Corporate influence in Washington has been a problem for as long as I can remember, and it’s only gotten worse since the Supreme Court let in all the soft money and Congress failed to fix the problem. Now, as I’ve said before, it appears that money is the only thing motivating the Republican party and the Democrats are only marginally better.

We need real reforms, the kind that Obama promised we’d get. But before we lay all the blame on him, we have to recognize that, by design, the President doesn’t have absolute power. It takes the Congress and the President, working together, to solve the problems we face. When one branch categorically refuses to cooperate, in this case Congress, then we need to lay the blame where it belongs.

We need to eliminate the Bush tax cuts which have helped dig the hole we’re in. We need to limit the size of banks and demand that they hold the paper on loans they make for at least five years, so they can’t abuse the mortgage system like they did before.

I think we need to go farther. I think we need a Constitutional Amendment that would state that corporations are NOT people for the purposes of politics. The concerns of corporations can be properly represented by the stock owners and employees, provided they are citizens of this country. Right now, we allow corporations, some of which do the majority of their business over seas, into our political process.

It’s also time we debunked the idea that the rich and entitled are some magical job creating class. We aren’t the ones who depend on the rich for our existence, they depend on getting us to work for far less that we are worth, in order to accumulate their wealth.

I’d love to see a study done that analyzes what the rich really do with their money. Somehow, I suspect that much of the “job creating” investing that’s going on is happening over in China, not here.

There are lots of jobs to be had here, in the U.S. if only we had the money to fund them. We need to repair the infrastructure. We need to increase the funding for schools and lower the cost of tuition so we can have the best educated populace in the world. We need to find new ways to build more efficient homes, and think about redesigning the way we lay out cities to increase energy efficiency and take advantage of our communications technology. We also need to build out a technology infrastructure second to none, so that our citizens and academics have what they need to put us back in the lead in technology.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of the crap. I’ll be happy to listen to honest debate about real issues, but the truth is that without a stimulus package there is no end in sight for this recession. I might be upset about how much this is going to cost, but I do recognize what the cost in human suffering would be if we sat on our hands and did nothing.

Of course, that’s not really what the Republicans want. That would be madness. It might cost some of them their cushy jobs and there might be a decline in support from their rich buddies. No, what the Republicans really want is to protect their own special interests from the axe that Obama is wielding in order to find the money to fix the problems he’s inherited without digging us so deep in the whole we’d never get out. So the Republicans will scream about spending on volcano monitoring equipment, about replacing federal vehicles that guzzle gas with hybrids and electrics, and about any other line item that they can spin into some kind of look-at-what-they’re-wasting-money-on-now!

Let’s talk about waste. How about sitting on our hands for thirty years after we were shown by the first Oil Crisis, just how vulnerable we were because of our dependence on oil? For all those years, the oil companies have drained money out of our pockets and put it into the pockets of middle-east high-rollers, some of whom like to finance terrorists. The money that paid for the attack on the U.S. on 9/11 came from the U.S., in payments for oil. Take a moment and think about what this country might look like if all that money hadn’t been carried off by the super-tanker load. We would have had money for road work, for health care, for improving the education of our children. We would all be better paid.

If we hadn’t paid for that oil. If we had refused to stay addicted and developed alternative energies, we would still have all that money, and we might not now be facing the climate change crisis that looms over us like a dark and dangerous storm that has yet to break.

Why didn’t we make changes? Because most of the politicians who’ve been in power over the last 30 years have owed allegience to Big Oil. The Bush family got their money from oil. Oil money helped finance Regean’s campaign and that of McCain. About the time it looked like Clinton might have gotten to work on the problem, Republicans suckered him into lying to Congress by questioning him about his affair with an intern. (You should keep in mind, that up until Clinton was questioned, he’d broken no law. He’d just been a cheating pig, which isn’t illegal in this country.) The Republican party managed to keep our former President busy with legal problems, so he wasn’t able to do his job.

That happens too much on both sides of the aisle, but lately, the Republicans seem to have made obstruction and obscufation a science. Even now, they are doing their best to slow the current administration. I dont’ think they have real problems with what Obama is doing. They all know that if they were in his place, they’d be forced to do the same things, but none of them have the guts to admit it. So, instead, they oppose him, for no reason other than he’s not Republican.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it often. If our politicians can’t begin to place the importance of good government before their own party affiliation, then we will fail as a nation. We will show the whole world what can happen when a democracy devolves into a mindless power struggle. The real shame of it is, we are needed. The U.S. needs to lead the way out of the Climate Change mess. If we don’t, it won’t just be our ideals that are lost, it might be our entire civilization, if not our species and most of the other species on the planet.

