I'm shocked to see gambling going on in this casino...…

Price fixing.... Oh no, you mean when you have a "gubmint" that allows too many mergers, which create a handful of RR oligopolies, with huge area wide localized monopolies on services, that folks will abuse that market power by using price discrimination and price fixing... Oh no!

Why it's just shocking... I had no idea this kind of thing could happen... that our politicians can be bought off like that, or that companies would abuse monopolistic power to gouge their customers... (Not really....)

I heard some folks bleating away in any earlier post about "term limits" to somehow solve these problems. My personal experience with term limits right here in CA, is that this just gives those politicians, so inclined, less time to "cash in" from the special interests, to line their pockets, raise money for the "next office", or get offers of future employment, or other "perks" as "bribes".

It's the massive amounts of money "sloshing around" in our politics that is the real problem. And now, with "dark money", anonymous both domestic and foreign money, now allowed to flood into our political system, it has become worse than ever.

It is the open and often outright "bribery" of our elected officials, using so-called "campaign donations, or nowadays with monies laundered through "third party" "fronts", now allowed to be spent on "educating politicians" through lavish all expenses paid "junkets", or through outside funded political advertising, by the thousands of these often "tax exempt" "front groups", to almost "all" of our political parties and politicians that is the problem.

Greed and the pursuit of power will do that to some people.

There even seems to get a lot of "dark" money "sloshing about", that is even going to the "Greens" through anonymously funded and even possibly from foreign intelligence funded "front groups". And, wasn't there an attempted murder of a witness in the NRA foreign political money laundering case, in Russia, just this week....? Political money laundering and bribery is now as American as guns and red beet borscht it seems...

These RR's paid for what they wanted, and they got it...greater monopoly pricing power. And, these other companies, didn't pay enough to the politicians stop it... So now, they're paying lawyers, because the open truly "competitive" open free market capitalist system has broken down for them... Oh well.....

Maybe the real reason we have so many of these kind of problems lately, is because we now have way too much money from god knows who influencing these decisions, and we now truly can say with pride, that we have "the best gubmint that money can buy"....