What the Free Market Gets You
Being dominated by unaccountable corporations is good, actually.
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Here in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are conditioned from a very young age to believe in “the power of the free market.” From my 34 years in Hell Country, I have surmised this belief to be that “Anything bad the government could do is actually good if it’s done by unaccountable corporations.”
This is why Americans would be repulsed to learn the police to bugged our house, but we have no problem getting served ads on Facebook about that product that our phone heard us mention to our friend over drinks at the bar.
It is also perpetuates the idea that whatever the government can do, the free market can do better. This idea is currently playing out in Texas, where its “energy independence” resulted in millions of residents losing energy and water and the government being so inadequate in its response that a fucking furniture salesman had to step up to the plate and offer his business as a warming center.
The Invisible Hand is also at work in Ohio, in typically nefarious ways. President Joe Biden, a man talking real slick for a stumblebum who owes me 2,000 dollars, is at least a somewhat competent bureaucrat unlike most of his Republican compatriots.
One idea he has brought to the forefront is a centralized system for booking COVID vaccines. You would think this program would be a godsend for a state where the vaccine rollout has been nothing short of a clusterfuck in which we’re getting mopped by the progressive oasis of West Virginia.
But no! Governor Mike DeWine said this week that the federalized rollout program “doesn’t work for Ohio,” which is Republican speak for not being able to allow an odious contractor to overcharge the state to build a similar website and kick those overcharges back into their campaign coffers.
This might be acceptable if Ohio were equally as competent as the federal government, which ain’t exactly a high bar to clear. Instead we get headlines like this, from Randy Ludlow of dispatch.com:
A statewide online portal to allow Ohioans to find and obtain appointments for COVID-19 vaccinations apparently still remains weeks away, state officials indicated Tuesday.
Gov. Mike DeWine said the system, which would allow users to enter their ZIP codes and find all available appointments within 20 miles, still needs to import data from vaccination providers. He originally had talked of the system being online by Sunday.
Work continues to integrate vaccine providers and their current appointment systems into the new state system, DeWine said. That includes accommodating their current waiting lists for so others do not jump in line in front of them. DeWine said that phase could take two to three weeks.
Two or three weeks might not sound like a lot until you remember DeWine is using the vaccine as a bargaining chip to force teachers back to work before they’re all vaccinated. It’s also harrowing considering, on average, 317 Ohioans have died a week during a pandemic and the “two to three weeks” metric is almost assuredly an attempt to blow sunshine up our ass.
Ohio has also seen this week how the free market works when it comes to our energy bills. You see, the invisible hand works so good for energy monopolies that ours had to pay a $4 million bribe to Sam Randazzo, the DeWine-appointed flunkie that was in charge of regulating utility companies and making sure they didn’t rip off consumers.
From Andrew J. Tobias of cleveland.com:
The October filing said the company could not determine “if the payments were for the purposes represented within the consulting agreement.” The company faulted then-CEO Chuck Jones and two other senior executives, firing them for violating unspecified company policies and codes of conduct.
But the new filing says the company now believes “that payments under the consulting agreement may have been for purposes other than those represented within the consulting agreement.”
The words “may have been” are doing some extremely heavy lifting. The fact these six-figure lawyers even typed that sentence into the record let’s you know how they view the chances of their clients going to jail, which is slim to none.
I always understood why Larry Householder wanted to make HB-6, the worst energy initiative of the 21st century, into law. Credit card bills were eating that man’s ass, and it’s not like the deck at his Florida vacation home was going to renovate itself.
I always wondered why guys like former Senate president Larry Obhoff or Governor Mike DeWine went along with it. That was naive. The reason, like Householder’s, was that of money.
While it has yet to be proven that DeWine personally profited from signing the corrupt law, First Energy did make a max donation to his inaugural committee. And everybody around him seemed to have their hand in the till, as well.
DeWine has refused to elaborate why his Legislative Affairs Director, Dan McCarthy, moved exactly in the manner of a public official on the take.
From Marty Schladen of ohiocapitaljournal.com:
But he didn’t explain why he founded Partners for Progress two days after the founding of Generation Now, or why a week later his dark money group got $5 million from FirstEnergy and within a month it was forwarding some of that money to Generation Now.
Of course there is zero chance it’s a coincidence that the governor’s top advisor was enmeshed with an energy conglomerate that literally had a vice president in charge of bribes.
This is what Republicans talk about when they mean “the free market.” It’s hobgoblin speech for higher expenses for you and higher profits for their corrupt corporate cronies that finance their campaigns. That’s how business is done in Ohio, and there is nothing that everyday people like me or you can do to stop it. But hey, at least we have some billboards in Times Square advertising our 0% corporate tax rate, which is nice.
THOSE WMDs. “Who scoops the litter box?” Questions about the mysterious lives of White House cats… Rush Limbaugh sold listeners a false reality — and we’re still paying for it… The Great Gatsby: The world’s most misunderstood novel… Con artists and crime syndicates swindled billions in pandemic aid… The Stan Lee story that tore apart Marvel Comics.