I used to think the Climate Change guys were exagerating, so I started reading the actual reports. I learned as much of the science as I could, and tried to determine who was giving me the straightest information. What scares me is that I don’t think the scientists have been exagerating. I think most of them are understating things. Scientists, unlike politicians, live or die based on what they say. The can’t go back and spin the scientific papers they author.

If we let things get completely out of hand and the Ice in Antarctica melts, our species may never see the Earth like it is now ever again. There is enough ice in Antarctica and Greenland to raise the seas at least thirty feet. That is high enough to flood over ninety percent of the populated world. People like to live near the ocean, and most of them do. Even though 30′ might not sound like that much, that would be enough to submerge most of Florida, all of the Florida Keys, most barrier islands, and all the pacific coral atolls. All those people would have to move inland, and they wouldn’t have any resources to bring with them. Couple that with a world population that is still growing and it’s a pretty bad picture.

So, here’s what I’d like. I would like the Republican constituents to have a chat with their representatives about honesty. I believe a healthy opposition party is a vital part of our system of government. That means we need a party that can argue based on the merit of it’s ideas, not on how much it can spin piddling nits into “issues.”

Barak Obama has already performed two invaluable services for our country. By getting elected, he’s helped us take another giant step forward, away from our racist past and into a more accepting future; and he’s set a new standard for honesty and integrity in government. Let’s see if the rest of our politicians can rise to the challenge of practicing politics like a grown up.

Look at the mess that kind of thinking has gotten us into. Our economy is trashed, as is our reputation around the world, several thousand of our children were sent to die in Iraq on the basis of a lie, and we are facing a world wide environmental crisis.

To those of you who have something to sell to the American people, I’d suggest trying a little honesty. It would be refreshing. Even better, it might work. You might find that people are willing to pay a little bit more for products that are peddled using accurate information instead of ludicrous stories and obvious pandering.

On the other side of this equation, I strongly suspect that people are going to become quite vengeful towards those that they feel put them in this position. They are going to wonder why the guy who sold all those sub-prime mortgages has a nice house while they are being foreclosed on. They’ll wonder why the CEOs and CFOs of all these corporations are getting paid bonuses when the end result of the work they did is the collapse of their companies and the world economy.

It used to be that honesty was taken for granted. Maybe we need to work on cleaning up our act and making it possible to live that way once more. It won’t solve all our problems, but perhaps it will make the ones that we have a little easier to face.

I don’t understand exactly what has happened to collapse our economy, but there are some things that have been going on for a long time that I believe played a role. If they aren’t fixed, I think we’ll either fail to recover, or we’ll go on to have another enormous collapse at some future date that dwarfs this one. I’ll just list them here. See if any make sense to you.

• Oil – This is one where most people agree. When you import half the raw material you need to burn to generate the energy you need, you are draining your country dry. That’s especially true when you are giving the money to people who fund criminals who attack our citizens. That oil wealth itself has created the terrorism problem by propping up bad governments that deny their citizens the basic freedoms we enjoy. Without money for weapons, most of those regimes would have fallen, to be replaced – one can hope – by more representational governments. If the money had been going into a democratic country, it would have created jobs and increased the size of the middle class, which would have generated demand for products we produce. Instead, most of that money has gone into the hands of individuals who are already wealthy where it does very little for anyone.
• Playing Favorites – If you want capitalism and free markets to work, everyone has to have an equal chance. All businesses need to have equal access to markets, to financing, and to government services. But that’s not how it works in the U.S. Here, we favor the largest businesses over all others. This is foolish, because large businesses do NOT create lots of new jobs. They aren’t particularly innovative. What they do best, is sue other businesses, try to form monopolies, jack up prices, and worry more about quarterly profits than if the consumer actually likes their product.On the other hand, small and medium-sized businesses employ half the people in this country and are always the fastest to enter new markets, generate new technologies, and create innovations.Hewlett-Packard laughed off Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack, when they presented their idea for a personal computer to the company. It wasn’t IBM, or Digital, or any of the other giant computer companies that invented one of the most important new industries on the planet.

