Thread by @flanbites

You know what they’re trying to do? They’re trying to squeeze out players. Vaping. Now CBD. Don’t be surprised when new alternatives get big and gobble up the spaces. Same thing happened w/ online gambling (poker). Hell, the internet!

Here’s a history and overview. #OneVoice1 🧵

This is how our economy is exploited; it’s a “pump and dump” on a societal scale. The same mobs are crashing storefronts, but now it’s big corporations racketing the shit out of small–midsized businesses. In every sector. Soon there will be no opportunity left—we’re almost there.

To those who say “This is how it is, that’s how it’s played, the economy is rigged…”

You’re absoforkintootly right.

At a certain point, corps—money aggregates—get large enough to “bend” the markets. They have gravity.

I call them Death Stars of Capitalism.

Death Stars of Capitalism destroy or devour (tractor beam) everything in sight. They kaboom planets. They’re doing it to ours now.

Watch and see.

Every time a bubble pops a monopoly is born.

Enter the FDA, these other corrupted regulatory agencies… the Drumpf administration.

I first encountered them back in 2000. I’d come up a bit and rode the dot com wave (except my company actually did shit 🙄). Everything was great—a new frontier—new successes happening for people overnight, small businesses growing, exploring this new space… Enter Goldman Sachs.

What GS did was artificially inflate—PUMP—the space, growing it, accreting new investment (if you were around you might remember the day-trading fad; day traders went broke), before pulling their own chips from the table—DUMP—and breaking the whole damn economy.

Jackal-vultures.

What’s most chilling is these same asshats have occupied positions in several admins, shifting the entire economy in phases; destroying value, then swooping in and gobbling up all assets within a given space.

They did it again in 2008.

Now their shit’s gone into overdrive.

It’s not just GS—though they are a convenient catchall as their revolving door leads into the Oval, Cambridge Analytica (by way of Bannon and the Mercers)—it’s a huge slice of our financial sector.

It’s where the money is. It’s the Big Game.

You rly think 45 gives AF about CBD?

It’s just like a protection racket. Now that Herr Drumpf occupies the WH, he’s concerted regulatory agencies into private goon squads. Vaping and CBD are both huge growth markets.

Now the big boys want their piece. They’ll either burn the stores (punitive regs) or smash windows.

Either way big players will move in via outspending their competition and complicity w/ regulators, or they’ll just M&A their way into everything.

Right now they’re squeezing out small players to make room for the big boys.

Only the big boys will remain, just like the internet.

In 2011 the fed gov shut down online poker. Did online gambling go away? Nope! Now it’s all sports betting and state lotteries.

Think that’s a coincidence?

Online poker was a multibillion dollar—and growing—industry. You remember the fad. But there’s only so much gamblin money.

Same thing happened in the housing market. It wasn’t low income people to blame—GTFOH—it was speculators.

The big boys saturated the playing field w/ cash, attracting smaller investors (paging 2000!), before ultimately pulling the rug out and bankrupting millions.

PUMP AND DUMP

Just like the day trading fad during the dot com boom, just like poker players during the Hold Em era, just like homeowners pre-2008, ordinary people got screwed. But y’know who else got screwed?

Emerging businesses.

And it’s happening again. The big boys control mass media.

They selectively rile up public sentiment—positive (to build value) or negative (to destroy value)—and then they do one simple thing:

Buy low, sell high.

That’s it. It’s not a fkin conspiracy, it’s business.

It’s *all* business to them—the whole damn world is business to them.

What happened to all the foreclosed homes in Detroit? Or MY foreclosed home for that matter? The billions made in online poker?

All that shit got swallowed by preexisting entities: banks, the fed gov, and so it gets slushed into hedge funds to make that money work.

*Our* money.

Mob gonna mob. Back in the 90s they went straight. The Italians went dodo, or so they say; but rly they moved into Wall St.

Know who else followed suit? The Russians. They launder money to CLEAN it. Well what do you think they do w/ it then?

They make that money WORK.

Money is money, or so they say. But there’s also another term: blood money. That’s why I nixed multiple buyout offers from bad actors—b/c their money was unclean.

Well these jackal-vulture fools don’t give a single F. Money attracts money, it accretes just like pumped-up value.

So now we have just open, baldfaced corruption. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. W/ 45 in the Oval and regulatory agencies doing the *opposite of regulating* they’re smashing windows and burning storefronts and putting the thumb to the little guy.

Sound familiar?

I’ll leave you with facts:

•Dot Com Bubble total value: $6T
•Housing Bubble value lost: $10T
•Online Poker Market worth: $1T

That’s so many Ts you can call me Mr T. Woof! Now for today’s growth markets:

•Vaping Market: $30B*
•CBD (excluding cannabis): $22B*

*est. by 2022

Where do you think all that money goes? It’s not lost—it’s transferred. And we are witnessing now a less elegant means twd the same end.

Vaping and CBD are on the cusp of big growth. The “health concerns” are distorted to kneecap the players; that’s the big boys elbowing in.

🧶

PS1 Oh I forgot to end w/ hope like I like to do. Well here’s hope, but it’s an uncomfortable hope:

The industries left to gobble up are becoming less and less, smaller and smaller. Eventually this will starve the beast. Our market economy requires unlimited growth. It will end.

PS2 This will be uncomfortable but it will lead to new spaces opening up just like clearing old growth to allow green shoots to sprout. The nature of the beast is such that it seeks to preserve itself to the detriment of its environment—eventually it will no longer have its food.

PS3 We will remain. It’s time to start investing locally, in small businesses that support their communities and environment. The big boys’ time will end; the beast will die.

It’s imperative we focus on real solutions now—build alternatives, form communities around basic ideals.