Do You Know Why Wine Can Only Be Around 13% Alcohol?

[Opinion]

It is because it is the percentage of alcohol that kills the yeast with their own waste. The yeast have a field day with all the sugar, they gobble it and sh*t alcohol and when their waste reaches 13% they can no longer live.

There are so many things in nature that are self-limiting where they out grow their environment.

Oligarchs are the same way.

Take a look at the Robber Barons and the depression of the 1890s. Massive amounts of wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few.

Take a look at the depression of the 1930s. There was was concentrated in the hands of a few, you know them, they were Mellon, Carnegie and Rockefeller.

Take a look at today, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report for 2022, the world's richest 1% owned 45.8% of all global wealth!

What is common with all these past depressions?

They were followed by war and revolution! In Russia it was proletariat vs. bourgeoisie. the working class against the oligarchs of their time.

What has history taught us?

1. When there is concentration of wealth unrest follows.
2. Workers blame the liberals for their plight and turn against minorities (In the 1930s they were the Jews who they thought had all the wealth.)
3. Dictators get elected promising to go after the liberals (i.e. The jews, the gays and trans people, the immigrants, and other minorities.)
4. The workers end up getting screwed again this time under a dictatorship.
5. Rinse and repeat but this time with different scapegoats.

We are on the cusp of #3 this November we get to decide which path we want to go.

Right-wing authoritarians have been elected in Hungry, Italy, Poland, and France, Germany and England oscillate between right-wing leaders and centrist leaders.

When you stop and think, the concentration of the wealth in the hands of a few stifles economic growth.

We see the cycle repeating again,

1. The oligarchs gobble up companies creating monopolies.
2. Monopolies drive up prices, the stock market shoots up!
3. Unrest in the working classes because they keep getting deeper and deeper into debt.
4. The oligarchs blame the prices on those:

A. Gays and trans people,
B. On other religions,
C. Immigrants,
D. Minorities,
E. All the above.

5. People elect a dictator who promises to “Make the country great again!”

When you stop and think for a moment you realize that it was during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s when there were strong unions, powerful anti-monopoly laws, and high taxes on the high income earners and we had our strongest economic growth. Once Reagan broke the unions, passed “right-to-work” laws, taxes on the rich were cut in a theory of trickle-down how wealth will flow down from the rich, and in the fifty years since Reagan we have seen what trickle-down… table scrapes!

 

How many refrigerators, boats, and durable goods can a billionaire buy? It is the middle class that sustains the economy by buying durable goods, and boats, cars, and vacation homes. With the vanishing middle class the economy is hurting, people are just struggling to buy food and shelter.

Just look at the food industries… you want to know why the price of bacon and other foods are skyrocketing? Monopolies!

Revealed: the true extent of America’s food monopolies, and who pays the price
Investigation shows scale of big food corporations' market dominance and political power
The Guardian
Nina Lakhani, Aliya Uteuova and Alvin Chang
14 July 2021

A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans, new analysis reveals.

A joint investigation by the Guardian and Food and Water Watch found that consumer choice is largely an illusion – despite supermarket shelves and fridges brimming with different brands.

In fact, a few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.

The size, power and profits of these mega companies have expanded thanks to political lobbying and weak regulation which enabled a wave of unchecked mergers and acquisitions. This matters because the size and influence of these mega-companies enables them to largely dictate what America’s 2 million farmers grow and how much they are paid, as well as what consumers eat and how much our groceries cost.

And which party has weaken the regulations on mergers?

But we are not the only ones hurting, so are the producers being squeezed,

It also means those who harvest, pack and sell us our food have the least power: at least half of the 10 lowest-paid jobs are in the food industry. Farms and meat processing plants are among the most dangerous and exploitative workplaces in the country.

There is one party that wants to do away with the Department of Commerce. According to the New York Times,

Conservative policy groups in 2016 were largely unprepared for Mr. Trump’s win. Since its announcement in 2022, these groups prepared Project 2025, a 920-page document outlining a radical transformation of the executive branch. The platform proposes replacing many federal civil servant jobs with political appointees who would be loyal to the president. The plan also proposes a cracking down on abortion rights, criminalizing pornography, cutting climate research funding and eliminating the Commerce Department.

Do you think the Democrats going after monopolies have anything has anything to do with the Republicans wanting to eliminate the Commerce Department?

 

There are new monopolies being formed today, you have seen them posted on telephone poles, "We buy houses!" The Sling writes,

In the first three months of 2024, investors bought 14.8 percent of homes sold according to Realtor.com. In some cities, such as Springfield, Kansas City, and St. Louis Missouri, investors purchased around one in five homes. Investor-owned homes hit their peak in December 2022, accounting for 28.7 percent of all home sales in America. Per MetLife Investment Management, institutional investors may control 40 percent of U.S. single-family rental homes by 2030.

Robert Reich posted a wonderful video to Twitter explaining how Wall Street investors could be driving up rents. He explains that home ownership—the primary vehicle for accumulating wealth—is out of reach for many Americans. Investors are not randomly making home purchases across the country, as Darling’s question above presumes, but instead are targeting bigger cities and neighborhoods that are homes to communities of color in particular. In one neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, Wall Street investors bought half the homes that sold in 2021 and 2022.

Such clustering of properties is occurring in several U.S. cities. A report from Drexel’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab found that between 2020 and 2021, 19.3 percent of sales of single-family homes in Richmond, Virginia, went to investors. It found that investors bought nearly a quarter of the homes in Jacksonville, Florida in the same period.

I read the real estate transfers in the paper and I'm starting to see houses being sold to LLC more often.

Watson and Ziv (2021) analyze the relationship between ownership concentration and rents in New York City, finding that a ten percent increase in concentration is correlated with a one percent increase in rents.

So if you are wondering why your rent has been going up or the price homes going up... once again look at the monopolies, the billionaire hedge fund owns for the answer!
 

In the past we broke up monopolies and we came out of the depressions, now the Republicans are encouraging monopolies and scrape the regulatory agencies saying that they lead to lower prices, shades of the Trickle Down theory and we know who got the shaft on that one.

Will the oligarchs in their greed cause another depression, war or revolution? Will they be like yeast and drown themselves in their own greed.

We are seeing history beginning to repeat itself.

Remember:
“R” is for reverse, bring us back to the 1930s.
“D” is for driving forward into the future.

 

Vote Democratic if you want to go forward!

[/Opinion]