[jeffkrol]

So farmers, photographers, artists, craftsmen, & artisans are all just evil people. Anyone who is creative and productive and seeks to make money from their skills is evil and reckless.


What I have said repeatedly is that since big businesses self regulate and control the government regulations they are able to use these regulations to their own advantage. Who had Glass-Steagall repealed in 1999? Citi group. Who was Sec. of Treasury in 1999 who was instrumental in repealing the law? Bob Rubin. Where did Bob Rubin go immediately after Glass-Steagall was repealed? Citi Group. When Citi crashed where did Rubin go? Back to the White House as an adviser to Obama. How much did Citi get in the bailout? $300 BILLION.


Sorry, but the greatest evils ever done in the world have occurred at the hands of government. From torturing prisoners, to medical experiments, to gas chambers the evils done to mankind at the hands of government dwarfs any exploitation of the tax code ever conceived.
National Socialist party leader Adolf Hitler.
Soviet Socialist party leader Joseph Stalin.
Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.

Nobody abuses power like government, and it is not even close.

NOBODY follows gov. corruption like Priv enterprise.. SEE "Arms of Krupp" and all the Rhine "barons" ect...
AND they survive surprisingly..

You always fall back on "extremest" projections...

gov. corruption is ephemeral.. business corruption is eternal.......

[Nesster]

So farmers, photographers, artists, craftsmen, & artisans are all just evil people. Anyone who is creative and productive and seeks to make money from their skills is evil and reckless.

Well, there's business and there's Business. I was referring to Business.

Sorry, but the greatest evils ever done in the world have occurred at the hands of government. From torturing prisoners, to medical experiments, to gas chambers the evils done to mankind at the hands of government dwarfs any exploitation of the tax code ever conceived.

You do have a point there. And add religious hierachies to that and you have most of it covered.

[Winder]

Well, there's business and there's Business. I was referring to Business.



You do have a point there. And add religious hierachies to that and you have most of it covered.

I think you're issue is with the Mercantilism/Corporatism/Socialized Capitalism that allow (encourages) these mega corporations. Mega-corporations are a rarity in a free market system. Almost all monopolies are created by government regulation.

Someone name an economic monopoly (not a political one) that was bad?

Our system encourages and rewards the consolidation of power which is the opposite of a free market system. Why is Jamie Diamond on the board of the NY Federal Reserve? Why do we allow businesses to regulate themselves? I am for smaller businesses and smaller government. Either one can trample the rights of the individual if left unchecked. There is no historical evidence that one is any better than the other if left unsupervised.

[Winder]

NOBODY follows gov. corruption like Priv enterprise.. SEE "Arms of Krupp" and all the Rhine "barons" ect...
AND they survive surprisingly..

The Rhine Barons of the 1200-1300 were killed. The two largest Werner von Bolander & Philip von Hohenfels were both killed by militia hired by merchants. The Rhine Barons were not business people or corporations. They were highway men who demanded payment for traveling through their segment of the Rhine river. It was not a "government" that put an end to their crime. It was merchants and hired militia that confronted them and killed them. What do the Rhine Barons have to do with modern corporations or free markets?

gov. corruption is ephemeral.. business corruption is eternal.......

Tell that to the people who died in Nazi death camps. Tell that to the people who endured 80 years of Soviet oppression. Government corruption has been with us since the beginning of civilization.

Prove that your statement is true. Prove to me that government corruption is "ephemeral".

[jeffkrol]

The Rhine Barons of the 1200-1300 were killed. The two largest Werner von Bolander & Philip von Hohenfels were both killed by militia hired by merchants. The Rhine Barons were not business people or corporations. They were highway men who demanded payment for traveling through their segment of the Rhine river. It was not a "government" that put an end to their crime. It was merchants and hired militia that confronted them and killed them. What do the Rhine Barons have to do with modern corporations or free markets?



Tell that to the people who died in Nazi death camps. Tell that to the people who endured 80 years of Soviet oppression. Government corruption has been with us since the beginning of civilization.

Prove that your statement is true. Prove to me that government corruption is "ephemeral".

arab spring is a start... the orig Bolshevec revolution french revolution american revolution, mao

then there is love canal and 1000's of "corporate junkpiles" affecting millions... maybe gov. are just more "in your face"

they are 2 peas in a pod..........

In the hyperinflation of 1923, the firm printed Kruppmarks for use in Essen, which was the only stable currency there. France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr and established martial law. French soldiers inspecting Krupp’s factory in Essen were cornered by workers in a garage, opened fire with a machine gun, and killed thirteen. This incident spurred reprisal killings and sabotage across the Rhineland, and when Krupp held a large, public funeral for the workers, he was fined and jailed by the French. This made him a national hero and he was granted an amnesty by the French after seven months.

During the Weimar Republic, Krupp was deeply involved with the Reichswehr's evasion of the Treaty of Versailles, and secretly engaged in arms design and manufacture. In 1921 Krupp bought Bofors in Sweden as a front company and sold arms to neutral nations including the Netherlands and Denmark. In 1922, Krupp established Suderius AG in the Netherlands, as a front company for shipbuilding, and sold submarine designs to neutrals including the Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, Finland, and Japan. German Chancellor Wirth arranged for Krupp to secretly continue designing artillery and tanks, coordinating with army chief Von Seeckt and navy chief Paul Behncke. Krupp was able to hide this activity from Allied inspectors for five years, and kept up his engineers’ skills by hiring them out to Eastern European governments including Russia.