  One of the worst problems with huge companies like Ford, GM, Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac, is that they are ‘too large to fail.’ The economic consequences of allowing any of these huge companies to fail are dire. Millions of people get laid off in a short period, causing a shockwave that travels through the economy like a wrecking ball.

  The CEOs and Presidents of these huge companies demand enormous power and extravagant salaries way beyond the actual worth of the individual to the business. As these companies get larger and gobble up other companies, the number of people making critical decisions in that industry gets smaller and smaller.

  The common argument for huge companies is that there is no other way. That some jobs are too big to be done by smaller companies. That’s a load of caca. There is no reason you can’t have a group of companies work together on big jobs. There will be inefficiencies, but those same inefficiencies might also make it harder for a single person to bankrupt the entire enterprise.

  If we really want to have a healthy capitalistic free-market economy, we need to stop giving any assistance to companies once they reach a certain size. Our government policies need to be focused on improving the health of the small and medium-sized businesses. Big companies should give way to hosts of smaller competitors all out to do a better job than the other guy. When one of them fails, a much smaller number of people will be out-of-work, and they should be able to find employment among their former competitors, or even start up their own business.

  Like gigantic stars warp space, huge companies warp the economy around themselves.

• Regulations – Regulations aren’t bad. If an industry is not constantly whining and bitching about how the regulations are keeping it from achieving maximum profitability, then you need more regulations. Regulations keep an industry healthy. Regulators try to make sure that the players in their industry follow the rules. As we have seen, you can not depend on businesses to act in their own best interest when it looks like there’s a quick profit to be made. Some of the brightest business people in our country were involved in these sub-prime mortgages. They weren’t stupid people, and most of them weren’t evil, but they fell victim to peer pressure and greed, just like all of us can.To me, the idea that people will act in their own rational self-interest is one of the biggest pipe-dreams anyone has ever come up with, and it is central to Adam Smith’s economic ideas and the principles of conservative thinking. If people were able to be rational, why do people smoke cigarettes? Why do so many people gamble? It’s because we are not rational. We need rules, and we need people to make sure we actually follow the rules.
• Education – It was World War II that pulled us out of the Great Depression. We can’t afford to wage another war like that in order to pull out of this one, so we need to understand why WWII helped and find ways to replicate that effect. It seems obvious to me that it was the incredible ramping up in industrial production capability that was needed to provide logistics for the war that saved us. But it was something else that helped keep things going afterward, and that was the GI Bill and an unprecedented number of young men going to college after the war. That’s what helped give us the prosperity of the fifties.The U.S. has been falling behind in education. We all moan and groan about it, but we never actually do anything. When proposals come up in our towns to raise taxes in order to improve public schools, the proposals are voted down. The rich in the communities don’t care, since they send their kids to private schools. The government’s moronic endorsement of charter schools, which is basically a poorly disguised way to fund religious schools with public money, drains more resources away from public schools.

  Public schools are one of the few places where all members of our society can meet and get to know each other. If all our children go to the same schools, than we really would be saying, this is a country in which we strive to give everyone an equal chance. Instead we have been racing away from that idea ever more quickly.

  We need to re-embrace the commitment to public education. Voucher programs primarily help the wealthy, who are doing just fine already, which is why we call them wealthy. We need to be doing whatever is needed to make sure that our schools are second to none.

  Improving our schools does NOT mean teaching by rote or “going back to basics” or any other such rubbish. It does not mean putting every kid in the country through batteries of meaningless standardized tests. We need to develop teaching methods using science. We need to harness the power of our new computing and presentation technologies to make it possible to tailor the education of every student in America to his or her needs

  Our children are the ones who the economy will depend on in the future, when we are all retired. It will be the energy, creativity, and willingness to work of our children that determines what our own final years will be like. So call it rational self-interest to make sure that our kids are given the best possible education.

  It used to be that your educational progress was measured primarily by your grades. The assumption was that your teachers had the most comprehensive knowledge of you as an individual and that they could see both problems and talents that tests would miss. We need to put the evaluation of the students back on the teachers, where it belongs, and try to give the teachers better tools for evaluating the student.

