The market we spend into every day appears to be made up of hundreds of diverse and competing business. But it actually isn't so. And this matters to MAGA. As long as this degree of concentration is allowed, so is the easy tyranny that we are facing today.
The following is taken from the Introduction to David Dayen's 2020 book, "Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power"
.......................................................................................................................
On April 15, 2019, Salesforce.com announced a $300 million deal to buy Salesforce.org.
I’ll back up if you’re confused.
There’s this company called Salesforce that makes “customer relationship management” software. It tracks current sales and projects future sales. It sounds to me like a shared spreadsheet, but I’m reliably informed that it’s a transformative product.
Anyway, at one point, Salesforce spun off an independent philanthropic arm, unimaginatively called Salesforce.org, which offers the software to nonprofits and educational groups for little or no money. As people like cheap things, that business took off. So much so that Salesforce decided to buy it. In its announcement, Salesforce boasted that it would enjoy a $200 million revenue boost from the deal. Salesforce.org would still supply to nonprofits; it would just become a business line of Salesforce. Of course, if you give away the core product to some customers at a discount, profit margins fall. That’s probably why Salesforce.org got spun off to begin with.
On a conference call, Salesforce chief financial officer Mark Hawkins reassured analysts that Salesforce.org will “be on a pathway and convergence over time to our overall Salesforce operating margin.” That’s a deliberately convoluted way of saying that Salesforce.org will either jack up the price to nonprofits or “streamline areas of operational duplication,” another deliberately convoluted way of saying it would make job cuts.
The larger point is this: Salesforce, which has made sixty acquisitions since 2006, according to deal tracker Crunchbase, has become either so starved for growth or so eager to please Wall Street that it has begun to buy itself. And I wouldn’t bring that up, except that it feels like a trend.
Within a week of the Salesforce/Salesforce acquisition, Expedia Group bought Liberty Expedia Holdings. This reconfigured a deal from the 1990s that created separate stockholder groups for Barry Diller and John Malone, two wealthy industrialists with their own empires and separate claims on Expedia, an online travel site that has spent the past couple of decades scooping up adversaries. Expedia was once part of Microsoft, then Diller’s corporation owned it, and then it became its own company but Diller still had a hand in it. Now it was purchasing itself. To make things simpler.
We’re living in an age where companies buying themselves offers the only respite from companies buying each other. It sounds absurd, but our era is absurd. The capitalist economic system, whether you value it or not, relies on competition. At its best, competition keeps companies honest, narrows costs, expands the job base, sows innovation, distributes the fruits of productivity widely, and gives every member of society a chance to use their talents to earn a living. Competition protects economies, affords possibility, and allows democracy to flourish, as no one firm becomes big enough to control the corridors of power.
That’s the theory, at least, and historical evidence bears it out. America’s best moments of shared prosperity line up favorably with eras of robust competition, when government-appointed guardians attacked efforts to corner markets. Those attacks have been kept in abeyance for over forty years; government has abandoned its post as the guardian of competition.
As a result, we toil in this age of monopoly, this age of plutocrats, this age of soaring inequality and broken democracy, this age of middle-class despair and sawed-off ladders to prosperity. The fact that fewer and fewer companies control most economic sectors today helps to explain virtually all the challenges America faces.
This book means to explain that connection. But we must also address the dissenters, the still-dominant faction of antitrust scholars, academics, and policymakers, who look at the world and see no concentration problem worth their attention. I’ve been to their conferences, I’ve heard them speak, I’ve read their papers. And I’ve read the academic rebuttals. Researchers in 2018 found increases in concentration in 75 percent of all industries over the past two decades; the Obama White House’s Council of Economic Advisers found similar systematic increases in 2016.
My main advice to the naysayers is to go outside. It’s not hard to identify the collections of monopolies encircling our every move through life.
(Just a note here: I’m using the term “monopolies” to refer to companies with significant market shares in highly concentrated industries. I could refer to “oligopolies” or “large companies,” but “monopolies” will suffice, for ease of use.)
Some monopolies are obvious to everyone. There are four major airlines, four major commercial banks, four major companies that deliver phone, wireless, cable, and internet services. One company controls most web search; one company controls most social media; one company controls about half of all e-commerce. Handfuls of firms dominate virtually every aspect of food and agricultural production, media, military equipment, medical supply, and regional hospital management.