In 1924 the Raw Steel Association (Rohstahlgemeinschaft) was established in Luxembourg, as a quota-fixing cartel for coal and steel, by France, Britain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. Germany, however, chose to violate quotas and pay fines, in order to monopolize the Ruhr’s output and continue making high-grade steel. In 1926 Krupp began the manufacture of Widia (“Wie Diamant”) cobalt-tungsten carbide. In 1928, German industry under Krupp leadership put down a general strike, locking out 250,000 workers, and encouraging the government to cut wages 15%. In 1929, the Chrysler Building was capped with Krupp steel.

Sorry meant the Ruhr Barons..interesting article..

Beaver County Times - Google News Archive Search

another:
http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2009/08/tainted-thyssen-dynasty.html

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, in a province about to be transformed by heavy industry, with much shrewd talent for business and sheer hard work, the sons of the sober proprietor of a minor local bank devote their life to building a huge industrial conglomerate. Buoyed by an unlimited international demand for coal and steel, and by the absence, up to a certain point, of income tax, company, or wealth tax, or planning regulations of any kind, or effective unionization of the labour force; supported by equally ambitious joint venturers; barely interrupted by the slump of the 1890s (and not even particularly incommoded by the First World War, which on the contrary was a great boon for the banking and steel branches of the family business), they create a mesh of intertwining companies that generates profit on a scale hitherto unknown, such that the shareholders’ vast wealth is almost impossible to calculate. Their banking, steel, coal, gas, oil and transport interests continually refinance and stoke one another, bringing about unstoppable expansion and causing the whole region to become one of the industrial powerhouses of the Continent..........By courtesy of an absurdly late decree of the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, August Thyssen’s son Heinrich bought into the Hungarian aristocracy and, as Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszón, helped his father profit from the production of steel and electricity during the First World War. With barely concealed distaste, Thyssen père’s obituarist in The Times remarked that “during the Great War the firm of Thyssen was exceedingly busy, and prospered greatly”. Heinrich and his brothers evidently underwrote and profited vastly from the Nazis. They exploited forced labour, acquired confiscated Jewish racing stables, and, when the Second World War looked like being lost, escaped to Switzerland.

Thereafter, as far as possible the family hid behind fake Hungarian nationality, Dutch and Argentine residency, and, later, Swiss citizenship. Meanwhile Baron Heinrich continued to maintain a permanent suite at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. Assets were routinely hidden offshore; funds at first poured into the Netherlands for safekeeping, then, through the Union Banking Corporation of New York, to South America. (The Union Bank was incorporated in the State of New York in 1924 with the assistance of the railroad magnate W. Averell Harriman, a future Secretary of Commerce under President Truman, and on its board sat the future Senator Prescott S. Bush, grandfather of the current President.) Well ahead of D-Day, assets and share certificates were rushed from Rotterdam back to Berlin, again for safekeeping. With the aid of the Allied occupying forces, Thyssen industries in the Ruhr were permitted to restart almost immediately – occasionally, at a few undamaged plants, without losing more than a single day of production; assets were easily salvaged; incriminating documents were illegally removed from Germany back to Holland under Russian noses, then destroyed.......
More perplexing even than these is the question why, during the war, did thousands of loyal, hard-working German lawyers, company directors, middle managers, and other employees, all the way down to factory foremen, risk life and limb to protect the assets of the Konzern from the Americans, British and French, and then the Russians, when their proprietors – who by their status as a wholly owned private family company were relieved of the basic obligation even to publish a simple balance sheet – reclined in comfort in the Villa Favorita on the shore of Lake Lugano, surrounded by Baron Heinrich’s conveniently portable art collection, which he regarded with total frankness as an excellent way of disguising his wealth from the tax authorities? In fact, Uncle Fritz was charged as a “major offender” in 1948 before the Denazification Court at Bad Königstein, having, in 1939, published an ill-judged but cheerful book entitled I Paid Hitler, in which he boasted about financing the putsch of November 9, 1923.

He retired to Argentina. But big brother Stephan, who worked on the V2 rocket project and shot his girlfriend in Hungary, lived unmolested in Monte Carlo, producing a bizarre tract entitled The Explanation of Life, which carries a somewhat embarrassing dedication to Max Planck. Meanwhile, big sister Margit and her husband, Count Batthyány de Németújvár, who throughout the war ran a stud farm at the huge, depressing Bornemisza castle of Rohoncz, by then in Austrian territory, shared the premises with the SS. In March 1945, they apparently turned a blind eye to an appalling massacre of 200 Hungarian Jews in the castle grounds, calmly packed their bags, got in the car and, in the path of the Red Army, drove unimpeded all the way across Austria, and trundled safely over the frontier into Switzerland. There, with two other disgruntled siblings, they contested Baron Heinrich’s shockingly inequitable will, which cursed his four children with just about the most corrosive division of assets as it is possible for a parent to devise: one-eighth, one-eighth, one-eighth, five-eighths, giving total control to the youngest, Heini, who, aged twenty at the height of the war, had amused himself with an Argentine lover: “I am trying to find out what it is I like so much in you”, he wrote to her, charmingly; “the sensual mouth, the wolf’s teeth, the laughing eyes?”. The Thyssens make the House of Atreus look cosy.

