Comment Re:"Sleeper" agents? (Score 5, Insightful) 211
Big guy, I have been working in corporate America for 45 years. I am entirely too familiar with the culture. Small, large, old, startup, shutdown, high tech, low tech. Been there, done that.
Your mother's story is interesting, to be sure. Here's mine: in 1961 we could not afford food. By 1973 I was in college. During the 60's (and before), this country knew how to build and develop both industry and technology. I was one of many students who wore dog tags, living in a second-strike city (Pittsburgh). Under threat of thermonuclear annihilation this country built industry, built rockets, semiconductor industry, and many other improvements.
That said, by the early 1980's all that infrastructure development began slowing, and I started to see a transition to focus on finance/MBA model and away from development and production. That was the beginning of the movement of corporate management toward outsourcing and foreign labor. I watched firsthand as our automotive industry got creamed by Japanese quality, I watched our industrial production jobs moved to Malaysia and China. I watched as workers got shitcanned, watched as steelworkers got screwed over, watched as automation killed coal mining jobs (but this is where I get really pissed) while the mine operators kept production up and rising. My family had a farm near southeastern Ohio and we watched the depression got worse and worse with every year.
This is not "history" for me. What I am responding to is what I've been living. I've been reading, watching and noticing all of it.
I don't blame the F-150 driver beyond a lack of interest in identifying the real issues. Most people are overloaded keeping up and have been for decades.
I remember the arguments about leaded gas, and smoking, and the whole goddamned lie of "teach the controversy". I was there. Lead poisoning is a good example. Those motherfuckers knew lead poisoning was real from the '20s onward but kept it up until at long last and way too late, gas went unleaded. Look at the crime statistics sometime: Various property and violent crime rates began falling in response to reduction in atmospheric lead worldwide. Since countries reduced their lead pollution at different times, it was possible to see how the correlations occurred with similar latencies in each country.
Smoking was similar. Tobacco executives stood before congress, right hand up to God, saying they did not know that nicotine was addictive. While simultaneously they were managing nicotine content informed by the best research.
The question of CO2 affecting atmospheric heat was FIRST STUDIED by coal companies and oil companies, it's documented in their own reports. Yet when it came to managing emissions, yet again it was "teach the controversy, the research is at best incomplete and probably a lie told by the progressive hippies". Again, not history, this was current events.
Communist? no. Too much concentrated power in "the state", always leads to a state mafia.
Free enterprise? yes.
Competitive enterprise? Absolutely.
Concentrated corporate power? Absolutely not.
The bottom line is that concentrated power leads inevitably to corruption whether it is "left" or "right".