More good news for the Republican party:
Tom DeLay deliberately raised more money than he needed to throw parties at the 2000 presidential convention, then diverted some of the excess to longtime ally Roy Blunt through a series of donations that benefited both men’s causes.
When the financial carousel stopped, DeLay’s private charity, the consulting firm that employed DeLay’s wife and the Missouri campaign of Blunt’s son all ended up with money, according to campaign documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist recently charged in an ongoing federal corruption and fraud investigation, and Jim Ellis, the DeLay fundraiser indicted with his boss last week in Texas, also came into the picture.
The complicated transactions are drawing scrutiny in legal and political circles after a grand jury indicted DeLay on charges of violating Texas law with a scheme to launder illegal corporate donations to state candidates.
Blunt last week temporarily replaced DeLay as House majority leader, and Blunt’s son, Matt, has now risen to Missouri’s governor.
Fuck ’em all. If this is true and illegal, a purge is long overdue. This also flies in the face of what some people were saying about Delay and his wife several months ago:
Mrs. DeLay makes about $48,250 a year, while Mrs. Ferro earns closer to $40,000. At that rate over four years, the two of them put together would have made around $350,000. The remainder of the half-million comes from Mrs. Ferro’s consulting firm which works on DeLay’s election campaigns; it received $221,000 over four years (two election cycles), or about $55,000 a year…
Don’t get me wrong. I think the practice itself is a problem, one that we should pressure our representatives to end. It can lead to back-door corruption far too easily. However, for the Times and the Left to jump all over DeLay as unethical and singular in this practice is dishonest, ignorant, and transparently partisan.
As I said in April, “If this were the only strike Tom DeLay had against him, I would tend to agree with the Captain- this would be a transparently partsan swipe at DeLay. But, if this was baseball, and Tom DeLay were a batter, he would be working on his ninth strike.”
I really am sick of these people. I am sick of the misplaced priorities, I am sick of the me-first attitudes, I am sick of the ethical transgressions and the attitude that it is ok to cross the line, I am sick of what they have done to the Republican party, and I am just sick of it all.
John S.
John-
I think we need some new parties to vote for in this country.
The questions is, would anyone vote for them?
David Rossie
Unfortunately what are ya gonna do, join the Democrats? Rampant failures in government should humble those who are quick to jump into politics for solutions to problems. Politics IS the problem.
James C.
Personally, I just think your sick.
rayabacus
If anyone breaks the law, they should be held accountable – but we need to make sure they are all held accountable.
McCain-Feingold has created more problems than it was ever designed to solve. Piss poor bill, passed by both houses and signed by Bush.
srv
I never vote Republican, and rarely Democrat. Alas, the system is fixed. People can’t even fathom something other than a binary choice. We might as well be voting in Cuba for all the difference it makes.
We must destroy the city to save it.
Slide
Welcome to the club John.
Krista
We can only hope that the lid flying off of all of this will help things a bit. I think it was Defense Guy who said that a nervous politican is the closest thing you’ll get to an honest politician. And I bet that a lot of them are plenty nervous right now.
Still…doesn’t it just make you sick to realize how incredibly corrupt and greedy and soulless they all are? These are the people who profess to care about Americans, and who are making the decisions that affect whether or not you can put food on the table. Nice.
srv
My definition of insanity is voting the same way, over and over, and expecting a different result.
David Rossie
Krista,
Is it absurd then to ask why we let politicians anywhere near the things we hold important to us?
Krista
It’s not an absurd thing to ask, but there aren’t a whole hell of a lot of alternatives. Some things just have to be managed on a large scale. And if they’re not managed by the government, they’d be managed by large corporations, which as we’ve seen, are just as corrupt at the top levels. At least with government, we can hold them accountable to some degree.
SomeCallMeTim
Gimmee a break. Y’all turned your party machinery over to the Southern Reds. Let’s not be too surprised when you pick up their tics.
David Rossie
Corporations are held to account much more than governments. For one thing, you can’t remove a government. Only every once in a while can you remove a set of politicians, and THEN you only have two realistic choices per seat.
Corporations and companies in general live and die by how they impress their customers, and you can choose from many of them. They never, ever can force you to do something, unless they are a.) engaging in criminal activity b.) enforcing a contract or c.) being helped in some way by the government.
They would die more often for their shenanigans if they were not propped up by government, by the way.
