Indictment of the rip off machine
Why are companies set up to rip people off at the moment of greatest need and vulnerability? Why do companies hide behind LLC (limited liability corporation) designations, and avoid responsibility for their actions? Why do they strip away the right to use the legal system, and force people into arbitration, with arbiters of their choice? Why with Google and Apple is it impossible to contact a real person? Why are people routinely deflected by annoying phone systems and “FAQs” that never seem to answer the question? Why? Because “the market” (the US capitalist economic system) enshrines the lowest common denominators of human behavior, and is set up to take advantage of people and to profiteer, rather than to actually serve people and to serve society’s needs.
Rent and cost of living inflation is a perfect case in point. That landlords are gouging renters nationwide, and especially in the Bay Area, is inexplicably, seen as normal to market analysts, supply and demand they say. Such analysts always say how great the economic forecast is. No one blames the landlords for greed, the booster analysts talk about market forces and GDP, and payouts that only a shadow group of “investors” ever seem to get.
Our society has a massive disconnect going on where “the free market” has come to dominate and exploit people the same as any flavor of social repression in history.
That people take advantage of others to profit obscenely, and to impoverish, is frankly, immoral, not to be accepted as normal. This is the logical extension of people who believe that human society is a war of all against all, and not a playing field where cooperation has any benefits. Look at emergency rooms or even your own insurance, you show up at the ER in great need only to find that the hundreds of thousands of dollars you have bene paying all these years has fine print that doesn’t cover that, and that one ER visit is $20,000 or more. Wouldn’t an actual service model do better than to saddle people with crippling debt from the ever-present rip off artists?
With heath care, rip offs have been built on rip offs, and foxes allowed to guard the henhouse so long, that the whole system is so dysfunctional there’s no way out but to take down the whole rip off architecture behind it: single payer, universal health care.
Market faith and worship has set up a US economic culture similar to the Star Trek Ferengi. The Ferengi are modeled on the true believers of American rip off capitalism. Rip off capitalism is akin to organized crime and gangs, in that extortion of value is the core object, profit is the highest order and value.
What good, for example, is a housing market that runs all the working and middle class out of town? What good is a finance and banking system that tends to monopoly and concentrates all the money at the top, and sets up a system of forced traps to catch annoying fees and fines around every corner? Sets up a system where the only two classes now are rich and poor.
We are caught now, in 2018, in a web of rip off spiders, that ensnare us and suck the life blood out of us. This is rip off capitalism enabled by starve the beast reflexive government haters, who hate all the good government can do, like the New Deal, Social Security, MediCare, the GI Bill, the Great Society, voting rights, women’s lib, protecting unions, environmental protections, the Affordable Care Act, any common good. Rip off capitalism’s main goal now is to take away all social benefits, further reward the rich, and do away with all regulations, leaving people all the more helpless to be ripped off even more.
The prostituting of Sonoma as a luxury brand is perfect case in point, in the name of economic development, the whole heart of town has become one big intoxicated party, that goes on and on, to the chagrin of locals who don’t need all the fuss, or inflation. The unfettered marketing of Sonoma has made the town into a Disney-esque theme park where the admission price has been jacked up so high, only the 1% and 9% can afford to live or shop here. All vestiges of the former authentic Sonoma are in process of being externalized or made into a marketing caricature. The rip off here is so deeply entrenched, it is almost impossible to imagine how to make all the great wealth generation actually pay for legitimate societal needs. Folks, we are deep into a maladaptive mindset that condones rip off culture as legitimate, greed as natural and somehow, even good.
The Sonoma Valley answer is to trickle back charity, but never to challenge the assumptions that allow such inequitable wealth generation at the top. Sonoma is almost like a fairy tale fantasy world. Isn’t it just so great! Yes, and I can get same exact Whole Foods/ Sonoma Market/ Safeway items for four and five dollars less per item at Petaluma Grocery Outlet. Whole Foods has now been subsumed by a finely tuned, 21st Century algorithm rip off machine in Amazon, one of the Silicon Valley Big 5, who promised so much only to turn out to be the same old rip off shit in a different package.
