Ok. So your eyes are red from uncontrollable crying, while watching hooligans (not Hoonigans) vandalize the U.S. Capitol. I get it. Wait. What? You haven’t been crying? What kind of communist scum are you? You should be inconsolable with grief over members of the domestic terrorist organization Antifa showing such disrespect to the home of the Legislative Branch of the US government. After all, this is the building where politicians making at least $175,000 per year, craft bloated, verbose legislation that is too big to read and understand but not so big that they can’t vote on it. It’s the building where Nancy Pelosi once said that, due to the size of the (non)Affordable Care Act, she and her fellow con artists have to pass the bill so they can finally find out what’s in it. When they’re not creating legislative monstrosities like the AFA (Obamacare for all you knuckle-dragging slobs out in middle America (or at least what’s left of it)), they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. They can’t seem to create a “budget”. I use quotation marks because a financial tool, where you spend over a trillion dollars that you don’t have, can not be called a budget. That would be like me calling a blow-up sex toy a woman.
Let’s face it: politicians from both parties have been disrespecting that building for decades. So why all the caterwauling from breathless newsreaders from all of the large, legacy advertising sales organizations like CNN and Fox News? Because they get to condemn the stuff that they were condoning earlier in the year: mayhem and vandalism. When a bona fide domestic terrorist organization is burning up small businesses in American and shutting down free speech on college campuses, well, that’s a darn shame. But when the same people change their dress from black to red, white and blue and don MAGA hats, and then go into the Capital building and tip over trashcans, let me tell you something: we’ve got to put a stop to this violence. Sadly, the really big crime goes relatively unnoticed or more accurately unreported.
The crime is where 3 of the biggest companies in the world are working together to shut down a small little upstart company and put them out of business, because the smaller company is growing like a house on fire. I’m talking about Google, Apple and Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) shutting down the social media app Parler. Google and Apple took the Parler app off of their app stores. Since the Federal government should regulate corporations so there isn’t a monopoly in any one product, someone explain to me how there is only one place to get Android apps and only one place to get Apple iOS apps? Oh! Right! All these companies bribe politicians through donations to their re-election campaigns. Then the Jeff Bezos Company just “pulled the plug” on Parler. AWS was furnishing cloud/server service for Parler and AWS just shut them down. Parler was getting new users from the droves of conservatives leaving the cloud version of a cesspool, Twitter.
The digital mafia wasn’t having any of that, so somehow all of these companies decided, without consulting each other, to drop the hammer on Parler within 48 hours of each other. Sure. And Jeffrey Epstein hung himself while in Federal custody. So think about it. Corporations got together to put a company, that was competing with one of their buddies, out of business . How would you like your business, or the business of one of your family members or friends to be on the receiving end of this kind of monopolistic activity? One of the problems is that policing society isn’t their job. Since they’re not elected to public office, and don’t hold the office of State Attorney or Federal Prosecutor, they shouldn’t have any say in what companies get to stay in business or which ones go out of business.
The Federal government should be pursuing anti-trust lawsuits against all of these corporations. Congress should pursue breaking up of these companies, just like they did with AT&T, and Standard Oil. They did that because these companies (and others) had a monopoly on their products. What that means is that if you wanted landline phone service in many cities, you only had one choice: AT&T. Currently, if you want an app, or if you are an iOS (Apple devices)app developer, you only have one place to download the app you want or put your app for downloading: Apple’s The App Store. Ditto with Android devices. You can only get them from The Google Play Store. Period. That qualifies as a monopoly. Those are illegal. Yet here we are with these two monopolies continuing to do business. How do they get away with this? Money. Bribes. Corrupt politicians.
It’s no secret how these big tech companies do it. They give lots of money to politicians. And the politicians don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Or it may be even more explicit. It may come down to “If I give you this money, you’ll keep any antitrust legislation from reaching the floor for a vote.” Imagine if Home Depot and Lowe’s conspired to run Ace Hardware out of business. Decades ago, you couldn’t even imagine something like that happening. Now, it’s being done right in front of us, in broad daylight. And instead of being worried about that, Congress is trying to impeach President Trump for nothing, simply because they hate Trump.
I, for one, am going to stop supporting these companies. I’m going to stop using their “free” services in exchange for them vacuuming up all my data and monetizing it without compensating me. I’m done with Google, Facebook and Amazon. Google used to have a saying in it’s corporate code: “Don’t be evil.” I guess they tore that page out of the employee handbook.
Bruce Hubbell 