Mike S
“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for the people who give you money so they give you even more.”
Tom Delay 1999
Darrell
Speaking of Reds, seems it was the Dems raising money from the Red Chinese not that long ago. Dems have such a better track record on corruption and all.
Exactly
John S.
It’s hard to guage where either’s level of accountability is set. The bar is too low to the ground to get any kind of accurate measurement.
Mike S
I was embarrassed by the corruption in the Dem party but the new GOP has made it into an artform. The dems never forced K-street to fire all Republican lobbiests(sp?) when they were in power. The number of dem pols and staffers to join lobby firms was nowhere near what it is now. Legislation was shaped but not written by interest groups.
There is and always will be corruption in politics, but the two parties do not compare in the last thirty years.
Tim F
Referring back to the five stages of political denial, it’s gratifying to see that John has reached stage 5. You could say that he reached 5 over Schiavo but he’s flirted with stage 4 off and on ever since. Now that this blog reads as often as not like posts on the Democratic Underground I feel almost…superfluous. sniff. Don’t forget stupid Democrats, John!
It’s entertaining to observe how far the GOP has to go before a given rightwinger advances a stage.
Tim F
Hell yeah! More attention needs to be paid to the millions of dollars that Jiang Zemin’s son paid under the table to Roger Clinton.
Oh wait, that was Neil Bush. NM.
Mike S
BTW. How long before Dreier takes over the majority leader spot?
Mike S
BTW2 When the Abamhoff scandals finally break we will see just how bad the GOP corruption has become.
Davebo
It’s people like Tom Delay and Micheal Moore that keep me firmly entrenched in the Green Party!
Well, actually John isn’t in the Green Party. And I pick on him far too much.
John, do yourself a favor. Chill out and run for city council.
It doesn’t pay much but there’s an outside chance it could land you a seat on the supreme court!
Davebo
Darryl,
Have you already forgotten the Governor of Mississippi and his previous creative fund raising efforts for the RNC?
rayabacus
I think all politicians were out fundraising when they were studying Ethics in the Philosophy courses.
rilkefan
Has anybody interested in seeing how high John‘s blood pressure will go tried commenting on the law Indiana Republicans are writing to criminalize unauthorized artificial reproduction?
DougJ
I’m telling you, Rove got a target letter. That’s what he told Dobson. That’s why the rushed nomination.
What’s good gossip blog where they’ll be discussing this thing? Anyone know?
Kimmitt
Hey, wow, the Party of selling arms to terrorists in order to fund an illegal war is corrupt. Who could possibly have predicted?
demimondian
Nah — he’d be overqualified.
stickler
I’m still a registered Republican. But man, I’ve been a lot angrier than our host since 2001. Bush is a useless crony, surrounded by cronies, and idealism went out the window with the Congressional GOP sometime in mid-1998.
But this is just rich:
Are you using Microsoft bloatware as you type this? Have you been impressed with your local monopoly cable service lately? Have you ever heard of John D. Rockefeller? And, at the risk of calling forth all the spirits of the unholy shrill spirits of the Internets, do you recognize the name Halliburton?
Corporations can be good for you, or they can bankrupt, dispossess, and kill you. Read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle sometime. Remember what Armour used to put into the sausage? All them rats and spoiled chunks of flesh were perfectly legal back in 1905.
David Rossie
Those things fall under “criminal acts.” I didn’t say companies are perfect. As for unfortunate non-criminal blunders, I can give you hundreds of examples of gov’ts doing much worse things than screwing up retirement plans.
As for arguments about books written describing the working conditions of 100 years ago, I believe Don Boudreaux responds best… “as compared to what?”:
“I granted my young friend his assumption that Sinclair’s descriptions are accurate. But I then asked: As compared to what? What were the alternatives 100 years ago for those men and women who chose to work in slaughterhouses?”
the rest is here:
http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2005/08/to_sinclair_ain.html
Pug
I could go for an economically conservative-to-moderate and socially liberal-to-moderate party. I don’t really know of any, though.
There’s hardly any such thing as a moderate Republican anymore as they have shifted ever further to the right as they have been more and more successful. They have kind of won everything to the point where now their agenda is “intelligent design” and a bunch of whacky tax reform ideas. The one thing I used to like about Republicans, the small government balanced budget types, are long gone.