Phrases like “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil” are ubiquitous in political discussion. In nearly all states, the top three health insurance companies take upward of 80 percent of the market.
For other monopolies, you need a decoder ring of sorts; I think of it like the sunglasses worn in John Carpenter’s 1988 schlock sci-fi classic They Live. Carpenter himself has called the film an allegory about unrestrained capitalism in the Reagan years. When people put on the sunglasses, they see the world in its true ugliness. Political and business elites are actually skinless, bulging-eyed aliens, and advertising includes bold subliminal lettering demanding that subjects obey, consume, and submit. It’s also amazing for a random, six-minute-long fight scene between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David, but that’s not important right now.
Put on the sunglasses, crack the code, and you uncover monopolies, ridiculous monopolies, throughout American life. There appear to be lots of dating apps out there, appealing to some cross section of the eligible bachelor and bachelorette pool. They’re almost all owned by the same company, Match Group, which includes in its portfolio Tinder, OkCupid, Match.com, Hinge, and forty other sites. Match Group itself is part of a conglomerate called InterActiveCorp, owned by the aforementioned Barry Diller. The only big dating site outside of Match Group, Bumble, got bought in November 2019 by the world’s biggest private equity firm, Blackstone.
Maybe you like to ski in far-flung locales across the country. It turns out most of the big ones are owned by the same two companies, Alterra (a division of private equity firm KSL) and Vail, catering to 18 million skiers across North America every year. You unquestionably don’t think much about plastic hangers, but the industry has been a monopoly for over twenty years, first under a division of Tyco International, and then after a 2006 acquisition through an Italian firm named Mainetti.
Enter a multiplex and see all the genres and styles of films, yet Disney in 2019 earned around 40 percent of all dollars spent at the box office, with control of Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox properties, along with its existing empire. Harvey Weinstein finally was exposed as a sexual predator because his power (he cornered the market on Oscar-winning films in the late 1990s, when his company Miramax was part of Disney) started to wane, making it safer to go after him. The horrors that today’s consolidated entertainment business has enabled are as yet unknown.
Walk into a supermarket and witness the glories of capitalism at work, aisles upon aisles of different products for different tastes. They’re mostly the handiwork of a few giant companies, from Nestlé to Unilever to PepsiCo.
Here’s a fun game: pick an aisle at random at your local supermarket and check the back of every product in succession. I’ve done this at my neighborhood Ralphs (a division of Kroger, which also runs Fred Meyer, Dillons, Food 4 Less, Mariano’s, Harris Teeter, and others). Maybe you see a lot of peanut butter brands but they’re almost all from three companies. Maybe you see a lot of jelly but they’re all from … three companies. All that toothpaste? Two companies, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. All those disruptive, healthier brands taking on the stodgy incumbents? Well, Naked Juice comes from PepsiCo, Larabar comes from General Mills, Kashi is part of Kellogg’s, Seventh Generation is part of Unilever (so is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream), and Blue Bottle coffee is a Nestlé product. This has brought the incumbents back to life. One article headline from 2018 sums up the situation: “Yogurt Is Cool, So Deal Talk Is Heating Up.” Whatever people want, large companies respond by turning their cash cannon on the upstarts and buying them out.
Put on your sunglasses and you can finally see, with clear vision, the monopoly in sunglasses. Practically every lens and frame outlet in America —Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Target, LensCrafters—has as its owner an Italian firm named Luxottica, which also makes frames for brands like RayBan, Vogue, Prada, Chanel, Coach, and dozens more. In 2018, Essilor, a French lens maker that controls half the global market, merged with Luxottica, creating a monster supplying more than a billion lenses and frames per year. In 2019, EssilorLuxottica bought GrandVision, a Dutch company that owns For Eyes, among other retailers. It’s a global glasses monopoly.