Recently Verizon couldn’t wait to jack up the price of its phone and digital service, to Cal Fire of all people, fighting the largest wildfire in state history! The optics were so bad, of reduced public safety held hostage for more $$$$$$ that Verizon had to backtrack. But Verizon illustrates how the gaming of fees and charges is a preferred strategy to rip people off. Cell phone plans are a morass impossible rip off choices, this after the breakup of Ma Bell was supposed to introduce more competition and get us better prices and service. Hardly. This and all other putative benefits are about the exact opposite of what market boosters promise.
More competition to lower prices? This is code that you will soon be ripped off even more. Allow giant monopoly mergers, to increase efficiency and get better prices? Guess again. Monopolies need to be busted up to get better prices, as the whole end-game object of business is to corner a market and then put the vacuum cleaner on your wallet. If service was the real goal, and consumers had real protections, like rent control, things would look much different, maybe a more benign society.
After hurricanes, the price of water and many other services is profiteered on the helpless. In a family emergency, the price of a short-notice airline ticket goes to over $1000, this for a ticket that is otherwise worth $250. Isn’t a seat just worth what it’s worth? If someone has a plumbing emergency, do plumbers jack up the price by 200%? So why can airlines and banks do it? Why didn’t those guys go to prison after 2008!? Stealing, usury, and extortion are crimes, no? These greedy behaviors are forbidden in all major religious texts, the places where many morals come from, yet somehow our economic system enshrines the worst as good.
Airlines and airports are among the worst because they have you in a captive monopoly, and now with market worshipping Republicans in charge, and hiding behind Trump’s Tweet smokescreen, deregulation leaves companies like airlines even more unfettered in their efforts to rip us all off. And, at an airport, why would a burger cost three times more than just down the road, with the same distance to suppliers etc? Why? Because the goal is not to serve but to rip off. Why is gas cheaper in Red Bluff than Sonoma? Aren’t we closer to the refineries?
Airlines play people out bad on trying to squeeze fees and extras. They shrink the size of seats even when Americans are bigger. They make it impossible to even choose a seat when buying a ticket for the best price. Maddening. Then they charge more for a regular-sized seat. They charge for all stowed bags, that used to be free, and make the whole plane push in line and fight to get a carry-on bag on board. For most efficiency, an airplane should be loaded back to front, but no, the highest paid tickets go on first, and the 4th and 5th class citizens get the crammed in the back, and can’t even stow their carry-on bag. We are being gamed!
Without the money, you end up a 4th class citizen, and not just in airlines. Where’s Jesus when you need him? “And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”
“My house” is the whole world and all of life. Good behavior is expected in all places, not just a temple.
In a social life contingent on reciprocity and relationships, companies and individuals who rip us off engender hatred and scorn, not loyalty. Really, the only people loyal to today’s carnivorous US capitalism are the wolves and sharks who have rigged the system to take all the benefits and leave the rest with crumbs.
In fact, Republicans and Ayn Rand true believers have a counter narrative going that it is not the market that is the problem, but government. If we free up the market by shrinking government to the point of no oversight at all, more benefits will then “trickle down.” This, my friends, is the biggest huckster line of bullshit of all. If anything trickled down, why has wage stagnation and cost of living inflation just about crippled the country and about set the stage for civil war?
The “law of supply and demand” is no law at all. It’s an anti-law, with the opposite effect of what real moral laws prescribe. The “law” of supply and demand gives permission for greed to triumph over good will and actual service.
All that has happened is that the hopes and dreams of millions of working people have trickled out the door, straight out of town to red county and red state America, where extreme alienation at being ripped off will be the ruin of us all. It’s not just red state folks who are alienated by the rip off machine, I’m as blue as you get, but it is inexplicable why red-state-of-mind-folks vote for state and fed reps who just enable starve-the-beast-true-believers to impoverish and rip them off even more. They can’t see they are getting played out by the Paul Ryan lackeys of the rich, or distracted by nativist efforts to blame everything on “takers” and lazy dark-skinned strangers.