• Population - Here’s one no one will talk about. There are too many people. The conservatives won’t talk about it because then they might have to talk about birth control, which gives them hives. I don’t know why the rest of us avoid it. Maybe because it’s felt like open season on liberals in the U.S. for the past eight years. Still, that’s a big part of the problem. We need to be teaching effective birth control here in the U.S. and everywhere else in the world. Someone has got to convince the Catholic Church and the Mormons that encouraging poor people to have as many children as possible is no longer a good idea and is mostly good at keeping poor people poor.

  One of the big upticks in the world economy happened back in the middle-ages about the time of the plague. Over about a hundred years, half the population was killed. Farms and whole towns were left empty, and wound up being reclaimed by the forest. All of a sudden, there were a lot fewer people, but most of the industrial capacity, in the form of tools and buildings was still intact. Around the same time, the horse collar came into widespread use, allowing an individual to farm more land than he needed for his family. That meant extra crops that could be sold in town. And that’s how we got the middle-class.

  I’m not advocating a plague. But I am pointing out that our world might be a lot better if we all had fewer children. Not only would it mean there were more resources per capita, it would also mean that we’d have less of an impact on our environment.

  Water and oil are going to become very scarce in the future, and if we don’t take any measures to control population growth, it will be wars that do it for us.

• Environment - Global warming isn’t some made-up thing to scare rich folks, it’s real. We’re already seeing the effects in longer growing seasons, stronger storms, and rising seas. While the effects might seem gradual to you and I, they are terrifyingly fast to those who study the climate. The world has had high CO2 levels before, as high as 1000 parts per million (ppm). So what’s the big deal about 400ppm or 500ppm? The big deal is that while levels have risen in the past, right now they are rising at a rate a thousand times greater than anything in the historical record. During past times of rapid growth in CO2 there were massive extinctions, which is the same thing we are seeing now. In fact, almost a quarter of all mammal species are now threatened in some way by climate change, poaching, environment destruction or some other problem we’ve caused.

  Why should you care if some animals go extinct? Because we don’t know how our ecology works. One of the animals that is suddenly having serious problems is the honey bee. Without the honey bee, it will be difficult to raise many crops like citrus, nuts, and dozens of others. A substantial fraction of our food supply might go away. No one had even though about that kind of possibility until recently, when bee colonies all over the U.S. started disappearing.

  Heard any good frogs lately? I hope so, because all amphibians seem to be in danger, too. That’s a whole class of animals. It’s possible that your grand kids children might not be able to go out and catch frogs and toads on those warm summer nights, like you used to.

  At some point, a key species will be eliminated and it will cause a chain reaction that will kill off entire ecological communities. Since we have no idea how to recover a lost species, that could lead to scenarios where most of the life on Earth perishes.

  Climate change isn’t just about things getting warmer. When the climate changes the way it has been, there are incredibly complex interactions, which will produce unpredictable consequences.

  We need to reinvigorate our basic sciences and encourage the study of the climate and the changes that are happening. During the last eight years, most of the researchers at the EPA have reported some kind of censorship. That has to stop. Without good information, we cannot possibly make the right decisions in dealing with the environmental problems that we’ve caused.

  It might seem like we have to put the environment on the back burner in order to deal with the economic issues, but if we do so, will there be an environment to save later?

  On the other hand, if we develop the technologies needed by the entire world to deal with these issues, we’ll have a new industry that will generate new jobs and new wealth.

Normally, I would oppose a bail out, just as the Republicans are doing. I don’t like the idea of bailing out the automakers. It’s become a bad habit. The leadership of the American automobile industry seems to be made up of people who can’t see past the next quarter and who are convinced that lobbying Congress is more important than making good cars. Frankly, we deserve a lot better than we’ve been getting from that group.

The writing has been on the wall since the 1970′s. We need alternatives to gas-guzzling cars. Instead of giving us those alternatives, the auto industry has squandered every opportunity we’ve given it. When the Japanese voluntarily restricted imports so that the U.S. automakers could catch up, the U.S. automakers jacked up prices, paid out bonuses, and stubbornly refused to improve quality until the voluntary restrictions ended and Detroit was forced to compete again. Instead of developing more efficient engines, the Big-3 have focused on pushing SUVs down the throat of every consumer. SUVs are great. Since they are classified as light trucks, they don’t have to meet the same pollution or efficiency standards as cars. That means they can be made bigger and heavier. SUV designers seem determined to force everyone into SUVs by making it clear that if there’s a collision between a SUV and an ordinary automobile, the SUV is gonna win.