There are some fairly middle-of-the-road Democrats left. At least they were before they shifted the middle-of-the-road to barely to left of Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter. Still, in practice if not in theory, the Democrats have been much more fiscally responsible than Republicans when in control. Somehow, though, I don’t see gay marriage as a real winner.
Pug
BTW, if you haven’t know for a long time that Tom DeLay is totally corrupt you haven’t been paying much attention, or you are highly partisan.
JWeidner
I don’t know. I think the “power” of the consumer boycott is greatly diminished in this day and age. To my mind, corporations live and die by how they impress their shareholders, and if a company is diversified enough that they can shrug off a boycott…well sayonara to any leverage the customer has.
Classic case in point is the huge religious boycott against Disney that recently ended. So far as I can tell, they acheived none of their stated goals and Disney didn’t change its corporate behavior in the slightest.
Bruce Moomaw
The (literally) trillion-dollar question: can we have big-time capitalism at all without it inevitably degenerating into crony capitalism? And is it only possible to do so through using taxpayer money directly to finance a large part of political campaigns?
eileen from OH
Whenever John posts anything like this, I wait for the “what will it take, John” posts and they make me wonder. What would it take ME to leave the Dems? Without my dream party of social lib/fiscal conservative, and HONEST, goddammit, what would it take for me to not vote Dem? I truly don’t know, but I do know that I’ve never voted knee-jerk because of Party and probably never will. BOTH parties are guilty of a lot of things. One thing is really clear though – the old saw is true. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Divided government, babeeee. Checks and balances. And when I am Prez (hey, it could happen!) I will abolish three things right off – gerrymandering, pork barrel spending, and tax breaks for companies that go offshore. The first is a corruption of the democratic process, the second virtually guarantees fiscal irresponsibility and the third is unpatriotic (and I don’t toss that term out lightly.) Yeah, I know, the Prez can’t just wipe ’em out, but I intend to use my power for good.
I have more (of course) but they mostly include things like making tiramisu the National Dessert so won’t go into ’em now. Make your own list.
eileen from OH
CaseyL
You want to fix the money-and-politics problem?
Here’s how:
Overturn the Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara Co. v. Southern Pacific RR Co. (1886). That decision made corporations “persons,” and gave them the rights previously limited to human beings. Particularly, First Amendment rights.
Corporations pour hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign coffers, and the Supreme Court has also ruled that speech = money, for First Amendment purposes.
David Rossie
That’s an interesting point Jweidner. I don’t see consumers being arbiters of social morality as much as they are the arbiters of the best products. Though innovative companies can force others to change by being the first to take a certain stance. For example, organic farming is becoming more popular. Which large ag company will take advantage first?
Boycotts don’t work so well because consumers tend to prefer gratification of their needs over petty disputes with far-away corporate management. But when a real choice emerges between companies with different philosophies, consumers are more likely to vote “no” with their dollars against what they don’t like. Social pressure (that is not political) on companies to change their policies is often slow but can work. In the end, a socially conscious corporation that is also efficient is much better than a non-aware corporation that merely follows some gov’t regulation (and likely finds ways to manipulate said regulation) and is less efficient.
TallDave
Both parties do this all the time.
This is a yawwwwwwwwwwwwwn.
Remember when everyone was criticizing Delay for that travel-paid-by-sponsor thing? And then a week later it turned out more Democrats were doing it than Repubs, including Pelosi?
All of this is totally legal, and both parties do it. You don’t think George Soros is lining people’s pockets like this too? Ha.
TallDave
think it was Defense Guy who said that a nervous politican is the closest thing you’ll get to an honest politician.
Actually that was me, and I stand by it.
I don’t mind seeing Delay get some heat. This ain’t the old days, where the media could spin this into “look how evil the Repubs are, while the poor saintly Dems do no wrong” with no corrections. We’ll get some ponderous NYT coverage with graphs and charts, then Fox News will point out 19 Democrats that did the same thing, then everyone will say “Oh well who cares.” Like the previous Delay brouhaha, the end result will be both sides toeing the line a little better.
jaime
At least you got your tax cut, right?
DougJ
There are times when I think John *has* left the Republican party. That this whole site is part of some strange Daily Kos plot to create blogs manned by Bush-and-DeLay-hating “Republicans” to convey some impression of a party at odds with itself. I find it hard to believe that someone who hates the fiscally unconservative, theocratic impulses of the Republican part as much as John does can remain a Republican. I’ve also noticed that this blog focuses almost exclusively on issues that are not good for the Bush administrations: Hurricane Katrina, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay, Bill Bennett, Cindy Sheehan etc.