Don’t the sharks know that bread riots and revolutions tear the whole house down for everybody? When systemic extortion reaches the point of being unbearable, then the whole house of cards falls. When golden eggs are all there is, those can’t be eaten, real life fails. Money is the root of all evil, and in the rip off “market” we are seeing the triumph of evil.
In fact, as if facts matter, Jared Diamond has clearly shown in his books Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse, that US kleptocracy has precursors in past failed civilizations, where extreme socio-economic inequity and over-exploitation of natural resources is the premier formula for failure.
For rip off market boosters, all sorts of huckster promises are made, and villains in government set up, and the same bullshit deregulation promises made, that only end up with more monopoly profiteering and more rip off, and more destruction of the environment. The aggregate effect makes it near impossible to imagine how to harness the rip off system for social good, but that is what the “invisible hand” justification attempts to do, aggregate greed will somehow have an emergent property of greater social good? Guess again, or might as well believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny. That’s our only hope, that habitual rip off wolves will somehow remember kindergarten and re-learn how to share and be nice.
And how, pray tell, will continuing to be exhorted to consume more and more, to prop up the economy and grow, help any of our major global problems? When heroin is killing you, the answer is to get more, not to moderate or quit? No, the things that make real sense are seen as impractical in the upside down world of rip off as the number one value.
The list of scams and rip offs goes on and on. Usury on student loans? Sure, education is the ticket to success, for the Wall Street banking mafia. Frankly, the US market as it stands goes against the higher angels of all religious morals. Somehow the US has sold its soul to the devil of money. The president himself, multiple times, failed to pay contractors, went bankrupt, brought spurious lawsuits, and this is idolized as an art of the deal? Where are our values?
Now we have and insidious and widespread product packaging scam where a gallon is not a gallon, and all of what used to be a certain size subtly masquerades as the former size while artfully reduced in size and weight, and charged more for. Products are now made to appear larger than they really are. A five-gallon paint bucket? Guess again. A box of food that used to be one pound? Look at the fine print, the bottom is now hollowed out. Any time you need to buy something, anything, assume you are being ripped off. Lies and cheating rule the day; they flourish in an unregulated market.
Our economic system is one big rip off. It’s no wonder that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian capitalist wannabees imitated the worst aspects of US market rip offs that they had seen pass muster. There’s not much difference between the market and the mob, it’s like putting a white table cloth on your booze, makes it seem respectable but it has the same end effect as Colt 45. There’s no “freedom” here, this is a progressive penning of the sheep by the wolves of deregulation. You too could be a wolf, just have to get up earlier in the morning is all, and read your Ayn Rand.
Market apologists try and pass off the same tired story that the real problem is government corruption, and all we need is more deregulation. This faith in the market is a lie, a faith in something patently untrue, that all we need is less oversight so economic sharks can have even better access to the helpless? How stupid can we get?!
And now we have a top mobster-type rip off guy as president of the US, who can steer the government to more market, rent-seeking, mafia interests, and take away any help for the people. We’ve got double winners now. On top of a system that needs to strip all natural resources to feed a huge short-term profit consumption machine, we’ve got a captain and crew who are enabling an even faster slide to the bottom. Oh well, if reason could not prevail to right the ship, bring in the clowns and sink the whole operation. As Trump inadvertently shuts down and destroys the engines of rip off consumption, we’ll end up being right for the wrong reasons when the whole thing collapses.
How many times do we need to get ripped off before waking up and saying enough is enough? What justifies such usurious, exploitive behavior? The thesis is relatively simple, it’s a cruel world, and only the strong and crafty survive. This lowest common denominator explanation seeks to capture the essence of human nature: homo hominii lupus, man is a wolf to himself.
Our higher capacities, of cooperation and altruism, which do exist, these are reserved for family only. Maybe we are not as great as we are cracked up to be, when we have such fine potential, but have been inextricably sucked down the drain of our lowest motives.
Greed, evil, and the worship of money has come to rule all. Like in Clint Eastwood’s movie, Unforgiven, we got it coming. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” King James Bible
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