I could fill the rest of this book by just naming hidden monopolies, though my publisher would recommend against it. There’s an office supply wholesaler monopoly, after Staples and Essendant, the main two national suppliers, merged. There’s a sanitary napkin monopoly, as three companies absorb about 92 percent of market share. There’s a font monopoly, after a private equity firm bought the company that owns popular typefaces Times New Roman and Helvetica. There’s a matzo monopoly, after the merger of Manischewitz with a conglomerate that supplies a bunch of kosher foods.
The current media fascination with monopoly is incredibly focused on Big Tech, which is indeed a menace, invading our privacy, distorting our attention, serving as conduits for misinformation, and destroying startups. Entire books have been written about the tech behemoths, from Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things to Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind. They’re good and you should read them.
I’ll have more on Big Tech later. But believe me when I say this: if you broke up Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon tomorrow, we would still have a grave monopoly problem in America. The structure of modern capitalism now favors monopoly, in the absence of government action to prevent it. Early Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, one of our foremost monopolists, supplied the words that sum up an era: “Competition is for losers.”
The market we spend into every day appears to be made up of hundreds of diverse and competing business. But it actually isn't so. And this matters to MAGA. As long as this degree of concentration is allowed, so is the easy tyranny that we are facing today.
The following is taken from the Introduction to David Dayen's 2020 book, "Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power"
.......................................................................................................................
On April 15, 2019, Salesforce.com announced a $300 million deal to buy Salesforce.org.
I’ll back up if you’re confused.
There’s this company called Salesforce that makes “customer relationship management” software. It tracks current sales and projects future sales. It sounds to me like a shared spreadsheet, but I’m reliably informed that it’s a transformative product.
Anyway, at one point, Salesforce spun off an independent philanthropic arm, unimaginatively called Salesforce.org, which offers the software to nonprofits and educational groups for little or no money. As people like cheap things, that business took off. So much so that Salesforce decided to buy it. In its announcement, Salesforce boasted that it would enjoy a $200 million revenue boost from the deal. Salesforce.org would still supply to nonprofits; it would just become a business line of Salesforce. Of course, if you give away the core product to some customers at a discount, profit margins fall. That’s probably why Salesforce.org got spun off to begin with.
On a conference call, Salesforce chief financial officer Mark Hawkins reassured analysts that Salesforce.org will “be on a pathway and convergence over time to our overall Salesforce operating margin.” That’s a deliberately convoluted way of saying that Salesforce.org will either jack up the price to nonprofits or “streamline areas of operational duplication,” another deliberately convoluted way of saying it would make job cuts.
The larger point is this: Salesforce, which has made sixty acquisitions since 2006, according to deal tracker Crunchbase, has become either so starved for growth or so eager to please Wall Street that it has begun to buy itself. And I wouldn’t bring that up, except that it feels like a trend.
Within a week of the Salesforce/Salesforce acquisition, Expedia Group bought Liberty Expedia Holdings. This reconfigured a deal from the 1990s that created separate stockholder groups for Barry Diller and John Malone, two wealthy industrialists with their own empires and separate claims on Expedia, an online travel site that has spent the past couple of decades scooping up adversaries. Expedia was once part of Microsoft, then Diller’s corporation owned it, and then it became its own company but Diller still had a hand in it. Now it was purchasing itself. To make things simpler.
We’re living in an age where companies buying themselves offers the only respite from companies buying each other. It sounds absurd, but our era is absurd. The capitalist economic system, whether you value it or not, relies on competition. At its best, competition keeps companies honest, narrows costs, expands the job base, sows innovation, distributes the fruits of productivity widely, and gives every member of society a chance to use their talents to earn a living. Competition protects economies, affords possibility, and allows democracy to flourish, as no one firm becomes big enough to control the corridors of power.
That’s the theory, at least, and historical evidence bears it out. America’s best moments of shared prosperity line up favorably with eras of robust competition, when government-appointed guardians attacked efforts to corner markets. Those attacks have been kept in abeyance for over forty years; government has abandoned its post as the guardian of competition.
As a result, we toil in this age of monopoly, this age of plutocrats, this age of soaring inequality and broken democracy, this age of middle-class despair and sawed-off ladders to prosperity. The fact that fewer and fewer companies control most economic sectors today helps to explain virtually all the challenges America faces.