The automakers tell us that we want SUVs. I’m sure some of us do. But I kind of think that the automakers could have sold us all golf carts with the kind of advertising budgets they’ve used to push SUVs on us. Does anyone really need a Hummer? Really?

If you don’t believe me, think about smoking. When I was a kid, smoking was so wide-spread, you really couldn’t get away from it. Marketing changed that. The U.S. government and organizations like the Red Cross, American Lung Association, spend tons of money alerting us to the dangers of smoking. They made us realize that if we smoke, it will – more than likely – kill us or someone we love. And look what happened, people actually stopped smoking! They even passed laws to protect people from secondary cigarette smoke! Advertising went up against one of the most addictive substances we’ve discovered, and advertising won. I suspect that proper advertising could help U.S. citizens understand that what they really want, is a car that helps secure the future for their kid, as well as keeping the kid safe right now.

So, you can see, I think it would be poetically correct just if the Big 3 went bankrupt — except we can’t afford for that to happen right now. If these companies go under, millions will lose their jobs, and I know what what it’s like to be unemployed and unable to meet my responsibilities. The auto workers be forced to take jobs paying a tiny fraction of their current wages. Of course, this may be a goal of at least some of the Republican leadership.

Now, I don’t think these guys are evil. Well, not all of them, some are pretty scary. Some conservative economists believe that the U.S. needs to adjust salaries downwards in order to be competitive in the global economy. They fear that if we don’t do so, we’ll face even greater problems in the future. They may even be right, but right now, we can’t take another hit and if the American economy goes into a great depression, it will drag the whole world with it. Then it won’t just be Al Quida criminals that hate us, it will be everyone in the world who blames us for their personal losses.

I believe there are also elements in the GOP that sincerely want the economy to tank. They feel that they can profit in the aftermath, both politically — by putting the blame on Obama — and economically — through their personal investments. I don’t see any of these conservative pundits putting their own livelihood on the line in order to help out. It’s easy to tell everyone that they just have to tighten their belts when you’ve got enough money that you’ll never go hungry. It’s always someone else who has to pay the price for their ideology, usually the poorest.

And, of course, the GOP is deeply embarrassed by how badly they did in this election. While I think most of them are thinking hard about what they can do to improve their party, how to get back in touch with their supporters and maybe do a better job than the had been doing. But, I suspect some want to lash out against the Obama for beating them. They want to see Obama fail, even if it means soup lines and massive unemployment.

Well, it’s time to grow up. We’ve seen what happens when we let our leadership react like a petulant teenager instead of a responsible well-educated grown-up. If you are a Republican, demand that your leadership fight for power the old-fashioned way, by finding a way to be better than the other guy.

This is no time for Democrats to gloat, either. There is a lot of very hard work ahead. We all need to pitch in and do our part. We need to all remember that our country is The United States of America, and that when we work together, no enemy can stand before us.The United States of America is going to have to lead the rest of the world by example, not by fiat, and not by threat. We need to lead them out of this recession and into a recovery that will generate jobs all around the world, and help us overcome the problems posed by our past mistakes.

Like a monoculture of plants that can be wiped out by a single disease organism, mega corporations and monopolies are more fragile than they appear. Look at Enron. A few greedy individuals were able to destroy a company that employed thousands.

Lets look at it using a thought experiment. Lets assume we live in a town where there are a dozen soup vendors. All of our soup vendors make their own varieties of soup. Your favorite soup is Freddy’s French onion, but there are a lot more chicken noodle lovers than French onion lovers. Over time, Charlie’s Chicken Noodle, Inc. makes higher profits and gradually buys up the competition, including Freddy’s French Onion. For a while, they produce all the soups from all the companies they’ve taken over, but then, Charlie’s Chicken Noodle, Inc. is purchased by the mega soup conglomerate Soups R Us. In order to make the purchase, Soups R Us has to take on a lot of debt.

The CEO of Soups R Us, Sam, has to find a way to cut operating costs, so he can pay off the huge debts incurred during recent acquisitions. An analysis by the accounting department shows that Freddy’s French Onion, while having an incredibly loyal following, just isn’t nearly as popular as Charlie’s Chicken Noodle. Sam decides to do away with French onion soup to save money. It’s the right decision for the company, but not for all the lovers of French onion soup.

