Yeah,
Lush Bimbao
Sean Manatee
Glenda Speck
Mann Coultergeist
Michael Weener Savage
Hugh Spewitt
Lardass Lars Larsson
Squeal Boortz
Dr. Whora Schlesinger
and the band played on.......
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Grrr. Lost at the end of the previous page: Life, Incorporated.
And we should thank said corporations every day for the tremendous enhancements in the quality and quantity of life they have afforded us all.
Would you like to buy a house in Delray? Probably even wih frontage on the Rouge River, prices are far cheaper than Farmington Hills. Imagine the joy your children would have jumping into that river day after day, or chomping into a ripe tomato grown on that soil and watered with that river's water, mmmmmm.
You don't believe a capitalist corporation could be a polluter, do you?
Batts ideas of "tremendous enhancements" to society as it relates to his way of thinking would include a Walmart on every corner, endless rows of belching smokestacks, strip mining the mountains of West Virginia for coal, drilling offshore, unregulated, and allowing Exxon to sell that oil on the open market, with no benefit to Americans or the prices of gasoline.
We could go on and on, but suffice to say, Batts' ideas are of the past.
If we are to survive, and clean this planet, we need to think of better ways.
Capitalism began eating it's own tail in the last few years, and now it's beginning to eat it's rear-end.
People need to be thought of as more than consumers, or some disposable commodity which is sent to a landfill when their usefullness is over.
I prefer to send republican ideals to the landfill and start over.
I am not aware of the status of the pollution of said bodies of water and the scientific reasons for said pollution...are you? If so, please enlighten us with some of the data.
The evidence is easily obtained and the price of liberty is constant vigilance.
[[I'm learning how to speak Batsonian)
As a proud Colbert Conservative and Social Darwinist let me be clear about how things work. Pollution, joblessness, devastated communities, cities, and states are all the kinds of "externalities" which need to be addressed by someone other than the “Captains of Industry.” Their job is to maximize short term profits for stockholders. :D
Milton Friedman so cogently wrote over four decades ago:
“Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.”
Mike Harper that Captain of Industry [[former CEO of Conagra and RJR Nabisco) gave this brilliant advice to students studying at Omaha’s prestigious Creighton University: “The environment and all that – that’s an important thing. I have grandkids. But your job is to make money. If that hurts your feelings, you can get into philosophy or something.” :D
So there are some negative side-effects of capitalism as it works its wonders in an unregulated market. You pessimists see this and label the glass as half-empty. :[[ Others see the bounty that such a system creates [[especially for the owners) and see the glass as half-full. :)
The problems that occur to the Rouge River, or Delray, Detroit or Michigan for that matter are for others to think about, not the senior decision makers who are worried about getting maximum return on the stockholders’ investments
Beautiful Omaha, too bad others miss the real message.
p.s.next time you're in Detroit, beers are on my tab.
Lorax, learn to read between the lines.
Jams -- You are too kind. Thanks for the offer. It would be good to put some faces with names. I wish that I have the ability to have made it to Belle Isle for the DY get together. :[[
You never know, I may turn up some day. Which tavern should we drink at? I'm an old East Sider formerly with a "Walnut" phone number...so I am lost west of Woodward. :o
You keep up your good work. BTW, good luck with learning that new language, and let's keep that DY political dialog going. :rolleyes:
GM, of course, fell a little short of following the above admonition. Government Motors is now free to pursue a new agenda since Wagoner was fired and replaced with a political appointee who announced "I don’t know anything about cars".Quote:
Milton Friedman so cogently wrote over four decades ago:
“Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-to-run-gm.ars
What is it with this profit fetish anyway? With $49B of Obama's pocket change borrowed from China, there is no reason why GM cannot continue to compete with ruthless profit making companies like Toyota and Ford. We already know that government owned car companies can provide the cars that people really want. Consider the Lada, the Trabant, and the Yugo. They were so popular in their respective worker's paradises that Toyota couldn't even compete with them. Too bad about President Clinton bombing the Yugo plant four times. Maybe he just wanted to make sure. Anyway, I am sure that President Obama's new man at GM will fulfil what could have been the Yugo destiny; a people's car that will never make any profit. Already, GM has broken new gound by announcing that it plans to begin marketing Chinese cars in the US. Cracking the US car market open was probably a deal Hillary made to get China to promise to continue buying some Treasury notes. Before, when GM was a profit making wannabee, there were no such possibilities to utilize GM as a tool of foreign policy. This is just so cool!
I do read between the lines, on just about every topic you can imagine, for in not doing so, you miss so much.