Hugh Frank
I learned when I was a kid that both parties are full of scumbags. I think problems occur when the rank and file start beieving that their “leaders” are virtuous. We would all (left, right, center) be better off recognizing elected officials for what they are–gasbags, charlatans, and liars.
DougJ
*AMEN TO THAT*
I don’t think both parties are full of scumbags — that’s going too far. I think that current Republican leadership is full of scumbags, but I think they’re unusually bad. I think most rank-and-file Democrat and Republican politicos are decent people. Maybe I’m naive.
stickler
David Rossie said some interesting, if baffling, things that deserve a response.
Regarding rats in Armour’s sausages before 1906,
Well, no, in 1904, they didn’t. They weren’t illegal because the food supply wasn’t inspected, wasn’t regulated, and was a product of the pure free market. And that market rewarded rats in the sausage. It took Federal intervention (driven by Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive Republican and the fourth head on Mount Rushmore) to create the Pure Food and Drug Act. Remember the story of him reading the Jungle while eating his breakfast sausage, and throwing his breakfast out the White House window? He called for meatpacking inspections that same day.
And then he quotes a Randian fantasy:
Well, there were a lot of opportunities. Mines with 18 hour shifts, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, sharecropping in Southern cottonlands, or Andrew Carnegie’s steel factories (he crushed the unions in 1892) come to mind. So what? Does that make child labor all right? Rats in the sausage just ducky with you? NONE of that was ended because corporations decided spontaneously to behave nicely. And are any of those conditions worthy of a democratic Republic? Can the mass of working citizens really be subjected to such exploitation and remain conservative? Patriotic?
Mike S
Typical defence of a ten year old.
Shygetz
Shorter TallDave: “But all the other kids are doing it!”
John S.
He’s trying to convince the world that corporations and capitalism are the answer to everything – one blog at a time.
Mark-NC
And the corruption will continue because all Republcians will obediently vote for them anyway!
Tim F
Kos diaries and Americablog are usually first with the gossip; Democratic Underground might work but IMO the false positive rate is too high. Kos has the advantage of threaded comments and a seasoned regiment of rumor-squashers and conspiracy debunkers.
Shygetz
David Rossie–The government’s motive is the protect the public interest. A company’s motive is profit. Don’t tell me that the two never conflict. Therefore, is it not absurd to allow companies anywhere close to the public interest?
Sure, you can remove the government. Read the Constitution sometime. It’s fascinating.
Companies live and die with how they impress their investors, not their customers. Example–companies with a surplus will increase dividends before they will lower prices or improve quality. And companies without government intervention result in unfair business practices that curtail free market-like practices. Companies are only interested in their profits; if they bring the country down around them while making those profits, who cares?
Tim F
Arguing with a Randroid is like kicking a pig; it hurts your foot and annoys the pig.
David Rossie
When you see a Randian, let me know. When you have an argument, let me know.
Anyway,
“Companies live and die with how they impress their investors, not their customers”
This is silly. Shareholders don’t invest for the fun of it. They expect returns, and returns only occur when companies make customers happy. Biting the hand that feeds you seems to be a common theme around here. If companies were so evil, why support them by living with the luxuries we have today?
“Example—companies with a surplus will increase dividends before they will lower prices or improve quality. And companies without government intervention result in unfair business practices that curtail free market-like practices. Companies are only interested in their profits; if they bring the country down around them while making those profits, who cares”
None of this follows…from anything. It’s conjecture. You’re trying to say that shareholders wants dividends NOW. Well, what about tommorrow? If they queeze a corporation dry of funding today the corporation could not compete. If any major corporation were to follow what you claim to be their MO, they wouldn’t last. Microsoft would not be in business because they sent all of their profits to their shareholders instead of R&D. But that is not case, and is rarely the case.
And as for curtailing free-market practices… you wouldn’t mean “actions that are non-coerced,” would you, because that’s exactly what govt regulation requires. Besides, it’s a hollow claim. What exactly does it mean?
Next, the government’s motive is to protect the public interest? Two problems: 1.) attributing motives to systems is fallacious. Only individuals have motives. And public servants are no different inherently than workers for a company. Their interests are diverse and known only to them. Ascribing motives is futile and romantic as best.
