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AmericanKulak says

Dependence on imports creates debt pressure to finance the deficits.

You are confusing trade deficits vs budget deficits, it seems.

Patrick says

PeopleUnited says

It won’t be fixed until the people say enough is enough and demand change.

Even if most people see the problem and demand change, the government is firmly in the hands of mega-corporations like UnitedHealth and acts solely in the interests of those corporations at all times.

Frustration with this state of affairs seems to be what motivated the shooting of that CEO.

We have a great Constitution, but it failed to anticipate the possibility of complete corporate control of Congress. Maybe one solution is to let the people directly vote on the renewal of corporate charters every five years. Extremely evil corporations like UnitedHealth and Pfizer would have their permission to be corporations revoked, resulting in personal liability for those running the companies.

Exactly - corporations were never imagined to be immortal. Finite limits to corporate charters. This achieves two things 1) There is no benefit to psychos to control something that is guaranteed dead after 5 years. 2) It puts the onus on Federal or State legislatures to take more direct control over corporations. Yes, there can be corruption, but legislators, in the absence of vote corruption, are probably more responsible than corporate dark-triad psycho CEOs.

stereotomy says

Yes, there can be corruption, but legislators, in the absence of vote corruption, are probably more responsible than corporate dark-triad psycho CEOs.

Both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee are private corporations and each have complete control over the business and activities of their organizations. Source: https://www.drmikekatz.com/the_dnc_and_rnc_are_private_corporations

Patrick says

Even if most people see the problem and demand change, the government is firmly in the hands of mega-corporations like UnitedHealth and acts solely in the interests of those corporations at all times.

I think its the other way around; corporation balls are in the hands of the government; if the corporations don't do the government department head bidding, he/she will squeeze the corporation balls one way or the other. At best, they are 69ing.

@gabbar You're right that corporations which do not obey the CIA and State Department get "investigated" for imaginary crimes.

Facebook found itself threatened by the government when it hesitated to completely censor the vast number of serious injuries and deaths caused by the mRNA injections, for example. Elon Musk's companies are now being "investigated" in a similar way.

Google, however, is itself an arm of the CIA at this point, a way for them to efficiently spy on all the Gmail and search habits of America.

So I agree that they're 69ing. And they do this partly to prevent the free market from working. If, say, a new company displaced Google, then the ability of the government to spy on all of us would be greatly reduced. Therefore, no such new company will be allowed to grow - unless they agree to give all their user info to the CIA.

Marc Andreessen just remarked on this - how he was explicitly told not to bother founding any AI companies, but only the three or so now in existence will be allowed, because the government can control them. No competing AI companies will be allowed to gain any substantial market share. Lol, I see that you yourself commented on this:

https://patrick.net/post/1382778/2024-12-03-marc-andreessen-at-joe-rogan-podcast?start=1#comment-2123357

stereotomy says

corporations were never imagined to be immortal.

That was the way it started out with corporations. They had a limited defined purpose with a beginning, a middle and a defined end.

The foreign occupied foreign city state of Washington DC is a corporate zombie, since the foreign corporations are completely dead bankrupt, but Congress keeps them lurching on by fiat legislation because they are the source of all the corrupt bounties.