Crony Capitalism: Everything Has a Price

When I was a boy, an obese boy when obesity wasn’t cool, I never dreamed that one day we would all know the glory of paying for water. I would bring a thermos with ice water to baseball games. For basketball games, I drank out of the gym’s water fountain. I had no idea what was in that non-purified water.

Fluoride was first added to our water supply in 1945. But that was only in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One of the initial proponents of putting this known poison into our drinking water was Harold Hodge, who was part of the human radiation experiments taking place around the same time. You know, where they injected vulnerable “test subjects” with plutonium and uranium. I guess they anticipated something wonderful happening as a result. The “science” behind putting a deadly toxin in our water was provided by some of the largest corporations in the country; Alcoa, the American Petroleum Institute, Dupont, US Steel, among others. And as we learned during the COVID psyop, it is imperative that we all “trust the science.” If we don’t, then we become a “threat to democracy.” Crony Capitalism in Am... Lewis, Hunter Best Price: $2.31 Buy New $12.75 (as of 10:40 UTC - Details)

Right-wing “extremists” were understandably upset when fluoridated water went nationwide by the early 1960s. Watch the scene in Dr. Strangelove where these sensible folks were not very subtly skewered. But capitalism- our corrupt, noncompetitive form of capitalism- benefited from this poisoning of the water supply. Two supplemental industries were born; the bottled water industry and the individual water filtration industry. Now, to a simple community college dropout like me, who barely passed high school chemistry, it would seem to make more sense to just have giant water filtration systems in every area, to do what Brita pitchers and the like do. And as for paying for bottles of water, there probably wasn’t a citizen on earth in 1960 that would have believed such a thing could ever become a booming business. They might have had little confidence in the collective intelligence of the people, but paying for water?

We now have billionaire “water barons,” which included the late George H.W. Bush, T. Boone Pickens, and familiar capitalist villains like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and the Blackstone Group, buying up water rights all over the world. At the same time, government has implemented tyrannical measures like outlawing the collection of rainwater by individuals. I’m assuming it’s okay for someone like Goldman Sachs to collect rainwater. When he died in 2019, Pickens owned more water rights than anyone in the world. Now this seems decidedly odd; how can someone “own” water? Can they shoot a thirsty homeless person for trying to get a drink of “their” water? How about an animal? That would be more likely to raise the ire of today’s Americans. If they could “buy” the air we breathe, you know they’d do it.

There are other supplemental industries, which exist solely because the cost of almost everything is beyond the means of ordinary people. Look at insurance. All forms of insurance. As Ambrose Bierce noted well over a century ago, the only way to “win” at life insurance is to die as quickly as possible. You’ll score a double indemnity if you can get someone to murder you. At least you’ll leave your blushing bride with an exciting new partner to help her spend all that money. Car insurance? You need that, because any significant repair is going to cost more than the amount of savings that 70 plus percent of the people have to their name. Home insurance? Same thing, but on a larger scale. And if you need another reason not to desire nuclear war, that particular catastrophe isn’t covered under homeowner policies. You can get “fliers” for water damage and the like, but to my knowledge not damage from nuclear war.

And if you defy all the odds, and live to a ripe old age, and avoid hospitals and “healthcare,” then you’ve paid an astronomical amount of both life and health insurance for….nothing. It’s not like they give you a refund because you were such a great customer, permitting them to buy and reap great profits from all that real estate and everything. As for car insurance, if you go decades without an accident, and then one happens because another driver was at fault, you will be very lucky not to have your rates rise. Some might even be cancelled by their insurance provider. When I became a pathfinder in the DWI movement in 1978, I was unable to afford insurance for two years. I had to opt for the uninsured motorist’s fee. It I’d been in an accident, I would have been financially destroyed. Good thing I didn’t know enough to worry. There are some advantages to being a happy-go-lucky partyer.

The most disgusting insurance is healthcare coverage. Of course, needless to say, without it, no one could afford to have cancer or any other debilitating disease. Medicare recipients, on top of paying an increasing monthly fee to get their own money back, which they paid into the system over the course of a working lifetime, also have to buy supplemental health insurance. This is because the Medicare Bernie Sanders is so infatuated with only covers 80 percent of medical costs. 20 percent of any medical bill can be financially devastating. But the oldsters are frightened into purchasing it. Without it, how could they afford the dozen different deadly products of Big Pharma they take daily? Hidden History: An Exp... Donald Jeffries Best Price: $9.86 Buy New $14.70 (as of 04:30 UTC - Details)

When feminism and the leftist cultural push resulted in most women entering the workforce by the mid-1970s, a new problem arose, for a new supplemental industry to address. Most people were still interested in having kids in those twilight years of America 1.0. What would happen to them when they got off the school bus, and mom wasn’t waiting there for them with a smile as big as June Cleaver’s? She was too busy toiling away in a pointless job that somehow didn’t result in the family having a higher standard of living. How does two incomes not result in a net financial gain? And thus, daycare centers were born. Where the loving parents could entrust hours of daily care to complete strangers. But don’t worry; the “legitimate” ones were certified by the state. Trained and licensed. By the state. It’s not like the state is corrupt.

For those children not old enough to attend government run institutions of indoctrination, you had day long day care. So in some cases, the infant/toddler was spending more time with these well trained “care providers” than his/her own parents. I wonder if they ask the toddlers what their pronouns are in today’s day care centers? Just imagine the purple haired, multi-tattooed “Woke” monstrosities that “provide care” for the children of working parents today. Now anyone with enough money also entrusts the care of their children to strangers. They call them nannies. It’s an upward mobility thing, you wouldn’t understand. In almost every case, the nanny (as opposed to the daycare “provider”) doesn’t speak English. So this serves to ensure that the upper crust will become bilingual. After all, you need to speak Spanish fluently if you’re going to own your own company, and pay the day workers their pittance.

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