.

[Winder]

arab spring is a start... the orig Bolshevec revolution french revolution american revolution, mao

Arab Spring = people rebelling against oppressive government.
Bolshevec Rev. = people rebelling against oppressive government.
French Rev. people rebelling against oppressive government.
American Rev. people rebelling against oppressive government.

What are you trying to argue with these? Governments are oppressive?

then there is love canal and 1000's of "corporate junkpiles" affecting millions... maybe gov. are just more "in your face"

Love Canal is a interesting story. Hooker Chemical sold the land with full disclosure to the local government (Niagara Falls School Board in 1953). EVERYONE knew what was buried there. The city approved residential zoning for land that they KNEW was a chemical dump. BUT again it was NOT GOVERNMENT that brought justice to the victims of Love Canal. It was a PRIVATE news paper, the Niagara Falls Gazette, that investigated and fought the system to make it a national story.

Hooker Chemical had sold the site to the Niagara Falls School Board in 1953 for $1, with a deed explicitly detailing the presence of the waste, and including a liability limitation clause about the contamination.
The government bought the land and developed it with full understanding of what was there. How is Love Canal a good example of corporate evil and government angels? A PRIVATE CAPITALIST COMPANY (Niagara Falls Gazette) and their employees are the heroes here.

[jeffkrol]

Arab Spring = people rebelling against oppressive government.
Bolshevec Rev. = people rebelling against oppressive government.
French Rev. people rebelling against oppressive government.
American Rev. people rebelling against oppressive government.

What are you trying to argue with these? Governments are oppressive?



Love Canal is a interesting story. Hooker Chemical sold the land with full disclosure to the local government (Niagara Falls School Board in 1953). EVERYONE knew what was buried there. The city approved residential zoning for land that they KNEW was a chemical dump. BUT again it was NOT GOVERNMENT that brought justice to the victims of Love Canal. It was a PRIVATE news paper, the Niagara Falls Gazette, that investigated and fought the system to make it a national story.

Hooker Chemical had sold the site to the Niagara Falls School Board in 1953 for $1, with a deed explicitly detailing the presence of the waste, and including a liability limitation clause about the contamination.
The government bought the land and developed it with full understanding of what was there. How is Love Canal a good example of corporate evil and government angels? A PRIVATE CAPITALIST COMPANY (Niagara Falls Gazette) and their employees are the heroes here.

corporations are amoral.. and never said gov. was angels... see we do agree here .. they are co-conspirators..
Not to mention the "know but don't know" stance.. some things take a long time to present themselves..........

You asked about gov. not being ephemeral.. I showed how gov. can be much shorter lasting than corporations (which can "adapt" rather easily not being beholden to masses of people ) .. that was the only point.......
The newspaper clipping showed how a Ruhr Baron can survive numerous "gov. turnovers" (WW's Napoleon ect. since they are more prizes to be had, which gives them MORE POWER than governments.. keep the people fed you know) and survive...

[Winder]

corporations are amoral.. and never said gov. was angels... see we do agree here .. they are co-conspirators..
Not to mention the "know but don't know" stance.. some things take a long time to present themselves..........

You asked about gov. not being ephemeral.. I showed how gov. can be much shorter lasting than corporations (which can "adapt" rather easily not being beholden to masses of people ) .. that was the only point.......
The newspaper clipping showed how a Ruhr Baron can survive numerous "gov. turnovers" (WW's Napoleon ect. since they are more prizes to be had, which gives them MORE POWER than governments.. keep the people fed you know) and survive...

But the idea that corporations are not subject to the will or needs of the public doesn't hold up.
Apple's products are shown being made by laborers working long hours in bad conditions and the public response forced Apple to take action. Companies spend billions of advertising and public relations to court the good will of the public. A sex scandal cost the CEO of HP his job even though he was one of the top in the industry. Didn't even phase Bill Clinton. The Founder of Best Buy was just forced out for an inappropriate relationship with an employee. Ted Kennedy would have been proud.

What happened to the CEO of BP when public opinion turned against him during the oil spill?

People vote with their dollars. If a major corporation finds itself on the wrong side of public opinion it is screwed..... Unless the government steps in. Public opinion favored letting Citi fail. It is the government that stepped in and rescued its master, not the will of the public. There was a small movement last year encouraging people to pull their money out of BoA and Citi in protest. These entities exist because of government intervention, not because of the will of the people. I think everyone on this board would love to see Citi and BoA broken up.

JPM was reckless and lost $3 Billion +. The public reacted and JMP lost 10% of its value this last week. That is what is supposed to happen.

We agree that government and mega-business are co-conspirators, but that means that you can't give money/power/control to one with giving to the other. You have to dilute the power of both slowly, which will give the people more power.