This book means to explain that connection. But we must also address the dissenters, the still-dominant faction of antitrust scholars, academics, and policymakers, who look at the world and see no concentration problem worth their attention. I’ve been to their conferences, I’ve heard them speak, I’ve read their papers. And I’ve read the academic rebuttals. Researchers in 2018 found increases in concentration in 75 percent of all industries over the past two decades; the Obama White House’s Council of Economic Advisers found similar systematic increases in 2016.
My main advice to the naysayers is to go outside. It’s not hard to identify the collections of monopolies encircling our every move through life.
(Just a note here: I’m using the term “monopolies” to refer to companies with significant market shares in highly concentrated industries. I could refer to “oligopolies” or “large companies,” but “monopolies” will suffice, for ease of use.)
Some monopolies are obvious to everyone. There are four major airlines, four major commercial banks, four major companies that deliver phone, wireless, cable, and internet services. One company controls most web search; one company controls most social media; one company controls about half of all e-commerce. Handfuls of firms dominate virtually every aspect of food and agricultural production, media, military equipment, medical supply, and regional hospital management.
Phrases like “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil” are ubiquitous in political discussion. In nearly all states, the top three health insurance companies take upward of 80 percent of the market.
For other monopolies, you need a decoder ring of sorts; I think of it like the sunglasses worn in John Carpenter’s 1988 schlock sci-fi classic They Live. Carpenter himself has called the film an allegory about unrestrained capitalism in the Reagan years. When people put on the sunglasses, they see the world in its true ugliness. Political and business elites are actually skinless, bulging-eyed aliens, and advertising includes bold subliminal lettering demanding that subjects obey, consume, and submit. It’s also amazing for a random, six-minute-long fight scene between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David, but that’s not important right now.
Put on the sunglasses, crack the code, and you uncover monopolies, ridiculous monopolies, throughout American life. There appear to be lots of dating apps out there, appealing to some cross section of the eligible bachelor and bachelorette pool. They’re almost all owned by the same company, Match Group, which includes in its portfolio Tinder, OkCupid, Match.com, Hinge, and forty other sites. Match Group itself is part of a conglomerate called InterActiveCorp, owned by the aforementioned Barry Diller. The only big dating site outside of Match Group, Bumble, got bought in November 2019 by the world’s biggest private equity firm, Blackstone.
Maybe you like to ski in far-flung locales across the country. It turns out most of the big ones are owned by the same two companies, Alterra (a division of private equity firm KSL) and Vail, catering to 18 million skiers across North America every year. You unquestionably don’t think much about plastic hangers, but the industry has been a monopoly for over twenty years, first under a division of Tyco International, and then after a 2006 acquisition through an Italian firm named Mainetti.
Enter a multiplex and see all the genres and styles of films, yet Disney in 2019 earned around 40 percent of all dollars spent at the box office, with control of Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox properties, along with its existing empire. Harvey Weinstein finally was exposed as a sexual predator because his power (he cornered the market on Oscar-winning films in the late 1990s, when his company Miramax was part of Disney) started to wane, making it safer to go after him. The horrors that today’s consolidated entertainment business has enabled are as yet unknown.
Walk into a supermarket and witness the glories of capitalism at work, aisles upon aisles of different products for different tastes. They’re mostly the handiwork of a few giant companies, from Nestlé to Unilever to PepsiCo.
Here’s a fun game: pick an aisle at random at your local supermarket and check the back of every product in succession. I’ve done this at my neighborhood Ralphs (a division of Kroger, which also runs Fred Meyer, Dillons, Food 4 Less, Mariano’s, Harris Teeter, and others). Maybe you see a lot of peanut butter brands but they’re almost all from three companies. Maybe you see a lot of jelly but they’re all from … three companies. All that toothpaste? Two companies, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. All those disruptive, healthier brands taking on the stodgy incumbents? Well, Naked Juice comes from PepsiCo, Larabar comes from General Mills, Kashi is part of Kellogg’s, Seventh Generation is part of Unilever (so is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream), and Blue Bottle coffee is a Nestlé product. This has brought the incumbents back to life. One article headline from 2018 sums up the situation: “Yogurt Is Cool, So Deal Talk Is Heating Up.” Whatever people want, large companies respond by turning their cash cannon on the upstarts and buying them out.