That said, I know you are refrencing my criticism of Omaha and his "Colbert Conservative" line, which is funny, and on first reading appeared differently.
I have heard far worse alignments to say, Ann Coulter, Joe Scarborough, Rush Limbaugh, etc, which any sane person would have a hard time believing, but sadly, these comedians have a large following.
Cheers.
Sláinte, as well to you, Lorax.
Omaha, I do Eastside or westside equally well, but Foran's [[eastside of Woodward), where I spend much of my time in the kitchen, always has 15 Michigan brews on tap.
Regulation to the extent that all parties of a contractual relationship are protected as far as their rights are concerned...including pollution. The market itself will also address this as the customer of said company will want to avoid bad press if they are contributing to harming a community. Regulations therefore are necessary, but can be much lower key then liberals like to claim.
Too much power to persuade on the side of the corporation, since their immense wealth will buy much favorable press when it's needed. Consumers haven't a chance without stiff regulation, and a criminal justice system that actually works within the span of one's lifetime.
Come on, you don't believe that people using a polluted public beach would stand long for biased press do you? Besides, the press is now so heavily leftward biased that this would never happen.
You are grabbing at straws.
Yeah, as a matter of fact I do. Since here in Florida we have plenty of polluted beaches, and in fact, the most polluted are in the panhandle where the only news source is Fox, and their biased "scare and off-balanced" news has never addressed the issue, since their sponsors are pro-pollution corporations.
It's the same republicans who support additional off shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, reducing the perimeter to only 40 miles off shore, as opposed to the 150 mile limit there is now.
You already have to bring lighter fluid to the beach as standard fare, so you can clean the oil tar off your feet. What will it be like when the perimeter is only 40 miles?
You have no argument here, the fascist corporations have been allowed to dodge regulation for years under Tush/Cheney and need to be forced to pay for the damage they've caused.
Grabbing for my lighter fluid.....
So, have you reported this to anyone? How many times? Too whom? Have you checked the laws pertaining to the subject? Contacted a lawyer?
Has it been investigated, is it, in fact, polluted by measurement?
You just do not make any sense on this one.
Me, not making sense? What are you talking about?
Sure it's been investigated by a repugnican controlled state house and a repugnican governor for the last 12 years, one of which was a Tush, and what do you think was done about it?
Nothing of course.
I've reported masses of dead fish in our harbor a couple of years ago.
The floral blooms resulting from raw sewage being pumped into the bay around Virginia Key, which is, of course, the beach that minorities are most comfortable using, have been reported consistently, and have met with some measure of monitoring and clean up when necessary.
But it still happens, since the South Florida Water Management District hasn't modernized the water shed in decades, every time we have heavy rains, the canal systems overflow into the storm drain system, which in turn floods the sewage overflow channel, and we have raw sewage pumped into the bay as a result.
I would still bring my lighter fluid if you plan on visiting the panhandle beaches, aka "The Redneck Riviera"
Have you seen to it that it has been investigated to your satisfaction is the question.
Oladub [[post 112), as a Colbert Conservative and a Social Darwinist I can only say that GM’s and Chrysler’s failure to maximize profits for their stockholders wasn’t for lack of trying. To paraphrase a song of many years ago said "I never proised you a rose garden." Capitalism and the striving to maximize profits inevitably creates winners and LOSERS. :)
All things being equal, maximizing return on investment is what drives senior decision makers of large corporations. Investors [[institutional and family varieties) invest to make money. All things being equal, if they have a choice between an investment that returns 5% and another that returns 8%, which would they choose? 8%!
To complicate matters, corporate profits are reported quarterly…every 90 days. So a CEO or other senior decision maker involved in long term decision making about how to compete for the consumer’s dollar has to think short term. WHY? If by thinking long term there is a short term reduction in profits, and the competitors’ plans maintain a large return on investment, there’s a potential loss of investors. There are lots of shares traded everyday, and even a hint of a short term loss can produce nasty results.
Nevertheless, corporations continually gamble that “smart decisions” will pay off. There are probably a lot of bets that go wrong. Some bad bets are more important than others [[Edsel, Pinto with flaming gas tanks…at no extra cost). But when corporations compete for market share and investment dollars, not every choice made by “well informed” senior decision makers will pay off.