Some people unthinkingly applaud the concentration of wealth, claiming that it’s only by the concentration of wealth that great things can happen. They insist that we have to have super wealthy people and corporations in order to compete on the world stage. I think they are wrong.

Accumulation of great wealth comes at a cost. In order to produce a profit, there has to be a differential between the money for materials, infrastructure, and labor; and the price charged for the product. One of the major expenses in any business is labor, so great energy is expended in keeping labor costs down.

But here’s the thing, money paid out to workers isn’t just a cost. It’s also an investment in the future of the community. If you pay no more than a worker needs to survive, the options that worker has to help the community to grow economically are very limited. It’s only the workers that can save enough money and/or find investors that can start up new businesses. It’s those new business that reinvigorate the economy and provide new jobs in the community.

When you have one super rich person, like Bill Gates, that person makes the decisions about how a very large amount of money will be spent. That one person will be guided primarily by his/her own interests, values, and prejudices. The diversity of that persons investments is unlikely to be nearly as great as if the money was distributed among sixty or seventy individuals.

Large corporations, as a rule, don’t respond well to change. They find it difficult to respond quickly. Often companies have a vested interest in the status quo, so they actively resist change.

A number of years ago, I was at a telecommunications convention where there was a speaker giving a presentation on what VoIP, or Voice over IP, would mean to the telecommunications industry. When he was done speaking, the first comment from anyone was “We have to get this outlawed.” It was the kneejerk reaction of an industry that has always been protected from competition.

The U.S. is falling farther and farther behind in the deployment of broadband internet services. It’s pretty clear why, there are typically only three choices for consumers in any given market: DSL, Satellite, and Cable. It’s rare to find more than on cable provider unless it’s the local municipality. In places where cities have started efforts to provide free WiFi access to all citizens, telecommunications companies have actively worked to get such efforts outlawed at the federal and state level.

Do you have a cell phone? If you have an advanced one, chances are there are several features that you’d love to use, but they’ve been locked out. My phone, from Sprint, won’t allow me to download my calling list, or photos, even though I can connect to my phone with a USB cable. The reason I can’t is that Sprint has a deal with the manufacturer to lock out those features so Sprint can charge me for them. I have to pay to email pictures from my phone to my computer. I have to pay more to have my calling list backed up and even more to get a copy of my calling list for myself.

People in Europe don’t have this problem, because there is competition, and because the telecommunications companies there apparently understand that when you purchase a phone, you are entitled to use all the features on the phone. In Europe, if you want a new phone, you buy it, pop the GSM chip out of the old phone, put it in the new phone, and you’re ready to go. Last time I changed phones with Sprint, it took two hours. I wanted to scream.

We could debate on which mistakes were the worst when it comes to dealing with the telecommunications industry. Personally, I find the idea of auctioning off radio spectrum bandwidth, which is clearly a natural resource held in common by all of our citizens, to be treason of the worst sort. I also think that allowing our telecommunications companies to merge into conglomerates larger than the original AT&T is absolute folly, as well. We’ve already seen cases where large sections of the Internet were disrupted because of foolish decisions made by the managers of these corporations.

When you have dozens of companies competing, you have dozens of management teams making decisions. That makes it far more likely that one of them will happen on the right decision. Every time you consolidate, you reduce the number of decider and decisions, so that a single mistake is magnified greatly.

People wonder why our economy is so lackluster. They blame our poor performance on foreign competition, on oil prices, and a number of other factors. I believe the answer is simple. We’ve allowed the growth of two many monopolies, and near monopolies. As a result, we’ve seen the destruction of small and medium-sized businesses that would reinvigorate our economy. There are fewer places for new ideas to come from.

Our government needs to reacquaint itself with the laws about monopolies and vigorously prosecute companies that are in violation. Our congress needs to specifically outlaw the use of consent decrees to allow monopolies to continue. Microsoft is a perfect example of why. MS has never met a consent decree it didn’t like and couldn’t ignore. (Ironically, I believe Bill Gates and all the shareholders of Microsoft would actually be wealthier if the company had been broken up as discussed, since I think it would have resulted in a far more energetic software industry.)

Free markets are great. Monopolies, by their very nature, are damaging to the health and wellbeing of free markets and economies that depend on free markets. We’ve got great challenges ahead of us. We need all the economic diversity we can get, if we want to see ourselves through to the other side.