Nah, the check just cleared. It's always a bribe.

It is weird that President of the United States is accepted over a billion dollars in crypto bribes and over 2 billion dollars in bribes for pardons and a $1 billion dollar bride from Qatar in a form of a jet he plans to take with him when he leaves office. He's taking at least 5 billion dollars in bribes maybe more. And we all just collectively shrug our shoulders instead of demanding he's removed from office.

I think we've gotten to the point where we just expect corruption too much from politicians.

There is a world of difference between Nancy pelosi using the stock tips and Donald Trump selling pardons.

Grievances? What the fuck are you talking about you imbecile?

Monopolies have a enormous and well-documented negative impact on consumers. How the fuck would any sane human being who knew what the word means be opposed to antitrust law enforcement?

I'm guessing that you're a bot. Because nobody in their right mind would write something that fucking stupid by themselves. I'm guessing the prompt was write a reply to this comment regarding antitrust law and mentioned grievances.

I think that's kind of the new game around here is to see the bot posts and wonder and figure out what the prompt was that created them from chat GTP or Grok. I don't think it was grok though because there's no sign of pedophilia

Is that large companies weren't too large so they were keeping each other in check.

As a voter Americans were disorganized and distracted to focus on antitrust law enforcement under normal circumstances.

So what would happen is McDonald's would be getting overcharged by the beef producers and they would file a lawsuit and get the public's attention to break up the cartel. This would benefit the public in the form of lower beef prices across the board.

These companies have gotten so large they don't do that anymore. McDonald's doesn't bother suing. They go to the four beef producers and they say give us a kickback and we won't Sue and you can keep over charging everybody else. Just as long as you don't overcharge us and you have to give us that kickback because we are actually big enough we can fight you in court.

So McDonald's gets their kick back and they get the pocket that money and the price of beef keeps going up and up and up because the system where these businesses were small enough that they could fight amongst themselves, AKA competition, has been broken down.

This is what is called a chesterton's fence. The idea is that if you have a fence you don't take it down unless you know why it was put up.

We had a fence up in the form of limiting the size of corporations and private equity and we took it down without knowing why it was put up in the first place.

Because they belong to the ruling class.

The word is ration. And you're next.

Honestly without our government being captured by billionaires and foolish voters falling for slick media campaigns none of what these Jokers do would matter.

One individual asshole isn't enough to screw us all over. It takes a lot of money and a lot of people who aren't paying attention to what's going on for . And that's on all sides. I'm on the left wing and we are dumb as dishwater. We are currently in fighting with the centrists instead of doing something about the little fascists.

Every time one of these cycles happens pay always goes down. They can just wait a little bit for your savings to be depleted.

About 20 years ago I noticed the cycle.

Too big to fail private equity would collapse the economy after a bunch of right-wing politicians deregulated Wall Street and cut taxes on the wealthy.

During the economic collapse it would always be taken out on our hides. Even if you hold on to your job raises stopped or became less than inflation and the cost of your health care kept going up as private equity moved in.

So every 8 years the Republicans came in and crashed the economy with Wall Street deregulation then they handed the mess to the Democrats who tried to fix it and failed because of course they did they were being sabotaged and then the public would put the Republicans back in charge for another round of it.

It really got going with the savings and loan scandals of the '80s. That was the start of too big to fail and the entire economy being held hostage by crooks. It was also when most of those crooks got away with it with only a few going to jail and mostly the ones who did are the ones who fucked with people who have real money and not people who stole from you and me.

Americans are not good have pattern recognition though so we've been dancing this Charleston for over 50 years now. But the next cycle I think is going to be a hell of a lot worse. The amounts involved are much much larger and so many more of the protections have been dismantled.

They are on track to privatize social security and when they do that it's going to massively juice the stock market taking an already overvalued market and sending it through the roof. A bunch of people here think that's going to be awesome because they'll get to see the line go up but that's going to be a mirage for them. Everyone though is hoping to take advantage of the greater fool without realizing that sooner or later everybody except a handful of trillionaires is...

I wish I could get people to understand if you have less than half a billion dollars in your bank account then you are on the menu but that's just not something people can believe. I think one of the problems is that if you have a realistic outlook on your chances in this world it is really hard to get out of bed in the morning...

I know that sounds like a non sequitured but stick with me.

In the old days antitrust lawsuits were part of the enforcement mechanism. If you illegally used a monopoly to harm competition you could expect your competitors to sue you and win.

After the lawsuit you would have to adjust or change your behavior or the regulator would move in.

Microsoft was when that broke down. They did the payouts but the regulator never moved in. Well it did, but then Bush Jr won the election and that was that.

So what does that have to do with beef prices? McDonald's has colluded with the beef producers. The beef producer is now giving McDonald's a kickback to keep their profits up while keeping the price of beef elevated via collusion. The regulator is asleep at the wheel or more likely they got shived by the administration. Meanwhile you're paying $8 a pound for ground beef.

You can't keep allowing all the systems that protect you and keep prices low to collapse and then complain when prices shoot up and crooks you all your property. You need to start making a choice between candidates that will actually put money in your pocket and keep it there and candidates that give you that warm feeling inside from grievances.

Unfortunately so far Americans are on track to go for grievance politics

We are currently around 20% functional unemployment. That is the number of people who have a job that does not pay enough to support them as a basic human being. Those people are relying on relatives or friends to make up shortfalls or they are working homeless. Last I checked we had about half a million full-time employees who are homeless.

