BeSiege82

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it's reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Abraham Lincoln

I truly understand the feeling Lincoln had when he spoke this.

We are at that brink of that crisis- the days of the corporate corruption and the aggregation of wealth.

I want you to look at GE and all of the things it produces and companies it owns. It is a huge force behind the Global Warming trend idea. GE makes large sums of money because of the the propaganda it creates.

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lTG-Irrl BeSiege82
A platoon leader in his own right...

"Courage grows strong at the wound."
"Virescit Vulnere Virtus."

"{My grump-o-meter starts to make a high-pitched whine when I point it at your post, though.}" -- Axis

Satertek

But they make fun of themselves on 30 Rock. They can't be all that bad.

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Acreo Aeneas

Are we talking negatively about the big heads of corporations or all the little guys working in them?

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Acreo_Aeneas
Former 9th Member

TheSkudDestroyer

Then elect representatives/senators who would challenge GE as a monopoly.

That's why in America we vote - see. We can change things with elections. Crazy huh?

Even better - write a letter to your local authorites/government.

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Tempus

Let's all back to the early 1900s, when we had no air-conditioning, dishwashers, hot water, etc.

Large corporations are inevitable. What needs to be changed is the age of pure consumerism that we're currently in.

Oh, and if you drive a car, or even use electricity for that matter, don't complain about global warming. You're part of the problem, just like everyone else.

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Battlefield 2/2142 Game Officer
Contact me with server/player/admin issues.




-- Suits are what you wear when doing things you shouldn’t want to do anyway.

FROM THE TACTICAL GAMER PRIMER.
3) Support game play in a near-simulation environment. Where the focus of play would not be solely on doing what it takes to win, but doing so utilizing real-world combat strategy and tactics rather than leveraging exploits provided to players by the design of the game engine.

leejo

GE sells what people buy. Including lots of CF bulbs. I don't understand why anyone would single GE out as a GW scapegoat.

Fenian420

Too bad politicians arent gonna do that to the people who put them in office in the first place (money for nominations, financing for Dems vs. Reps)

Truely would be one hell of a day when we still have to worry about Global Warming with another civil war (revolution?) going out through America like the French Revolution..

Axis of Eeevil

Equating one person's individual impact vs. a corporations' to the carbon balance is a fallacious argument.

It's not about Global Warming.

No longer driving a car will not change it.

It's not about heads of companies or the little guys.

It's not about the products or services a corporation provides or uses.

It can no longer be changed by voting, except in theory.

There is no neat summation, no generality, no single problem to point to, no branch of government solely responsible.

It is the effect of individuals, capitalizing on the system of freedoms in small, almost imperceptible steps over time, like water on stone, that has completely changed the concept and reality of what a democratic United States would or should be.

Self-interest maximizers and the Tragedy of the Commons--the billions of selfish decisions all of us can make. Changes in law that safeguard the dishonest: loopholes left, secrets kept and backdoors placed in the system to achieve a short-term benefit without thought beyond the term of office or political canon of the day.

If it was already perceptible in Lincoln's day, is it even plausible that it has not come to pass, many years ago? The Bush empire has just been more lax and lazy about hiding it than anyone else, that's all--that's because the system is in place, and nothing short of major disaster can change it.

By major I mean that 9-11 was very minor--less than 5,000 killed? Try millions, with all major infrastructure disabled or severely interrupted.

The problem is older, larger and more integrated in the world than we think.

At this point, the train has left the station, has achieved cruisng speed, and we're just along for the ride.

Try to run your own train, and you may end up like David Koresh or the Mansons; try to stop the train and you can end up like MLK or Solzhenytsin. Try to help others get off the train--do good, help others, stand up for the truth--and you can end up like Jesus Christ.

Or just take what you can get, get as much as you can before the end, and forget all about threads like this.

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Fenian420

This guys been listening to Immortal Technique.... Even if you havent 100% agreed.. It will get pretty bloody when everything pops off,

kevlarorc

I completely agree.

I dont think much will keep me from using electricity but the problem of cars is a hard one to fix. Most american cities dont have a train system or any decent public trans system for that matter. I would love it if we could just turn the highways and roads into train tracks and bike routes.

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Steeler

I find it interesting that the most common response to threads like this is "why are you bothering posting about it, you're not going to change anything." The Internet comes with a kind of built-in cynicism that only applies to other people's complaints.

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AMosely

Taking this one step further, look at the role that consumerism plays in the American economy and its evolution over the past half century. The economics of consumerism has made a natural progression toward what some are arguing is an unhealthy dependence on credit and loan profits - essentially amounting to a hollow economy.

This has less to do with corporate ownership and more to do with the current US economic landscape and the lack of effective economic policy guiding it.
As a twisted tie-in to skyrocketing oil prices, subsidies for the promotion of ethanol are driving domestic food prices even higher. If it seems like the government is being proactive about this difficult combination, it's not.

leejo

I see this as a natural downturn in a cycle that's been repeated many times and will be repeated many times again. At the largest scale, the economy is lead by investment (financials), supported in the middle by the industrials, who use the capital investments to make stuff with labor and basic materials, and trailed by wages, employment, and material costs. I need money to start my widget-making business, and as my business grows the supply of labor and materials begins to rise.

Last summer, banks and the financial markets coughed up a giant hairball when the results of the gradually-slowing real-estate market began hitting their cash flow. This prompted a sector rotation out of these markets into commodities such as oil as investors rightly saw pending fed rate cuts and sought protection from a falling dollar. This rotation helped drive up commodities, and helped accelerate the liquidity crises in the financial markets last fall and this winter. The fed began cutting interest rates, which drove commodities up even more as the dollar fell in reaction to the interest rate cuts.

All of this has finally "trickled down" to the consumer and a lot of people are howling for relief - just like the banks and Wall Street howled for relief last summer. Thing is, the relief is already in place, it's just going to take a few months to percolate through the economy to the consumer. The banks and real estate markets are already improving - on Wall Street which is at the very front of the cycle. In other words, people are investing in financials and homebuilders, instead of fleeing those sectors for more safe havens. The fed pretty much signaled its intention to stop cutting, and the dollar has already rallied a bit on that news. Commodities, which are at the tail end of the economic cycle, are back up a little today but everything I've seen indicates that commodities, including food and oil, will fall significantly and soon.

The sky is not falling. The end is not near. This will be over soon and world will have to live without a collapse of our economy for another cycle. Meanwhile, people with some cash saved up and socked away are investing in the economy right now - when it needs their investment most and when they stand to benefit the greatest. The people who are betting on economic collapse now and investing in nothing will be howling to tax "the rich" a bit more in a few years when their butts are in a jam again.

That's how I see it.

ScratchMonkey

Mass transit must be a panacea for those who like to play with toy trains. If you don't also move all the destinations up against the tracks, near the stations, you still have to have lots of local non-mass transit.

The real problem is that "planners" who love to compartmentalize our lives into neat little grey boxes insist that you can't put commercial property near residential property, which forces people to commute from distant housing to where they work. Then we try to spackle over that problem with telecommuting. Let's put the businesses and houses right next to each other, minimizing commuting in the first place.

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Sig