Hospital Radio.

We've been listening to Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, for much of this blog's existence. During that 15-year period, Amazon has become the tail that wags the dog, with Apple, Facebook, and Google competing to be the flea with the second-place trophy.

One rather wishes that a few of those delusional Republicans in mid-prattle about "competition" could explain how monopolies and free markets can co-exist. They can't. Perhaps that's why they're so quiet -- but it doesn't have to be that way.

And the Democrats? Don't get me started on their cowardice in the face of monopolistic entities like these.

Amazon Is a Private Government. Congress Needs to Step Up, by Stacy Mitchell (The Atlantic)

Reining in the tech giants will help restore American democracy.

 ... The hearing was one of the final steps in the subcommittee’s bipartisan, yearlong probe into whether Amazon and three other tech companies—Apple, Facebook, and Google—are abusing their market power to thwart competition and entrench their own dominance, and if so, what Congress should do about it. The committee is expected to release its report in early September, and it could well be damning. The report may call for regulating the tech giants’ behavior, splitting them up into smaller companies, or both.

Despite all of this, Amazon’s share price barely budged after the hearing, suggesting that Wall Street harbors little fear that anything will come of the investigation. The very next day, Amazon announced record profits ... these developments illustrate the challenges facing lawmakers who want to rein in the U.S.-based tech titans. Even if they can put forward a convincing case that, for instance, Amazon is unfairly crushing small companies, most Americans can hardly imagine that the government will act, or even that it can.

The problem isn’t just that Amazon employs more lobbyists than the U.S. Senate has members. It’s that the machinery of government has been dysfunctional for so long that Americans forget it even exists. This is especially true when it comes to questions of how the economy is structured. Both political parties long ago abdicated their responsibility to be a check on the accumulation and the abuse of private power. Americans who believe this deference to big business is unwise have been conditioned to see ourselves as helpless.

snip

For that reason, what happens next in the investigation is crucial. The committee’s work is that of a democracy rediscovering its capacity to determine how the economy should operate—and how to hold the powerful accountable to the law. Its ultimate outcome will speak to two of the most consequential economic questions Americans face. One is whether a handful of tech giants will continue to wield outsize power over our commerce and communications. The other is whether we’re still capable of governing ourselves.

snip

The burden is on the subcommittee to show Americans that what Amazon and the other tech giants are doing is both wrong and harmful. Armed with witness statements and internal company documents, the subcommittee and its staff are framing an argument: Although these companies may still produce the occasional innovative product, they’re not nearly as inventive as they would have us believe. Rather, they have achieved their extraordinary reach through raw power. The tech giants have become gatekeepers, and they exploit that control to advance their own interests. At the hearing, the subcommittee members translated the sometimes-arcane language of antitrust law into words everyone understands. They talked of spying, stealing, and bullying.

Strong Towns on "what the pandemic reveals about the fragility of our institutions."

As the economy "reopens," think there might be time to squeeze in a revolution or three?

Designer masks, designer pitchforks.

Not a Black Swan: Nassim Taleb on What the Coronavirus Teaches Us About Our Institutions

... Not only have epidemiologists been sounding the alarm and urging pandemic preparedness for many years, but so have many scholars who study risk, randomness, and uncertainty. This includes our era's veritable prophet of risk and uncertainty: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who co-authored a January 26th paper warning that the spread of COVID-19 would be "nonlinear" and potentially severe.

Tell me more.

Taleb's interest is in what the pandemic reveals about the fragility of our institutions. The story historians tell about COVID-19 may prove to be less about the disease and more about its rapidly cascading effects on governmental and financial systems that have, for years, been more or less rigged to blow.

How do we build systems of governance and distribution (of food, medicines, energy, and other essential products of civilization) that can handle mounting random events like a global disease outbreak? Taleb is critical of "just-in-time" supply chains and production schedules, of "too big to fail" institutions, and of the hubris of those in power who attempt to manage risk without adequate contingency plans, believing that the future can be predicted from the average circumstances we've experienced so far (a delusion Taleb calls "naive empiricism").

The correct response, according to Taleb, is to decentralize power and flatten hierarchies, creating institutions that more closely mimic the redundancy of organic, natural systems. This allows pieces of a complex system to fail without endangering the whole.

Choosing between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos is like the choice of Pabst or High Life. It's no choice at all.

Center of the target.

Trump's enemy is not your friend: why we shouldn't defend Amazon, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

Why must we choose between the worst president of our lifetimes and one of the most rapacious corporate enterprises in the country?

... Confronting concentrated, autocratic economic power is what Democrats used to do. It was the definition of the species. They fought against monopolies in oil and food and transport that ripped off producers with one hand and consumers with the other. But now it’s Trump who, in his clumsy and authoritarian way, is trying to swipe that legacy.

I am making a tricky point here, so let me be clear: I don’t like Amazon, and I don’t like Donald Trump either. I would approve enthusiastically if a president started enforcing antitrust laws, but that’s not what Trump is proposing to do. What we are being offered instead is a choice between the worst president of our lifetimes and one of the most rapacious corporate enterprises in the country. And, eagerly, we are lining up with one or the other.

This in turn seems to me an almost perfect representation of the wretched choices available to Americans these days, as well as the megadoses of self-deception we are swallowing in order to make them. It is everything that is wrong with our politics, and it extends from the most sweeping matters of state right down to the individual reader.

The brutal conclusion:

And this is where we are now in the world’s greatest democracy. We have the billionaire Republicans, with their bigotry and their war on all things public, and the billionaire Democrats, with their oblivious ideology of globe and technology. To the common people, assembled in all our majesty, the momentous question is posed: who do you hate more?

Middle fingers: "It’s never been better to be a big company in America, but it has rarely been a worse time to be an entrepreneur."

What Democrats might be doing about it.

Indeed, the opening reference is intended as ironic, because ...

"America’s biggest companies have never been bigger, but all too many people are sitting in a McDonald’s, drinking coffee and wondering where their town went."

If you agree that "small is losing the war against big," then a logical corollary would be ceasing to accept at face value the bilge dispensed by oligarchy-based entities like One Southern Indiana.

There are other ways, you know. But Wendy's not going to be telling you about them, is she?

Monopolies Are Killing America, by Ross Baird and Ben Wrobel (The Development Set)

From rural farms to inner cities, small is losing the war against big. And we don’t see it getting better.

... The regulars asked what I did, and I told them I run a firm that funds small businesses — specifically, high-growth startups. One man pointed out the window at a nearly deserted clapboard Main Street and said, “Small business, man, that’s all we got. We used to have the hardware store there; when they opened the Lowe’s twenty miles away, well, that went under. The Walmart in Locust Grove killed off a few more. Now, McDonald’s is all we have.”

The most basic American rights — which the authors of the Declaration of Independence called “inalienable” — are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American promise is equality of opportunity. These rights weren’t universal when Thomas Jefferson first inked these words in 1776.

And while, at first glance, America has become more free for women, people of color, and others who weren’t landed gentry in 1776, I’d argue that thanks to monopolies, American freedom is quickly in decline — and because of the unchecked power of big enterprise, we’re on the road to serfdom.

It’s never been better to be a big company in America, but it has rarely been a worse time to be an entrepreneur.