#oligopoly — Public Fediverse posts

#Terrorism / #Terrorist definition

= "a level of #pain and #frustration and a level of #lack of #agency that they have to #feel to do something so #insane and #absurd".

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=BzioOJLuiZE&t=12m07s

or

https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=BzioOJLuiZE&t=12m07s

I don't agree with the rest of the video - it's confusing that slice of the clip I am pointing to, which is more clear about pain and lack of agency.

#State control #Totalitarianism #Oligopoly #Plutocracy etc #Protest

“It’s very hard to buy a sports team and lose money.”*…

Just 14 months after agreeing to buy the controlling interest in the L.A. Lakers at a valuation of $10 billion, Mark Walter found himself in a spot of trouble and needed to sell. Joshua Kushner (who recently tried to buy a big stake in the World Cup) and Bob Iger stepped right up, and agreed to buy his share at a valuation of @$12.5 billion. Kushner is a bona fide billionaire; Iger is an almost-billionaire; together, their net worth is something like $6 billion. Under the NBA’s rules, Mr, Kushner’s investment vehicle, Thrive Eternal, cannot invest more than 20 percent in the Lakers; so, unless they get a waiver, it’s likely that Kushner and Iger will finance the balance of their purchase personally (and/or with funds from rich friends).

As Eben Novy-Williams observes, this transaction is just the latest in a long line of folks with relatively fresh fortunes buying into the big leagues…

Sports team sales tend to reflect what’s happening in the broader economy. During the dot-com boom, many of those newly-minted millionaires found their way to sports (Ted Leonsis, Mark Cuban, Paul Allen, Henry Samueli and John Moores). That gave way to the real estate boom, and those buyers followed (Stephen Ross, Stan Kroenke, Jimmy Haslam, the Lerners, the Wilfs). More recently, it’s been the finance, private equity and hedge fund titans (Josh Harris, Wes Edens, Marc Lasry, Tony Ressler, David Tepper, Tom Gores, the list goes on and on)… – source

And as the title quote (from Carlyle [and here] co-founder and Baltimore Orioles co-owner David Rubenstein) suggests, this make a very straightforward kind of mercenary sense– major professional sports franchises have historically outperformed traditional indexes like the S&P 500 over the long term. And it stands to reason: scarcity value, legal local monopolies, and lucrative media rights make for a heady brew.

In a recent Substack post, Derek Thompson takes stock of the situation. After his own review of the Lakers deal, he puts it into context…

… In an age of surging wealth inequality, where stock market valuations routinely outpace median income growth by surreal factors, there is a live debate over whether billionaires should exist at all. The strongest argument for their rightfulness is that some people amass ten-figure wealth by building companies; by working within free markets to invent new technologies that millions or billions of people choose to use; and by managing complex enterprises that create billions or trillions of dollars in consumer welfare and investor value. But even this steelman case for billionaires presents as a kind of taunting insult to what often passes for sports ownership today. Professional-sports ownership offers the already-impossibly-rich a unique opportunity to become vastly richer, not necessarily by working, building, inventing, or doing anything positive at all, but rather by merely sitting on top of an asset that American law has conspired to make absurdly scarce and luridly profitable.

A thought experiment. Imagine if a diabolical oligarchic elite wanted to build an efficient and low-risk machine for turning their already-elevated wealth into exospherically extreme wealth. What might such a devious group of self-serving plutocrats want?

• Unleash the forces of capitalism! you might think. But no, absolutely not. Capitalism is markets, and markets are ruthless. What you should want is legal permission to create a monopoly that builds a moat deep enough to keep all competition out. That way, you’ve got something much better than capitalism: artificial scarcity and pricing power without the risk of unwanted rivals.
• Get the government off your back! you might say. Wrong again. You know what’s nicer than getting the government off your back? Getting the government on your side. You should crave dependable government subsidies to pad your profits.

So say, for example, that you wanted to set up this money machine in American professional sports. Your devious plan: shield leagues from antitrust law so owners can enjoy monopoly profits; use that market power to extract money from local governments; and rewrite the tax code to hand sports owners special advantages.

Lo and behold, all of this exists…

[Thompson unpacks the particulars: sports leagues are basically legal oligopolies; labor law makes sports ownership even sweeter; sports stadiums have become legal ransom; and team-owner tax benefits put the cherry on top. He concludes…]

… People sometimes compare buying sports franchises to buying works of fine art—say, a Monet, a Calder, or a Rodin. In both cases, the simplest answer to the common question “Why is that thing worth so much?” is always “Because someone rich was willing to pay it.”

