The term crime scene cleanup arose from popular culture. The term monopoly came from a Greek term, monos, meaning one or single. It also includes the meaning of sell in Greek, polein. So a single person becomes sole owner of an enterprise or commodity.. πωλεῖν (to sell)) exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity.

Oligopoly

An oligopoly means a single group's control over a market or goods. This requires a domination and a powerful subject group controlling, manipulating a powerless consumer group.

Monopolize

So monopolies lack economic competition to produce the good or service and a lack of viable substitute goods. The verb "monopolize" tells us that a process occurs and this process captures price controls, production, and consumption. Oil and gasoline often come to mind in both monopolies and oligopolies. Oil and gas will also recur in the reader's mind in the context of monopolies. Quite literally, oil and gas monopolies do their own type of cleanup -- cleaning up economically from their criminal-like monopolies over natural resources belonging to the commons.

We see from these big businesses that size is not a single feature of a monopoly. A small business may and does have a monopoly in many counties. This company has the power to raise and lower prices. It also has some control over who may practice crime scene cleanup in Orange County, California, for example. Sharing this market behooves one or more of these biohazard cleanup companies to find strength from friendly competitors.

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Monopsony

Some will say that a monopoly differs from a monopsony. A monopsony has a single buyer or maybe a very small group of buyers. A monopoly may have controlling power over a monopsony's buying power; in effect, this setup singles out a small business with both of these features. Select families and select businesses must respond to county government employees in matters of homicide, suicide, and unattended death. The social-economic-political process ensures that this process continues. With their positions of power, county employees, some city employees too, have a monopoly while selectively acquiring clients.

You see, some obviously do not have discretionary income to hire a crime scene cleanup company. Crime scene cleanup monopolies prefer clients with homeowners insurance or deep pockets. Large corporations meet this last requirement well, deep pocket. These become government employees selected companies, their monopsony.

Cartels

Now the issue of a cartel arises in some cases. A cartel reflects the form of an oligopoly. We see the development of cartels in South and Central America as criminals move into business oligopolies as they combine their forces, their assets.

In this way they move more quickly and effectively into US markets, albeit illegally. They act together to coordinate their security, their drugs, and their guns.

Now the question arises, will city and county employees find a cartel model to fit their particular needs? Death cleanup nationwide may become organized on this business structure as our economy collapses more. For certain, edging out competitors at the county level has it problems for cronies.

Price Takers

In the world of "price takers," legal or illegal, a near perfect, free enterprise system reigns. We seldom see this model in the United States at the corporate level. We do find it among garners, barbers, and family owned restaurants.

Monopolies can be established by a government, form naturally, or form by mergers. A monopoly is said to be coercive when the monopoly actively prohibits competitors by using practices (such as underselling) which derive from its market or political influence (see Chain store paradox). There is often debate of whether market restrictions are in the best long-term interest of present and future consumers.

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Controlling a dominant position in many cities and towns is against the law. Only in the last generation has our federal government rolled over to appease corporate monopolies. How some categories of business behavior survive as monopolies pays tribute to our corrupted political system. Abusive and dominant behavior has trickled down from large corporate monopolies to small family sized monopolies in crime scene cleanup. Here thought, county and city employees do the dominating.

Some readers will see a hint of Mussolini's fasci in these arrangements. I do. Now, at times governments do grant monopolies to save precious time and resources. During times of war it becomes a necessity to throw out the free market and institutionalize a monopoly to expedite production.

However certain categories of behavior occur, when a business is dominant, it may become abusive and therefore incur legal sanctions. Patents, copyright, and trademarks are sometimes used as examples of government granted monopolies, but they rarely provide market power. Sometimes a government may also reserve a monopoly venture for itself, creating a government monopoly. This is exactly what we find in Orange County government's crime scene cleanup ventures as well as other counties across the US.

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Drugs and Homicide

Noted above in the context of South and Central American dug cartels, we need to find a historical context for both alcohol and drugs in the monopolies over death cleanup. We see the role of alcohol's homicide influences as the technologies changes and the industrial revolution grew. Drugs came into prominence with more political direction than we found with alcohol's emergence, in terms of social problems and homicide.

We now have a Drug Enforcement Agency with its own growing bureaucracy. It now grows each year with a growing budget. Its goal has now become to justify its own existence. It therefore mimics other bureaucracies.

Our nation's concern with the escalation in drug related deaths grew with the growth of federal drug-control money. In 1985 tax payers paid out $2.75 billion for our drug war. By 1994 we had reached 12.14 billion (U.S. Department of Justice 1994a: 19). It's an out of control, growing employment development program ran by our federal government. Its tentacles reach down into the lower city homicide and drug offence investigations. Its cost have no real accounting.

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We know that drugs and alcohol both add to crime scene cleanup tasks. While intoxicated people, mostly males, become violently. They may perform acts that they might not normally carry out. In 1967, many areas of the US, like Homicide - Drug War, experienced a dramatic increase in use of the PCP drug. Otherwise known as "angle dust," and phencyclidine (PCP), it brought about sever mental transformations. A hallucination, PCP lead to great mental illness episodes. It also cause permanent mental illness in users. Otherwise used as a horse drug, homicides increased among its users. Burglaries, robberies, rapes, and suicides increased.

Ironically, as police resources increase for drug war causes, fewer resources remain for violent crime investigation, overall. Cato claims that with higher community resources applied to drug offenses higher homicide rates occur. Empirically, Cato claims the numbers prove the case. In other words, more resources to drug crimes equals higher homicide rates as a result. Why? Again, because fewer police resources remain for violent crime reduction. Readers should keep in mind that over half of our nation's homicides result from domestic disputes.

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