2.) deriving a “public interest” is only useful in a broad sense. It must be universal, since a public cannot exist without individuals. The only thing which approximates a true public interest is order.
Finally, quit making “profit” a dirty word. It profits you to eat food every day. And it profits merchants to sell things to you. If the monetary representation of someone’s profit is so horrible, you cast rocks at yourself as well.
Shygetz
David, several problems with your reasoning.
Do I need to remind you of the dot-com boom and bust? People got rich starting companies that didn’t make customers happy at all (in fact, they had no customers). They excited investors and kept them happy as long as possible until the company crashed from its own weight. This example shows that it is possible to attract investors without profit, and that keeping the investors happy (either through profit or otherwise) is a company’s primary motive.
Conjecture? Please. I never said that companies did not invest money into new product development, I said that they care more about keeping their investors happy (through higher returns on their investment) than their customers (through lower prices and higher product quality). This is evident in current and historical business practice, and is a large part of why one can successfully argue that, in business, it is the primary mission (since the word motive seems to give you semantic convulsions) to keep the investors happy, and keeping customers happy is a sometimes-consequence of keeping investors happy.
Read about the era of the robber barons. It is a simple claim–if you do not enforce regulations to ensure that market forces can work to keep the capitalistic system running, then deceitful business practices rule the day (including collusion, monopolies, and unsafe products, all of which are prevented only by government regulation).
Fine, their mission is to advance the public good, since the word motive seems to give you semantic convulsions.
Public good need not be universal, it only needs to be in the greater interest of the social body (as measured by the gain for all individuals in the body minus the loss for all individuals in the body). Companies are entrusted with the mission to advance the financial gain of its shareholders only. Governments are entrusted with the mission to advance the overall gain of its members. Big difference. And lots of things are in the public interest. I will give you one example–national defense. I would not be willing to hire out national defense to an entity whose sole professed mission is to generate profits for its shareholders. The use of such mercenaries are considered to be a large part of what ended the Roman Empire.
Nice straw man, does it come with a hat? Never said profits were bad, only said that they are not the only good thing. I like profit myself.
Shygetz
Tim F–Having grown up around farms, I must say that I enjoy annoying pigs. They squeal in very amusing ways.
David Rossie
This is easy: dot coms that failed at making customers happy crumbled. My point exactly.
“I said that they care more about keeping their investors happy (through higher returns on their investment) than their customers (through lower prices and higher product quality). ”
Conjecture, pure and simple. It’s not reasonable to even assume that shareholder interests are exclusive from customer interests. And more so than the consequential alignment, they are intrinsically aligned. Shareholders serve as your bogeyman, but there is nothing to back up a claim that making them happy somehow hurts anyone else. Shareholders’ interests are tied-in with the health of the company, and that is tied-in with its ability to satisfy customers. Put simple, higher returns come from smart (not necessarily lower) pricing and better product quality.
“Read about the era of the robber barons. It is a simple claim—if you do not enforce regulations to ensure that market forces can work to keep the capitalistic system running, then deceitful business practices rule the day (including collusion, monopolies, and unsafe products, all of which are prevented only by government regulation).”
This is a faith-based argument. No monopoly can last indefinitely, except the government. Collusion is demonstrably unworkable as a business model except for in minor and temporary cases: take OPEC for example. As for unsafe products, “compared to what?” American economic history is full of examples of companies innovating to provide better products without intervention. All intervention does is force a political goal. Sure, people benefit in some way, but there are hidden costs that you aren’t willing to acknowledge.
Finally, my observation of your linkage between profits and everything bad with corporations is no fiction. If you don’t want it brought up, stop using profits as some reason for corporate bad behavior.
Darrell
By not serving customers, they went bust. Government programs which do not well serve the public (customers) get rewarded with increased funding. Huge difference
And they can accomplish that mission only by serving customers well
David Rossie
That is, stop using profits as THE reason for corporate bad behavior.
“Companies are only interested in their profits; if they bring the country down around them while making those profits, who cares?”
The connection is not even subtle, and it is rampant among many here.
Shygetz
But the dot-coms existed for several years, despite having ZERO customers. This sole fact proves beyond all doubt that businesses do not have to satisfy customers to operate, they have to satisfy investors.
