After all, everyone knows the Clintons are funded by the Red Chinese! Commie bastards! Richard Mellon Scaife told me so. They used the Red Chinese commie money to fund their Arkansas drug operation and had to kill Vince Foster when he found out!

At last!

I'm getting the attention I so desperately crave..

If you didn't feed the trolls they would just go away.

And it was Algore who was financed by the Red Chinese.. Try to keep your pinko libcomsimps straight.

Fuck man, what kind of a country are we when a 50-something woman needs to eat fucking garbage in the rain to survive?

Obviously a "welfare queen"..

Probably had her Bimmer parked around the corner.

In the last two months I've given away a motorcycle, an electric wheelchair and a computer to desperate people.

One was a kid straight out of the orphanage who needed a way to get to work, the other two were paraplegics.

Corporations are not always evil or undeserving of their profits.

In theory true, but in practice an immortal an amoral entity such as a corporation ends up doing a lot of harm as well as good.

The corporate merging continues apace and if current trends continue unabated the singularity is not all that far off.

Corporate power, like government power, attracts pathological personalities. Without adequate checks and balances those pathological personalities will run amuck.

All you have to do is read Scott Adams' _Dilbert_ for a while to get a good feel for what corporations are all about.

Government always reaches too far, and the greedy always try to enlist privilege from the state.

A lot of people are fond of using the word "greed" and yet definitions of "greed" seem to be universally subjective.

Is there an objective definition of the word "greed"?

We are alive with enhanced lives because of R&D at businesses/corporations.

An awful lot of what appears to be corporate R&D is actually either borrowed or based on government funded research.

Very little business R&D these days is sheer "blue sky" research.. It tends to focused very heavily on the bottom line and usually on the short rather than the long term.

Like all generalizations there are exceptions, but I think what I state is more true than false.

Iatrogenic deaths and illnesses are legion, and more than a few are due to corporate malfeasance and misfeasance.

Tylenol overdose is a leading cause of death by poisoning worldwide and yet this is little known among the public.

Why might this be?

Every person with a modicum of sentience knows that corporate R&D researchers call on every bit of raw data that is available, a lot of it govt-funded. And so what? Business further invests in 100 drugs or techniques, and maybe 1-5 pan out. All I care about is that in the accumulation, it means I live, and so do my progeny and theirs.

I wonder how many of the illnesses that plague us are actually caused by corporations focus solely on the bottom line?

We live in a miasmic stew of chemicals, very few of which have been tested for toxicity.

Take the formaldehyde in the FEMA trailers, it comes from products made by corporations for profit. Corporations routinely and reflexively fight any sort of oversight or other regulation of their activities.

Lead paint on toys, mercury in tuna, the list is nearly endless of environmental hazards brought on by the rapaciousness of corporations.

Take the Pinto for instance.. Ford ran a cost/benefit analysis that basically showed it was more profitable to allow a certain number of customers to burn to death than it was to fix the problems with the gas tanks in the car.

Almost all modern car front seats will fold back under a severe rear impact, they simply are not made strongly enough. The reason? It would be more costly to build stronger front seats that could withstand a rear impact.

Management by bean counters is rampant.. The marketing department has far more say in the design of the great majority of products than do the engineers who actually have to make the products both safe and operable.

It is incredibly common for a corporation to make an unsafe product for a while, go into bankruptcy, leaving their creditors high and dry and then reincorporate under another name and continue with business as usual. Rinse, repeat and dry.

I've seen it happen time after time.

Anyway, markets exist everywhere, even if as illegal, black markets in Soviet states (or heroin trading in Afghanistan). For markets to be a driver of progress however, the rule of law is essential.

Strange how you felt you had to go outside the USA to find black markets to use as examples.

Cannabis is the #1 cash crop in America today, you really didn't have to go so far afield for examples.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=2735017

Greed is in the eye of the beholder and behold what greed has done using any definition you care to find.

Not necessarily..

greed: that level of acquisitiveness that will cause one to knowingly and deliberately cause harm to others without their uncoerced consent solely to enrichen or empower oneself

Try to find it in the dictionary.

My example of the Pinto fits that definition perfectly.

Keep reading my posts and you will eventually discover I seldom ask an unloaded question.

Which brings me back to my question to you.. What would you have done in that Florida schoolroom on the morning of 9/11/2001 were you the agent in charge of the Presidential Protection Unit?

I was raised an Episcopalian but my babysitter was Southern Baptist and I went to the Baptist church more then the Episcopal one.

Baptists at least do indeed fear God in the sense of being terrified of going to Hell.

I seriously doubt other fundamentalists are all that different.