Put on your sunglasses and you can finally see, with clear vision, the monopoly in sunglasses. Practically every lens and frame outlet in America —Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Target, LensCrafters—has as its owner an Italian firm named Luxottica, which also makes frames for brands like RayBan, Vogue, Prada, Chanel, Coach, and dozens more. In 2018, Essilor, a French lens maker that controls half the global market, merged with Luxottica, creating a monster supplying more than a billion lenses and frames per year. In 2019, EssilorLuxottica bought GrandVision, a Dutch company that owns For Eyes, among other retailers. It’s a global glasses monopoly.
I could fill the rest of this book by just naming hidden monopolies, though my publisher would recommend against it. There’s an office supply wholesaler monopoly, after Staples and Essendant, the main two national suppliers, merged. There’s a sanitary napkin monopoly, as three companies absorb about 92 percent of market share. There’s a font monopoly, after a private equity firm bought the company that owns popular typefaces Times New Roman and Helvetica. There’s a matzo monopoly, after the merger of Manischewitz with a conglomerate that supplies a bunch of kosher foods.
The current media fascination with monopoly is incredibly focused on Big Tech, which is indeed a menace, invading our privacy, distorting our attention, serving as conduits for misinformation, and destroying startups. Entire books have been written about the tech behemoths, from Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things to Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind. They’re good and you should read them.
I’ll have more on Big Tech later. But believe me when I say this: if you broke up Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon tomorrow, we would still have a grave monopoly problem in America. The structure of modern capitalism now favors monopoly, in the absence of government action to prevent it. Early Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, one of our foremost monopolists, supplied the words that sum up an era: “Competition is for losers.”
Reposted from The Free Republic: a 4channer describes his experience becoming a big, swinging dick in the GOP.
Basically, he says it was ridiculously easy.
To paraphrase Edmund Burke, If the country is lost, if evil has everywhere triumphs, it is only because men of good will do nothing.
Here is the article
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3933304/posts
FROM 4CHAN ANON:
Dug around and discovered a gaping, massive hole in the structure of the GOP:
Each county in my state has a local GOP. The official party members consist of Precinct Committee Officers (“PCOs”). As far as I can tell, each state has something similar, even if they use a different name (like Precinct Committee Person).
Never heard of this. Do a little research. PCOs are essentially the legislative body of the party. There is one PCO per precinct. Many thousands of precincts in a state. Their powers include, but are not limited to: -Electing party executives -Redistricting -Defining the party platform -Deciding who to endorse in elections
Additionally, they are the pool that political nominees and bureaucratic appointments tend to be pulled from. My district chair told me how a local school board member asked a PCO in our county to run for a vacant seat on the board because he did such a good job with redistricting. That school board has now had the benefit of at least one non-marxist in its ranks for 4 years. Being a PCO presented him with the opportunity.
These are elected positions. HOWEVER, if a PCO position is vacant, a person can be appointed PCO by the district chair.
Do a little more research. I call the local GOP.
Pretty much run by boomers. They can barely email me a document.
I ask how many precincts in my county. About 750.
I ask how many precincts are vacant. About 500. >TWO THIRDS OF THE PRECINCTS ARE VACANT >I ask if my precinct is vacant. Yes it is. >I ask for paperwork. Document has wrong address at the bottom and is so screwed up I have to manually reformat it in a draw program so I can fill it out and sign it. >I fill it out, sign it, send it in. >Get a call a week later. I’ve just been appointed PCO.
Realization #1: A VOTING MAJORITY WITHIN MY COUNTY PARTY IS APPOINTABLE. No elections required. The whole county party could be taken over by 250 people simply raising their hands to volunteer.
Begin strategizing how to gather 250 new PCOs in my county.
Have conversation with district chair who appointed me. DC tells me that he was elected when the district GOP managed to get a quorum of 17 PCOs for the district.
Realization #2: Only PCOs who show up to meetings get to vote, AND NOBODY SHOWS UP. The district could be taken over with 17 people simply raising their hands to volunteer. The entire party is barely holding itself together just from lack of participation.