I never said shareholder interests were exclusive, I said they were primary. Read. More. Carefully. Shareholder interests may or may not lie in lower prices and happier customers. Often they do. Sometimes they do not. When they do not, it is the investors’ interests that are guarded, by law and custom, not the customers. If you haven’t learned that, get a refund on your education.
Ok, Mr. Faith-Based Argument, cite and summarize your evidence for this outrageous statement. I expect you to show empirical evidence why corporate monopolies are always inherently less stable than government monopolies. Given the intellectual rigor of your previous arguments, I’m guessing you can’t.
Regardless of the ultra-long-term stability of monopolies, what concrete reason should people have for allowing long-term monopolies to exist, waiting for the unregulated market to force them out while the public suffers?
Compared to any metric you would like to derive–what is advertised, what is expected, what could be available for no extra cost, what would be available had a regulated market fostered the amount of competition necessary to allow innovation. Choose a metric.
There has been no time in American history when any company operated completely free of regulation, so that is a bald-faced lie. The argument that intervention only forces a political goal is either semanitcs or faith-based, depending on you definition of political. If by political you mean social, then yes, but why is that bad? The society that allowed the existence of the corporation has a right to demand that the corporation not actively work against that society’s goals, right? If you demand (rightly) that I admit that profits are not evil, then I demand that you admit that profits are not the only good.
Since you obviously know what exactly I am and am not willing to acknowledge (no doubt due to some non-faith-based mechanism), then pray do tell me what these costs are that I might refuse to acknowledge them.
Shygetz
David Rossie–If profits are not the reason for corporate bad behavior, then what is? I am dying to know. Additionally, for those not accustomed to rigorous argument, stating that profits are the reason for bad behavior is not equal to stating that profits are bad. In order to do that, I would have to argue that profits are not the reason for corporate good behavior, which I have not done. Ergo, your argument that I am “making ‘profit’ a dirty word” is facially false, and you should retract it.
Darrell
For a period of time, sure, that statement can be correct. But unlike government where there is no incentive to be efficient (politicians spending other people’s money), in private enterprise it eventually catches up. Imagine if Safeway started selling rotted bananas and tomatos for $10/lb.. by not serving their customers well, they would lose their ass. Not so in government
TallDave
But the dot-coms existed for several years, despite having ZERO customers. This sole fact proves beyond all doubt that businesses do not have to satisfy customers to operate, they have to satisfy investors.
LMAO Yeah they also failed spectacularly, proving beyond all doubt that idiots who believe that will lose their money. So much for your “faith-based capitalism.”
Shygetz
My argument with dot-coms is that companies can exist that do not service customers, and that servicing customers is a symptom of the primary mission of companies, which is increasing investor profit. My argument still stands. And failed government programs only get increased funding because people will vote for idiots who will increase their funding. Any time the electorate wants to end it, they can.
Bull. Companies that service customers comparitively poorly but attract beaucoup investors compared to their competition can crush the competition based solely on superior capital. Not to mention quasi-legal investor-only pyramid-like scams that made people (and investors who got out in time) rich quite a few times in history (e.g. dot-coms again).
TallDave
Shorter TallDave: “But all the other kids are doing it!”
Great. Prosecute all them too, then. Until then, don’t pretend it’s big deal.
SeesThroughIt
Somewhat OT, but I went to high school with Nick Armour, who will presumably take over the family business one day. Unless he has undergone a transformation that’s nothing short of miraculous, Armour Meats is totally screwed. That kid was a complete waste of space.
Shygetz
I never insinuated that dot-coms didn’t fail; I am only stating that it is possible to run a business, attract invesotrs, and make money (albeit for a limited time) completely without customers; ergo, stating that a business only operates by satisfying customers is demonstrably false. Satisfying customers is one (good) way to satisfy investors, which is what a company must have (by law and custom) as its primary mission. Look it up.
TallDave
My argument with dot-coms is that companies can exist that do not service customers
Yeah, and trees can “exist” with no roots. We call them “lumber.”
Companies that have investors but no customers have idiots for investors.
Shygetz
TallDave–So let me get this straight. You don’t want to see clean government unless someone other than your guy is the first to go? Gotta start somewhere, why not with DeLay? I would love to see all corrupt politicians go, on both sides.
Shygetz
I know quite a few venture capitalists who would strongly disagree with you there.
