A Realization:
Sometimes, something hits me just right, and makes me expand my opinion, thoughts, formulations of a subject. That happened to me recently.

Just by chance I was reading an article by Matt Stoller (note: this has nothing really to do with the subject of the last blog I did on his book Goliath) on his Substack, about what he'd been trying to do with the substack account, and thanking those of us who supported him however they could. He wrote a few paragraphs which really struck me.

And that’s because most of us have a shared experience in coming to understand market power, even if we don’t know it. I analogize this process to understanding plate tectonics. Before 1967, we didn’t really know the cause of earthquakes and volcanoes. But that year, scientists Dan McKenzie and Robert Parker published a paper describing the theory of plate tectonics, the idea that Earth’s crust is composed of big flexible plates that smash into one another, fostering lots of phenomena, including earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain ranges and continents.
As plate tectonics does to geology, monopoly power explains the underlying features of our politics in such a fundamental way that it is inconceivable to understand how things work without it. Earthquakes and continents do not make sense without a basic explanation of movements in earth’s crust, just as culture wars and social questions do not make sense without understanding that they flow through corporations and business law.
Once you see the basic architecture of politics, you can’t unsee it. Once you understand the market power of Disney, Google, or CVS, and how their strategies and choices are based on a set of ideas interpreted by legislators and judges, arguments about culture or health care or technology seem foolish without a grounding in market power.
And believe it or not, this process is something that happens to everyone. It happened to antitrust lawyers who saw the collapse of their body of law over the last three decades, it happened to people in the cheer world when they realized that Varsity Brands is organized to acquire power over them, and it happens to policymakers as they come to understand their role in protecting our markets and our liberties. It’s why a lot of the antitrust bar lawyers are still upset, they haven’t gone through the experience of seeing what we see, of recognizing that the dysfunction of our politics and society is a result of consolidated market power.

This part '... culture wars and social questions do not make sense without understanding that they flow through corporations and business law' and this part '... seeing what we see, of recognizing that the dysfunction of our politics and society is a result of consolidated market power' really says it all to me, at least in terms of the power that the owners of our society, the oligarchy, has.

We have to remove that power or the other fights and struggles we might make are going to be unwinnable. I really want to stop wars, but how can we stop wars when some of the biggest market power players in our country, in the world, are the military industrial complex? How can we trust even one word of what they tell us about said wars and their excuses for them? From Weapons of Mass Destruction to Viagra helping soldiers rape (where? In Libya, in Ukraine, haven't we heard this story before?) How do we stop Amazon, or Google, or Facebook; they control everything, everything online? The fight has to start there, against the consolidated market powers, the fight has to start there. I think it's going to take a lot more social unrest, a lot more, before the small changes that are starting with the likes of Lina Kahn, can grow. Maybe those changes will be killed and have to be restarted by another person or group of people a few years later, I dunno. Maybe that's the really scary war that's coming up... scary for TPTB.

To Completely Change the Subject:
Did you know that jack o'lanterns started as carved turnips, rutabagas, mangel wurtzels or beets? Before pumpkins made it to Europe in the 1980s, really, that's what they used. I think they make a far scarier impression... And imagine the difficulty in doing that carving. It's not like any of those vegetables are hollow!

A Cornish Jack o'Lantern, carved from a turnip. source

And here's another, from Ireland. source

So, thanks for reading, have a great weekend and Halloween!, and here's the open thread - and remember, everything is interesting if you dive deep enough, so tell us about where you're diving!