It’s time to start participating We’ve all sat on the sidelines waiting for Donald Trump and the Tooth Fairy to save us from ourselves while letting Communists R Us unleash hordes upon hordes of insane and narcissistic leftists into the folds of the political, bureaucratic, and corporate structures to govern our lives with glee. What did we do? Pursued honest work, as any moral and upright citizen should do, of course. Start your own business. Learn a trade. Stay away from government as it’s full of thieves, scoundrels, and pedophiles.
Of course it is. We’ve avoided it and now we don’t have any power.
The culture I’m imparting to you, and that it’s time for all of us to impart to others, is we all need to be doing at least ONE THING that engages us politically or civically. Becoming an elected official is obviously the big ticket, you take a country down by infiltrating its bureaucracy and local government.
It’s time we run for government and get jobs in government. It’s time to GET POWER. That’s what the leftists do—they can’t string two non-contradictory ideas together, but they can get power. We need a MASSIVE TSUNAMI of the right getting involved at every level of government. Get a job in an alphabet soup bureaucracy. Become a poll worker. Hell, get a job at the Federal Reserve. Just get some modicum of power, no matter how small it is.
This game is about BUTTS IN SEATS. Any seat that you can put your butt into is a seat that a commie can’t fit their butt into. I don’t care if you get yourself a position on the subcommittee of potholes. Get SOMETHING and get something OFFICIAL. When need actual, official power.
If you’re like me, you’re overwhelmed wondering where to start to get involved. Government is a vast, near infinite beach, and I a mere speck of sand. Where do I go?
If you don’t know what else to do, figure out what PCOs are called in your state and see if your precinct is vacant. It probably is. Take that seat. The Republican Party is a sitting duck for reform.
Spread the word and encourage everyone to do the same. Obviously, we are going to need more than to simply become a bunch of PCOs. However, this is the lowest hanging fruit that requires nothing more than filling out a form and sending it to your district chair, and the potential power is to gain control of your local GOP party leadership. The loss of 2020 has provided the impetus for the masses to want to get involved. It’s time to point that impetus at acquiring power.
FROM COMMENTS:
Found some information about it in my state pretty easy with what op presented https://www.spokanecounty.org/4065/Precinct-Committee-Officer-—Candidate-F
yes, this has been the case for ages, and I already got into a position in my county.
I won my position with a single vote anon... I voted for myself.
So if you want a position, go vote in the next primary for yourself. there is a near 70% chance you will be in charge of your precinct if you get your mom or some friend who is also registered as a republican to vote for you as well.
I don’t think you understand what OP is about. He is trying to reform the GOP. The best way to do so is to take it over. There are easy ways to do so, it is just a matter of finding out what precincts are vacant, talking to someone in the precinct and telling them to get their vote and a single other vote so there is no tiebreaking stuff going on. If you manage to get enough in your county you can quite literally control the GOP of your county and change bylaws. Then rinse and repeat.
Just remember that the meetings are almost always a massive cluster fuck of boomers whining about not getting their way exactly how they want it.
Just sent an email to my county GOP asking them about how to get into one of these seats. They are called precinct delegates here in Michigan.
Man, the abuse and insults I have had since I posted that link to Dan Schultz and how easy it is to become GOP Precinct Committeman/woman and how all it takes is basically attendance at one meeting a month.
I am sure that these people who are attacking me are not MAGA because all they have is abuse and invective. Not MAGA at all.
So clearly Democrats and Commies do not want MAGA to take over the GOP.
What do YOU think we should do?
Dan Schultz describes how you can do it - and where you can find lots of really helpful advice and resources - at this link on War Room.
https://rumble.com/vdmi63-episode-712-how-to-win-w-dan-schultz-mike-j.-lindell.html
You may have seen Dan Schultz of Arizona on the War Room. Very impressive and persuasive.
https://rumble.com/vdmi63-episode-712-how-to-win-w-dan-schultz-mike-j.-lindell.html
It doesn't seem too onerous a job and, the way Dan Schultz tells it, it can really have a big effect all the way to the top, especially at primaries.
Are MAGA people interested? Probably more useful than sending money to the RNC.
There are 80 million MAGA voters. It should be possible to get 200,000 good people to go to one meeting a month and help send RINOs into extinction.