But there is an important difference between the factors that push up the value of Monet paintings and those of sports franchises. Think about why a Monet painting is so valuable. Setting aside the irresolvable debate about the ineffable nature of beauty and quality and artistic pleasure, the underlying fact is that a Monet painting is valuable because it was painted by Claude Monet, a famous individual who once lived, and is now dead. The finality and scarcity of the Impressionist oeuvre—the fact that one can buy a painting from Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series and not worry that he will paint 100 more tomorrow—is a function of his mortality. There is no scientific or technological means by which anyone can exhume and reanimate Monet’s skeleton, sit the zombie upright in a chair, hand him a paintbrush, an easel, and a cup of tea, and say, “Now that you’re all settled, I’d like 500 additions to the Rouen Cathedral series.”

But the scarcity of sports franchises emerges from the laws of mankind, not the laws of nature. It benefits from a set of rules, laws, and customs that we made up and that can be redrawn in a way that Rouen’s facade never will be.

I am not a fan of conspiracies, and I am not a socialist. But nothing makes me feel more socialist than the public, out-in-the-open conspiracy to buttress the value of sports assets, whose lush beneficiaries tend to be impossibly rich already. Solutions here are hard. Many fans like the weird, market-warping rules of professional sports, which often promote parity and competition and keep favorite players on long contracts; plus, I don’t think doubling the number of NBA or NFL teams is particularly desirable among most fans. But ameliorations are possible. Tax law could further restrict the ability to team owners to amortize. And honestly, I don’t know why some local governments shouldn’t own stakes in the professional sports teams that they often directly finance. I’m not sure exactly how this would work, and I’m sure that there would be some negative side effects of literally socializing the already-kinda-socialist dynamic of professional sports. But the status quo is vile enough to justify some experiments. What we have today is a handful of lucky, franchise-owning billionaires who get to sit at a poker table where every card they turn over has a face or an ace. I wouldn’t call it cheating. I wouldn’t call the legal structure of American sports cheating or corrupt. I would call it … the law. But the law is bad.

An out-in-the-open conspiracy to help a lucky few billionaires get much, much richer: “The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social.

For a peek at an Lakers ownership sideshow, see Giri Nathan‘s “The Buss Children Are Squabbling Over Their Remaining Lakers Stake.”

And for a different kind of context, see the source of the pull quote in the intro, “The Lakers Are a Massive Bet on AI Disruption,” in which Novy-Williams suggests that Kushner is “buying the Lakers because sports are relatively insulated from the economic havoc looming from the rest of his portfolio. That’s not a hedge against AI, it’s a doubling down.”

* David Rubenstein

###

As we play ball, we might recall that it was on this date in 1920 that the owners of the Canton Bulldogs, Akron Pros, Cleveland Indians, and Dayton Triangles met in Canton, Ohio, and formed the American Professional Football Association– which proceeded to add teams and, in 1922, renamed itself the National Football League– the NFL.

At the outset, the APFA/NFL was very different from the behemoth it would become:

This new organization did not resemble a league as we would know it today, but was more like a professional association whose sole functions were membership and articulation of some general principles. Perhaps the best modern-day analogy would be a weak form of the NCAA. As can be imagined, the league office had no influence on anybody. It set no schedules, leaving each team to arrange its own slate. – Pro Football: The Early Years: An Encyclopedic History, 1895–1959

Still, there were hints even then of what was to come. The owners who created the “league” agreed to introduce a salary cap for the teams, to refrain from signing players under contract with another team, and to hold a league championship competition.

“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.'”*…

As Max Burns reports, a wave of corporate consolidation is reshaping the grocery industry; today, the U.S. has one-third fewer grocery stores than it did 25 years ago. The result is that just four corporations—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons—control more than two-thirds of the U.S. grocery market, This is squeezing workers, limiting competition, and giving this handful of retailers unprecedented control over what Americans pay for food…

If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.

From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.

Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.

In a corporate landscape defined by Republican deregulation, America’s grocery stores and food suppliers are consolidating despite active federal laws explicitly intended to prevent anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps the most important of those laws is the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, or RPA, also known as the Anti-Price Discrimination Act. For decades, RPA ensured fair competition by banning food suppliers from charging different prices to different stores; at least it did until the Reagan-era Federal Trade Commission largely stopped enforcing it in the 1980s. Even though RPA is still the law of the land, food suppliers like Pepsi now routinely ignore the law without consequence.

“Big corporations have buying power, and they can oppress and dictate to producers what they want to pay for crops,” Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos told me. “A corporation can come to a farmer and say ‘we’ll pay you this price for potatoes, but you can’t give that price to anyone else,’ so they fix prices in a way that hurts independent supermarkets and independent businesses.”

Megacorporations aren’t subtle about flexing their market power to fix prices in ways that protect other megacorporations. Last year President Donald Trump’s FTC dismissed an RPA claim against PepsiCo which alleged that Pepsi illegally offered grocery chain Walmart unfair pricing discounts while charging smaller chains more for the same products. When independent grocery stores undercut Walmart by lowering the price of Pepsi products, PepsiCo allegedly responded by raising wholesale prices or refusing to do business with the smaller stores until they raised prices above those at Walmart.

