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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (150845)	9/3/2002 10:02:08 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1586267

That makes no sense.......how could GM get involved if the systems no longer existed. They existed in hundreds of cities at some time or another. Many of them went away before GM got involved. Others where still operating but where a finacial mess. What you said made no sense. Now you've amended your way back to where we were before you made the comment that did not make sense. Look, many of the streetcar systems were in financial trouble because they were not permitted to raise fares by the cities in which they operated. Had they been able to raise fares most of them would have been financially viable. When GM saw they were in trouble, they formed a partnership that they could hide behind and called it National City Lines. Hmmmm, sounds like a streetcar line. They swooped in and bought up most of the larger and medium size lines. Instead of taking over the lines and improving them like many thought, they dismantled them and convinced the cities that buses were the way to go. And guess who made the buses? Now, you can keep saying it wasn't clear what GM's intent was or how I could possibly call GM's intent malicious but unless you have some new pertinent info to provide lets just drop it. What facts do you want.........GM bought the systems and dismantled them. They said it was good for America and many Americans bought their bs. If they where thriving and carrying a large amount of people with solid profits they probably would have been to expensive to buy up GM and its partners got them on the cheap because most of the operations where falling apart anyway. Oh my God, you're like Fastow or Ken Lay.......you don't want to get it. If there was so much demand for streetcars then GM buying them would not have made any difference. If GM shut them down then someone else would have started a new service. Not if they couldn't raise the rates.....plus many cities took out the rails. One of the features that made these systems financially viable was traveling on rails. They failed because they where not very profitiable. Perhaps they could have been profitable in some places if there where no fair price restrictions but the restrictions existed and they where not put in place by GM or any of its partners. Right, so GM did nothing wrong. We need to regulate the hell of them so American people don't keep getting screwed. Corporations are some of the most dishonest institutions in this country and have contributed much to our messes. The government is at least as dishonest as the corporations and is massively more powerful then any corporation. Show me where/when the gov't treated children, women and men like slave labor on a regular basis like corps did until the laws were changed at the turn of the century? Show me where the gov't poisoned the ground in places and despoiled the water in others like corporations have done? Tell me when did the gov't screw people out of millions of dollars in their savings and 401s like ENE did? The list goes on and on. It can back up its screwing us over with guns. You seem naive about this fact. Give me a fukking break.........this is all about precious guns? This is so ridicules its not worth hassling. In fact most of the ways corporations screw us over require the involvement of the government. For example big agribusiness taking billions of subsidies and benefiting from trade barriers, or the recent tariffs on steel imports. A lot of the regulations actually just function as a way to keep out compitition even if they are nominally for safety or to protect the environment. Large companies with tons of experience and well funded legal and compliance departments can deal with the regs, while new competition is kept away. Sure it is corporations asking for us to get screwed in those examples, but the government is the organization that has the actual power to do it. Any human institution is going to have dishonest, corrupt or just horribly misguided people. The only way we can keep from getting screwed is to not give any of them too much power. You need to really look what your saying......there is no way the abuses people have suffered at the hands of some corporations and what you perceive as abuse by the gove are any way analogous.....at least not to me. Gov'ts are pain in the ass but they are not abusive like some corps. continue to be. ted