...as many "bases" as I do?

I bet I could STILL kick its ass.

"[Google is] also staring down multiple federal lawsuits, including an imminent antitrust trial set to begin in September that alleges Google illegally maintained a monopoly by cutting off rivals from search distribution channels."

"Private Oligopoly ISPs To Get $759 Million in Grants for Pretending to Provide High-Speed Internet to Rural Areas"

Well ... maybe if you're super-rich you'd go to the US for medical treatment, but if you're only ordinary-rich, you might be better off getting care in another developed country: Ezekiel J. Emanuel et al., "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries," JAMA Internal Medicine, March, 2021;181:339-44 From the Abstract: Objective To assess whether the health outcomes of White US citizens living in the 1% and 5% richest counties (hereafter referred to as privileged White US citizens) are better than the health outcomes of average residents in other developed countries. . . Conclusions and Relevance: This study suggests that privileged White US citizens have better health outcomes than average US citizens for 6 health outcomes but often fare worse than the mean measure of health outcomes of 12 other developed countries. These findings imply that even if all US citizens experienced the same health outcomes enjoyed by privileged White US citizens, US health indicators would still lag behind those in many other countries.

...that was a bad place to put the Nigeria–South Africa cable, but did anyone listen? ;-)

That's funny. When I hear "worker-owned cooperative" I think of Mondragon, a federation of worker-owned coops in Spain's Basque Country — the world's largest such federation and Spain's seventh biggest "corporation." It was born in 1956 (under Franco and the Falangists!) and is going strong today. It seems like a more relevant reference point than some straw man dredged up from the Stalinist USSR.

There was no massive economic crash in France that hasn't been linked to the 2008 crisis. Fast forward to 2018 and they are still battling with unemployment linked directly to 2008 combined with a double whammy of slow growth from Brexit in all of western Europe, pressure from the EU to cut spending, and rising costs of living. All that combines to cause a massive hit on the government which is not getting tax dollars and is overburdened on welfare due to high unemployment.

Delocalizing entire factories from France to low-wage EU countries and subjecting French farmers to cut-rate competition from ground-and-surface-water-polluting CAFOs in Denmark and Poland and groundwater-depleting farms in Spain that use illegal migrant labor from Africa hasn't helped, either. That's not a result of the 2008 crisis but of the Treaty of Lisbon's race-to-the-bottom design. The French electorate decisively rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in a national referendum, and the French government went ahead and implemented it anyway two years later. And in the the first round of the 2017 presidential election, just a shade under 50% of the electorate voted for candidates who were openly anti-EU (and anti-euro, anti-NATO, and anti-globalization). Unfortunately, the leading anti-EU candidates were the scary "radical leftist" Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the scary "neo-fascist" Marine Le Pen, and whichever of them made it through to the second round (Le Pen) was going to get clobbered (and did). Fear and loathing of the anti-EU candidates and their parties for reasons having nothing to do with national sovereignty, monetary policy, and trade was the only reason Emmanuel Macron -- France's Bill Clinton and Tony Blair rolled into one -- got a deceptively massive electoral mandate in the second round and in subsequent parliamentary elections. The extent of his true mandate is better reflected by the public's majority approval of the Yellow Vests movement and the current general strike.

The French value the quality of life they once enjoyed, from job security to workers' rights to retirement security to first-class healthcare to world-class rail service to high-quality meat and produce to ... freedom from assault by advertising. Many -- old enough to have been exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion in French mass media, before all private outlets were bought out by billionaires -- have a good idea what is causing them to lose that quality of life and are fighting to get it back. In another generation or two, the French will be just as monolithically indoctrinated, propagandized, complacent, and self-defeating as their "Anglo" counterparts. (And who knows? Maybe they'll be topping up on their indoctrination every time they pee.)