There's background on the woman who gets shot that I found pretty illustrative of a lot of things here (here's
the longer article discussing policy):
According to the New York Times, Babbitt was a 35 year-old woman from California who spent 14 years serving in the U.S. Air Force, deploying to both Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government sent Babbitt abroad eight times, and though not every time was in a combat zone, such repeated deployments into violent areas tend to cause brain damage.
After her time at war, Babbitt had a modest propensity for violence, threatening a rival love interest by rear ending her with a car in 2016. She married, and bought a small business with her husband, a pool supply company called Fowlers Pool Service and Supply. There she ran into commercial problems common to small businesses these days. The pool business isn?t a good one, dominated as it is by monopoly pool supply distributor Pool Corp. (The FTC settled with Pool Corp in 2011 over a predatory practice called ?exclusive dealing.? This settlement clearly failed, as Pool Corp was bragging to investors earlier this year that one of its competitive advantages was ?exclusive products.?)
Fowlers Pool Service and Supply predictably ran into trouble. So Babbitt took out what was known as a ?merchant cash advance? from a company called EBF Partners, which she calculated charged her an interest rate of 169%. She quickly defaulted, and was embroiled in a lawsuit. Her lawyers argued that her lender had cheated her with too high of an interest rate. She lost, as ?courts have held that such arrangements don?t amount to loans and are not bound by usury laws.? According to her brother, her politics weren?t particularly unusual, she was frustrated with homelessness in San Diego, and how hard it was to run a business. And then she got more into politics through social media, and then into QAnon.
So here?s the profile of a rioter, a working class person who went overseas eight times in military service, including two combat zones, who then tried her hand at a small business where financial predators and monopolists lurked. She then fell in with conspiratorial social media, and turned into a violent rioter who, like most of the rioters, thought she was defending America by overturning an election.
Can't help but think the executives at Pool Corp. - and countless other companies like it - view QAnon and Trump as having done
God's Work by keeping people like Ashli Babbitt angry at the WRONG people. (SIDE NOTE: I can't believe that's her actual last name...
who's writing this script...)
and if Biden's tenure is anything like Obama's, the most you can expect to befall Pool Corp. is not being broken up into pieces by the FTC & DOJ, forced to disgorge all their ill-gotten profits, and having their executives charged personally and criminally, but a small fine, and consent agreement that requires them to add a disclaimer to their contracts, which will be buried on Page 9 of a 10 page agreement that no customers ever read, and can't negotiate even if they wanted to.
And... this kind of story repeats in every industry right now. how much more of this can America handle, before we collapse?