So back to Detroit and my version of what went on inside the heads of Big 3 senior decision makers…Why should we compete with these “new fangled” foreign car companies that make and market small reliable cars when we have big, gaudy, and shoddily designed station wagons, Suburbans and the like? There’s more profit in a Surburban than in 10 Honda Civics. And Americans want big cars anyway. Heck VW has been in the American Market selling “Bugs” for more than a decade and it hasn’t even scratched our market share. And there’s “brand loyalty.” You know there are Chevy families, Ford families, and MoPar families. So let’s bet that Datsun, Honda, and Toyota will only market small fuel-efficient cars and never bring larger models to compete with what the Big 3 are selling and on which we are making big profits. Then the first “gas crunch” hit.
Sometimes bets go bad. And the Big 3 learned from their mistakes and competed for market share with their own small fuel-efficient cars...cars that don’t meet the same standard for reliability and dependability. But long term engineering takes time and may hurt profits. So let's hope that the buying public will remain “brand loyal” and won’t notice the differences in quality. OOPS, another bet gone bad.
Finally when the Big 3 really decided to engineer quality into their vehicles [[well most of their vehicles), it is TOO late. Perception is reality and OVERCOMING years of public perception that quality was poor [[by comparison) takes more time than was available. Market share decreases, profits decline, and the market works. The end result is that some large bureaucratic corporations may consistently misread what was wanted, and they FAIL.
Hey, but as a terse but prolific poster says, the free market doesn’t promise a utopia…just a great way for smart investors to make money [[or more money) while offering products that sell in the marketplace. The side effects of a greed-driven, short-term profit-maximizing economy may be devastated families, communities, states and the rest. Too bad. They are just unfortunate side effects of the way that the market works. These side effects just go with the territory. DEAL WITH IT.
The strong will survive. They will dust themselves off, and pick themselves up, and start all over again. The weak will die by the curbside and be reminders that only the strong survive. So what if you worked 30 years for a car company and you mistakenly thought that your loyalty to your employer would be paid back? Or that you owned a dealership for the same number of years and your loyalty would be paid back? ONCE again loyalty to an employer or company in our economy isn’t a two-way street. Learn the lesson and GET OVER IT. ;)
Can’t afford your house? Can’t afford to send your kids to college? Can’t afford a single serious health care incident? Thinking that the increased stress will lead to divorce or suicide? TOO BAD. The dog-eat-dog, greed-driven, profit maximizing system works as intended. YOU are on your own to sink or swim.
There is NO NEED for a “so-called” government safety net. Such safety nets are counterproductive. They don’t ease pain. They don’t help families get over the hard parts of life. They make people dependent. They kill “the will to do well” for yourself and your family. Those "bodies by the curbside" are more helpful than any safety net. And that goes for private sector philanthropic safety nets as well. They may not cost tax dollars, but in the BIG picture, they encourage weakness. :mad:
As a Colbert Conservative and Social Darwinist I’ve come to love greed. Compassion and empathy are overrated in the extreme. I am glad that Gordon Gekko is coming back to once again sing the praises of free market capitalism. I hope that all DY posters will go see the movie and will become as inspired as I am and learn to love the idea of an unregulated free market. :D
Omaha, as Colbert Conservative and Social Darwinist you have no doubt realized that the rules are changing requiring you to change tactics to maximize greed. Free market capitalism has long ago been replaced with corporatism. President Bush and the helpful banker fairies in the Senate recently illustrated how the game is now played. Why earn profits when politicians can be rented who will shower one's company with billions of dollars. If I were you, and I am just trying to be helpful here, I would support President Obama. Why go through all the anguish of trying to make profits when Government Motors score $52M, bankers get $700B, and the insurance companies are promised another 46M clients' profits served to them by big government? I realize that you might have some qualms about accepting a safety net of grants and earmarks for political contributors. Just realize that this is an advancedand more modern form of profits that our inferiors will be completely cut off from:p ...except to have to pay for it. Back to President Obama. Not only did he vote for and lobby for President Bush's magnificent Wall Street bailout, he passed Porkulus for allies on the government of the corporatist equation, and $637M of earmark shortly after becomming President. This man understands how the economy works in Chicago. He even has a printing press to pay us what we deserve. He is providing incredible incentives for even the greediest of his friends even in China. So I beg you, don't get left behind doing the old-timey profit thing. That is so 20th Century. There are new ways of fleecing workers. Something that even :D they can believe in.Quote:
As a Colbert Conservative and Social Darwinist I’ve come to love greed. Compassion and empathy are overrated in the extreme. I am glad that Gordon Gekko is coming back to once again sing the praises of free market capitalism. I hope that all DY posters will go see the movie and will become as inspired as I am and learn to love the idea of an unregulated free market. :D