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Here's something I had never given any thought to: the price of fire trucks. Plus, a worrisome fire truck shortage!

Huh? What would cause any town or city to run short of this essential piece of its community infrastructure? Answer: old-fashioned greed, coming from a modern-day monopolistic construct called "private equity."

Essentially, this is a fast-money Wall Street scheme, encouraging very wealthy investors to buy up established businesses and either plunder their assets or consolidate several of them into a monopoly. It has targeted everything from health care to newspapers -- and now, your local fire department.

Until recently, making and selling fire trucks was a competitive business, with family-owned manufacturers operating in every region of America. However, (as detailed by BIG, a unique newsletter investigating monopolies) about a decade ago a private equity outfit began an industry "roll up," consolidating independent truck companies into a national conglomerate named REV Group. It now controls nearly half of U.S. fire truck sales.

What REV mainly revved up was its profits by doubling the sticker price for trucks to more than a million dollars each. Worse, REV increased delivery time for a local department's order from about a year to as a long as four years, meaning old trucks break down and can't respond to catastrophes. For example, the Los Angeles fire chief reports that in last month's horrific wildfires, more than 100 of the city's 183 fire trucks were out of service!

Fires are inevitable. Letting a handful of private equity speculators profit from fires is not. National and state antitrust laws already prohibit such greedheaded monopolization. So, here's an idea: Enforce those laws! Learn more at the American Antitrust Institute: AntitrustInstitute.org.

BIG NEWS: GRASSROOTS DEMOCRATS PULLING PARTY BACK TO THE GRASSROOTS

Early in the Civil War, Gen. George McClellan's Union Army was poised for a decisive victory over Confederate forces. But, inexplicably, McClellan wouldn't attack! For days, President Lincoln ordered and even begged the general to move. But nothing -- so the Confederates slipped away. In firing McClellan, Lincoln wrote: "If you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while."

That's what today's grassroots Democratic Party activists are saying to their aloof campaign generals, who stay ensconced in Washington, refusing to deploy their ground troops in the field of battle.

The great strength of the Democratic Party is its army of volunteer door-knockers across the country who have the local knowledge, connections and lingo to relate to local voters. Yet, in the past 30 years, fat-cat donors and high-dollar consultants have taken over the "People's Party" and abandoned high-touch organizing for high-tech "digital outreach."

Thus, the Democrats' passionate army of local campaigners is unused, only called on by emails to send more donations to fund Beltway consultants and negative political ads. As a friend of mine recently said in exasperation: "I wish the Democratic Party would stop asking for money and start asking me for ACTION."

Well, change is coming, for the grassroots Democratic army has been taking charge in many areas and mobilizing itself! And in a huge advance, the party's new national chair and its new chair of State Democratic Committees were both elected this month on a bold program to move the party's focus back to year-round, grassroots activism. After all, voters aren't mere consumers of politics; they should be valued as the whole purpose of politics and its primary producers.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

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