The two and five, which is 40% cuz well math is hard, is the number of people who have good jobs. A good job is one that gives you enough money to afford a one bedroom apartment by yourself and a reliable car and health care. Basically what the baby boomers took for granted before pulling the ladder up behind them.

You don't have to like reality but you do have to live in it. You've got Google you can look all these things up little man. As the saying goes, reality has a liberal bias.

Full employment is a lie. You have to count gig workers to get to it. And a shitload of other massively underemployed workers. There are only two good jobs for every five Americans.

Consumer spending is only up because the baby boomers are sitting on a shitload of cash from when we used to do stuff like the New deal and the great society. AKA socialism. They are burning through it fast because of our healthcare system and because RVs are fun and they're going to leave basically nothing in their wake. We have a massive crisis brewing because when they die and leave no inheritance the next generation does not make enough money to sustain the consumer spending our economy needs to be functional. Just throw this on the pile of crises that we are not talking about.

As for the solid market growth that's because a bunch of finance Bros are in the process of looting everyone's 401ks. The actual market is incredibly overvalued and when they are done stealing all that money, about 10 trillion in total, the market is going to collapse when all those fake stocks have to eventually come back down to earth inside of our retirement plans. It's going to make Black Friday look like the . com bubble...

This is before we talk about the last 40 years of non-stop automation devouring middle class jobs and the huge automation boom going on right now.

Absolutely nothing about our economy or society or civilization is at all stable and I just wish I had died before the shit hit the fan. I did used to think that the baby boomers were going to get off scot-free but the younger ones look like they're going to get caught up in it because the pace has accelerated so much.

For example the shit Donald Trump has done is going to cause social security to collapse in 4 years instead of 10. They are going to use that as an excuse to privatize everything which will over juice the already overvalued market making the inevitable crash even worse.

I want to say historians are going to write about all this but honestly I don't think our species is going to survive this much concentrated insanity and stupidity. I think we're going to hand the nuclear launch codes over the religious lunatics and then it's game over. Maybe some of the trillionaires will survive in their bunkers but I think even that is unlikely.

These are people who cashed out. They're gonna shiv you for cash.

It's just highly amusing that virtually all of the fraud committed can be tracked back to Republicans doing incredibly pointless and ineffective voter fraud.

The real fraud is county level voter suppression. Look up who your county recorder is and tend to one they are a republican. You will have to do some digging to find that out because they are actively trying to hide their party affiliation and most counties do not make the recorder a partisan race even though it is an extremely partisan race.

With control of the county recorders they can send broken voting machines to their opponents districts. That's why you had 7 hour wait times to vote in swing States even though many of them had Democrats secretaries of State running the elections. Democrats don't take this seriously because you know what they say, they go low we lose the election and die and work camps or something I don't know I don't really listen to Michelle and Barry's speeches...

I've got a touch of the autism what with all these vaccines and so I don't really react to charisma from politicians. I don't understand it. So when people tell me Obama is this great orator and I watch him and I'm like meh and then people tell me Trump is this charismatic guy and I'm like what the fuck are you talking about...

I just want to do away with voter suppression because it'll help me get health care and a functioning economy.

At least once a week a republican gets caught altering a couple of ballots. So there's lots of Republican ballot fraud.

Oh you meant those dastardly (or was it dumbocrats, I don't remember the results of the presidential poll)

And yes the president of the United States held a poll to determine whether he should call Democrats demoncrats or dumbocrats. I will remind everyone that we are at War. Also that the price of gas is on track to shoot to $15 a gallon if that dumbass in the oval Office doesn't hand the 300 billion dollars to the Iranian government. I guess he could also do a draft and send 2 million of us to die.

So we have fucked things up so badly that everything is a grift and everyone is gunning for you.

That said this kind of petty crime is on the downswing and there is less of it every year. That doesn't mean that it doesn't suck when you're a victim of it but the odds of you becoming a victim of it have been going down steadily for decades.

You should be much more concerned of the much bigger grifts. Yeah there is the occasional old person who had their house stolen from them because we pay for our schools with property taxes and then let unpaid property taxes result in your house being taken. There's an easy fix for that do away with property taxes on your primary domicile and pay for schools with income tax and wealth taxes. And no a property tax and a wealth tax are not the same thing. If you have less than 500 million in your bank account you can stop typing now...

As for the big grifts you need to be paying attention to what SpaceX is doing. If you have any money in the stock market especially if it's a 401k they are coming for it and all the systems designed to protect you have been dismantled. The Democrat party when they get in charge in 2028 will try to restore some of those but they will be obstructed and blocked by their opposition.

So rather than worrying about a $2,000 check that you probably should have paid for electronically you need to be much much more worried about the half million dollars (or several million if you're a baby boomer or older Gen x) in your 401k.

You would think instead of dumb stories about petty crime that again has been going down every single year that I would be getting stories about the biggest heist in the history of the human race but nope. Almost as if billionaires own 90% of the news media. Although that number will be going down since several of them are becoming trillionaires...

How the hell do you think all these people are going to become trillionaires? It's by taking your property

The anti-woke crowd did was when the new She-ra cartoon came out and she was a 13 year old girl and had a body like a 13 year old girl they all complained that she didn't have massive badonkadonks.

And there isn't really any excuse because if there is one group of people that knows what a 13-year-old girl looks like it's maga. Although to be fair Grok didn't exist yet