TallDave
Shygetz,
Yeah, the only problem with that is it wasn’t illegal. They had lawyers advising them the whole time, just like all the politicians do.
So great, go out and prosecute all the politicians for doing things that are perfectly legal. Screw rule of law anyway.
TallDave
I know quite a few venture capitalists who would strongly disagree with you there
Great, have them give me their money then, if they’re going to throw it away anyway.
No investor ever invests in a company that never expects to have any customers.
Shygetz
Note the subtle change from:
(emphasis mine)
Somebody moved the goalposts.
Shygetz
Gee, TallDave, given the fact that you are obviously much more intimately involved with the evidence than, say, the grand juries that handed down the indictments, and you obviously have no partisan involvement, then I bow to your superior intellect. With dirty government for all.
TallDave
Shyvgetz
No, someone just clarified a common sense assumption. No company has customers at the instant its incorporated. All companies expect to eventually make money from customers, whether from day 1 or day 1000.
TallDave
Gee, since you don’t even understand the difference between an indictment and conviction, I guess I can assume you have no idea how common and legal what Delay did was.
TallDave
But the dot-coms existed for several years, despite having ZERO customers. This sole fact proves beyond all doubt that businesses do not have to satisfy customers to operate, they have to satisfy investors.
Yeah, those zero-customer dot-com investors were REAL satisfied to lose all their money.
David Rossie
Shygetz, if you’re unwilling to look past nominal facts you can’t be reasoned with.
The dotcoms lasted for a while because of their shareholders. What’s your point? That investment is important for startups? Good job. And when the investment runs out and the company has proven to be a failure, it crumbles. What’s hard to understand about it. Of course they try to prove to shareholders that their model works, but eventually this cannot last. If shareholders are willing to wait two years to pull the plug, that’s their deal and changes nothing about the basic premise.
Look, repeating your conjecture won’t prove it. Companies that seek to make shareholders wealthy by screwing their customers cannot last indefinitely. This stems from a basic idea of trade: both sides trade because both sides are made better. Even if your conjectures were true, they don’t negate the fact that customers must be made happy at some point or the company will fail. Otherwise, where are these profits going to come form? THEY MUST come from customers who benefitted from trade.
It might be necessary to seperate marginal criteria from absolute criteria. I say that many actions made by companies led to innovation sans intervention. It is a marginal statement, meaning that no intervention was necessary to force the action. It is not meant to say that no intervention existed at the time. In other words… innovation produced by voluntary action, not intervention, is everywhere shown in our economic history.
As for your other claims.. its up to you to find a monopoly that is indefinite. It up to you to choose a metric for me to compare, and I will not retract my appraisal of a mood that you created, which puts profit in a bad light inherently.
Shygetz
Since you obviously have no idea what an indictment is, I will spell it out for you. In order for there to be an inditment, 9 out of the 12 people on the grand jury must decide that a crime has probably been commited, and that there is sufficient evidence to charge DeLay with the crime. Got that? They decided that a crime has probably been commited. Read it slowly if you must. No, he has not been convicted, but that certainly doesn’t mean that what he did was legal. In fact, this is the first time that I’ve seen the argument that an indictment means that what the accused did was legal.
The point is that they were satisfied for the amount of time that they invested, and that the dot-coms lasted as long as they could attract investors, not as long as they could satisfy customers, of which they had none! Therefore, the proximate cause of the dot-com collapse wasn’t that they lost customers that they never had; it was that they stopped attracting and keeping investors. If you do not understand the different between proximate cause and distal cause, I suggest you look it up before you come back.
Shygetz
See above for point. In direct refutation of your assertion that “Corporations and companies in general live and die by how they impress their customers.” This is false–they live and die by how they impress their investors, which is a subtle but important distinction. A company with inferior customer satisfaction but vastly superior investor relations will crush opponents based on superior capital availability. This is a nominal fact that you are unwilling to face up to because apparently it detracts from you philosophy.
The business must make the customer happy as compared to what? Other businesses? False. A business with superior capital availability will be able to crush competition with higher customer satisfaction but poor capital. It comes down to investor satisfaction, not customer, and the two are not irrevocably married.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, so start addressing the facts. Are companies required to service cusotmers or investors as their primary mission? I know the answer, and I hope you know the answer, so just say it.