As independent grocery stores struggle, they become more likely to sell out to larger national chains, leading to consolidation that makes both prices and employee wages less competitive. As president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 3000, Faye Guenther represents over 50,000 grocery and retail workers across the Pacific Northwest. Guenther has spent years fighting the growing imbalance between rising prices and falling wages. Now, she says, things have reached a crisis point for regular Americans…

Read on for Burns’ looks at the impact on workers (TLDR: fewer jobs, lower wages), availability of stores (TDLR: or its opposite, food deserts), and food prices (TLDR: they’re rising), and for his suggested remedies.

The painful reality behind the joke “I’m getting stronger with age. I can now lift $100 worth of groceries with one hand!”: “America’s Grocery Monopoly Problem,” from @themaxburns.bsky.social in @damemagazine.bsky.social.

See also: “Grocery Retail: The Last Link in the Monopoly Chain.”

Also apposite: “Big Food Versus the People” (what court battles reveal about the ultra-processed food industry’s corporate litigation strategies). Further to which: “Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be“…

A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.

In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.

The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away —  could bear the chasing arrows.

Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court….

Of course, there’s always eating out… but of course, that’s got its own issues: “The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition,” gift article from @economist.com.

Oh, and we might note that this is National Farmers Market Week.

* Steven Wright

###

As we chow down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that the officially-adjudicated “first supermarket” opened: King Kullen in Queens, New York.

Grocery chains had been around since 1859, when The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was established. But they rarely sold fresh meat or produce and relied on the old mercantile system of clerks puling items from shelves on request. As long-time readers may recall, the first self-service grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly, which shifted to self-serve in 1916.

The first modern supermarkets appeared just over twenty years later, offering a full range of food items, beverages, and household items under one self-service roof, often with an emphasis on low prices as well as convenience. There were a number of contenders for the “first supermarket” crown…

To end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. They defined the attributes of a supermarket as “self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling.” They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” The store layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter. Everything displayed for sale in the store “had prices clearly marked”, meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices. Cullen described his store as “the world’s greatest price wrecker.” At the time of his death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot. Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores. – source

source

@sglerman95814
That is all well and good, but I’m sure my grandfather and uncles found no comfort in those words when in #Nazi prisons or in the Nazi #slave labour camps. Not to mention ALL of those who were sent to #ConcentrationCamps either.

Yes light and love are the healing aspects of our human history as long as you have a history a living. Otherwise, turning the other cheek just gets you nothing but more of the same, that is if you survive at all.

Nazis are to be wiped out, not saved.
#Antifa #ChristoFascists #Oligopoly #TechBros #AntiSocialRich #RogueCapitalism #FinancialVampires #Corruption #Greed #Racism #EugenicsOverlords and many other hashtags. Drive the Nazis out of govt everywhere. #RWNJs

Canada is a the world leader in rigged markets that pander to MBA fck-wits: “If I was WestJet’s CEO, I would not want any competition. I would want to make it as monopolistic or duopolistic for maximizing profit,” he told the Star.
#airlines #WestJet #competition #oligopoly #rigged #consumers #corporatism #Canada #Cdnbusiness #bussiness #markets #regulations
https://www.thestar.com/business/document-shows-westjets-push-against-federal-air-passenger-rights-regulations/article_04d36601-d56e-49f9-b8a1-650bc3ef3e94.html

Multilateralism for middle powers

" Multilateralism is shorthand for the much-invoked “rules-based international order”; multipolarity is the world of competing spheres of interest, what Stubb calls “an oligopoly of power”, where the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must.

We are not simply in a transition; we are in a fight for a future world order. And the path to a healthy outcome necessarily runs through international institutions, from the UN to settings far beyond it, where we must rethink membership and power for global cooperation to survive.The world is being reshaped by the “structural” forces of demography, climate and technology,

Part of the problem, Stubb argues, is that “the US is not a modern society by European or Asian standards”. This helps to explain the growing influence of a radical form of evangelical Christianity within the Trump administration. But it also accounts for the absence of adequate healthcare, education and housing that plagues the US, in particular, and neoliberal economies like Australia’s more generally.

Without strong multilateral systems, all interstate deals become transactional. A multipolar world runs on self-interest. A multilateral world makes the common interest a self-interest. " >>
https://theconversation.com/finlands-president-alexander-stubb-has-some-ideas-to-save-the-international-order-and-ourselves-280153
#Multilateralism #MiddlePowers #Australia #TheWest #InternationalOrder #SelfInterest #oligopoly

#trumpregime #imperialism #donroe #trump #trump2 #TrumpDictator
#donroedoctrine #corporatecontrol
#corp #CorporateLandlords #MAGA
#oligopoly #corrupt #corruption
#epsteinfiles #colonialism #antifa

@maleve @smithke Sounds very, very plausible. #Capitalism always works to make it an #oligopoly.
Maximize #ShareHolderValue aka #GoldenCalf is the answer to life? Who needs an itinerant preacher?