just to get the ones they need.
Stores like the mega corporation Walmart developed a tactic to wipe out competition. They show up in as many cities as possible, undercut the local department stores like Kmart, Sears, Winn Dixie and so on until many of them have to shut down or close outlets. Then Walmart starts upping it’s prices.
A major book store uses similar tactics to wipe out competition, only they will bring in several stores at once. They also make deals with book publishers for high volume items, and buy so much that unsold books can be bought back by the publishers. The publishers then start buying manuscripts mainly of the type the stores will sell because the smaller book stores cannot compete with various orders. In the end, competition is slight and this book mega company dictates to the public not only what they will read, but what publishers will publish. Their goal is profit and only profit. They carry only what sells well and fast.
Record companies used to have to pay DJs to play their music. Now they tell them what they can and cannot play. They have the ability to take a second rate artist and have his or her songs played so much by so many stations that the public is fooled into thinking they are great. They can make or break a musical group by promoting or restricting the playing of their music. Currently they sell CDs at the highest price the market will bare and admit this, having said that so long as people buy the music, why lower prices?
Insurance companies have been called the richest businesses in the US, with good reason. Almost all invest your payments into real estate, stocks, bonds, other businesses and banks. You are required by laws they pushed through to have car insurance. Your payments go up no matter if you have an accident or not. You can be dropped over one accident. They control you via the law. major claims barely dent the insurance companies no matter what they say.
Health Care became big business via the privatization of hospitals which were once nonprofit organizations. Costs go up, staff gets cut back, services get cut back, conditions grow worse and profits soar in many cases. Health care is now one of the major expenses in a person’s life and getting more expensive.
The list goes on and on, steadily increasing since the end of the 1960s and making a huge jump in the greedy 80s.
Business have flaunted and blocked environmental laws being enacted here that other nations use with good results, have tied people who fight them up in court until they run out of money, go away or die, have smeared responsibility for ecological disasters such as Love Canal until no on know who is actually responsible anymore and the mess gets only partially cleaned up.
The greedy oil companies should have known long ago that single hulled tankers are not the safest way to transport crude, but they make greater profits that way. Mega companies have fought cleaning up missions for decades while people living in their shadow sicken and die.
Not too long back, a major agricultural sed company tried to introduce a limited life seed to farmers. It grows, produces and does not give viable seed. The reason? Greed. Farmers, to save costs, usually try to harvest some seed to not buy so much next time. With this new seed, they would have to buy fresh each season at the producers cost to grow the desired crops. We all know that eventually the cost would reach us.
Not to long back, lobbyists got the monopoly law removed on radio stations, so now major businesses may buy and own a tremendous amount of them, which they have, and essentially control what news goes out. The whole object of the communication laws was to prevent any business from controlling too much of the media and thereby controlling what the people were informed of.
We’ve all seen the mess professional sports have become since they turned into megabuck businesses.
Not too long ago, a dental business was caught deliberately blocking the importation of teeth for false teeth, brokering illegal deals with dental corporations and dentists to buy only their goods and trying to prevent small dental manufacturers from selling to dentists. The reason? Greed. The results? Higher dental costs for us. Each tooth in your $500 plate is made for about $1.00. Look what you pay. The company was stopped.
HMOs turned sickness into major bucks, for them. Now people are noticing that they might have made a mistake, but the people did not force the HMO bills through congress, investors did.
The cost of dying is soaring, yet the basic costs of doing business have not risen all that much. You’ll pay up to $2000 for a $800 casket and get hit with hidden charges later. Why? Greed.
Look at Barnett Bank. One of the biggest and most powerful banks in the nation, who almost charges now for the customer just to walk into the offices, has some of the highest loan interest rates, the most service charges and some of the toughest policies and is still growing like a cancer. It has been known to take residential properties in its care that could be converted to more expensive commercial ones, let them run down, hide ownership from prospective buyers, until the city is ready to condemn them, then buy the ‘distressed’ property from the owner at a much cheaper rate and sell it high for industrial use.
Let us not forget the faster, more casual way of handling meats which have infected them with E-coli, which means we have to handle the stuff like radioactive material. Even though such handling has been known to transmit the disease for a decade, not much has been done to clean it up. Plus, taking infected chicken manure and animal waste, treating it and mixing it in with animal food for herbivores to create a cheaper food which has more protein and means greater profit also infects the animals with E-coli along with antibiotics which humans are now becoming immune to but no major effort has been made to stop this practice. The money is too good.
I’ve read where people have wondered if there is not such a thing as too much profit and read others sneer at them and claim that all profit is good profit and the more the better.
Is profit still good profit when it actually hurts all but a few?
When and how did we let major corporations dictate our lives and even if we live or die?
Now, what do we do about it?
