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

To: tejek who wrote (340270)	6/13/2007 3:17:02 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577833

Excuse me....there was taxpayer money involved in the deal. The deal was not a sound one but yet, the newspaper lied to protect its interests. Who do you think paid for that cover up? The taxpayers did. A newspaper failing to report something may be less than ideal, if its an important story. If it doesn't report important stories that reflect negatively on the paper or its parent company that doesn't reflect well on the paper, and generally isn't a good thing. But it still isn't "screwing" anyone to the extent that the government does, unless it actually committed fraud, and if it did that illegal, and the people who committed it can be punished. This example of supposed "screwing" is small potatoes compared to the history of "screwing" from governments, even if you limited your consideration to the governments of modern western democracies. But democracy is far from the only form of government. Compare anything abusive or wrong about this situation to the great examples of government abuses and it looks subatomic. None of which is to say that this specific issue is unimportant or should not be addressed in some way, but using cases like this to support the idea that we need much more activist government to act against companies is ridiculous. Both because governments do so much worse and because the governments where involved in this mess up as well. The paper's parent company hardly wanted everything to fall apart. It made an investment and hoped for a positive return. The fact that financing didn't come through isn't something the company is morally to blame for, it wanted the financing to work. Perhaps your concerned that the government's involvement caused it to lose money and its bond rating to decline. I'd be concerned too, but the answer to that one is simple. Don't guarantee the debts of the corporations. In other words the answer is less government involvement not more. An excess of government involvement is why the government got burned in this case. So then the only issue you have left is the failure to report. I've already covered that issue. Its not a good thing, but its a stretch to call not reporting a story "screwing the people". Also the story got reported anyway, it just wasn't covered by this one paper.