Now that you have amended your claim, it is defensible. I never suggested that corporations never drove innovation; I can also name numerous times when intervention drove innovation (check out SBIR and STTR programs if you want a ton of examples). So what? All that proves is that innovation will occur in some form both in the presence and the absence of government intervention. This does not address the question of the social desireability of such intervention.
Man, they really don’t teach logic these days. You made a claim (to quote, “No monopoly can last indefinitely, except the government.”) You offer no facts or examples (or even formal theories) to back up your argument; instead you require that I disprove it? You fit in well with the Intelligent Design apologists. Out of courtesy, I will put it plainly–that’s not how logic works. If you want to make an assertion, you must provide a foundation for such an assertion.
I was trying to do you a favor by letting you pick your most favorable ground. But, since you insist and since it is most germane to the current topic, how about compared to the products available from a regulated market.
Ah, and the zealot fully surfaces. I give logical proof that I was not guilty of what you asserted, and yet you refuse to retract the assertion or point out a flaw in my logical defense. I will state it again for your consideration–Profit is the major (if not sole) motive for all corporate action, both good and evil. Corporations do both good and evil, motivated by profit. Corporations do more good than evil. As such, how am I denigrating profit? Unless, of course, you want me to make a graven image of profit and set up an altar to worship it?
stickler
Let’s get back to David Rossie’s obvious historical illiteracy:
You clearly do not know who John D. Rockefeller was, nor apparently have you heard of Standard Oil. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust dominated the American market for petroleum products. By 1880, Standard Oil controlled over 80% of the American market. It generated fantastic profits because it could keep the price of petroleum high. Standard Oil did not succumb to market forces: it dominated the market, and its profits meant that it could dominate the political system too.
Standard Oil would have continued to dominate the oil market indefinitely, were it not for intervention by President Teddy Roosevelt. Have you heard of him? Any notion of what the term “trust-busting” means?
Collusion is demonstrably workable. Capitalists prefer it: it ensures the preservation of capital. The Gilded Age was a forty-year testament to the power of collusion. And if you don’t know this, then pick up a college textbook on US history and save the literate from the tedium of educating you.
Tim F
LOL. Knock yourself out.
David Rossie
“live and die by how they impress their investors”
this is silly. Most business are small enterprises where the company is run by the investor/investors. Tell me one good way to impress corporate shareholders, while being honest, and while making customers unhappy.
“The government’s motive is the protect the public interest. A company’s motive is profit. Don’t tell me that the two never conflict. Therefore, is it not absurd to allow companies anywhere close to the public interest?”
“Companies are only interested in their profits; if they bring the country down around them while making those profits, who cares?”
You added to the general suspicion of profits that is common by commenters here, do not deny it. And my original comment wasn’t directed merely at you, it’s directed at everyone who responds to a pro-market argument on here that profits somehow get in the way of good deeds.
Shygetz
David, simple question that would prove my point, and yet you continue to avoid it. Are publically-held companies required by law to act in the interest of their customers? Answer: No. Are publically-held companies required by law to act in the interest of their investors? Answer: Yes. Privately held businesses are not exempt; there, the business will continue so long as it satifies the investor, even if it runs at a loss (as many small business owners do not view profit as their primary goal). In addition, I gave the example previously–Company A has 100% customer satisfaction; Company B has only 70% customer satisfaction, but 1000% of the working capital of Company A due to better investor relations. Company B will crush Company A, even though Company A makes its customers much happier. You are wrong, you have been demonstrated to be wrong, and yet you refuse to admit it. At least you have demonstrated to the lurkers here that you are intellectually dishonest in your arguments.
No one here that I saw argued that, including me. I (and others) argue against the idea that profit is a definitive moral good in and of itself; no one implied that profit is evil, or only leads to evil, or usually leads to evil. And I certainly did nothing to “make profit a dirty word” as you originally accused me of (nice try moving those goal posts, by the way). And yet, no retraction, no apology, no nothing from you. Intellectually and morally bankrupt.
David Rossie
Companies aren’t required by law to make customers happy because its blatantly apparent that they must do so to survive! I’m not required by law to eat food, but I still do so. It’s necessary. If that’s how you base your opinion on whether something is important or not, you’re missing out on quite a bit.
Companies must respect their shareholders because of contractural law. So, what’s your point? They have to pay off lenders before shareholders as well. So what? You are ignoring the fact that shareholders gain nothing without the company making customers happy. Do you deny that? Tell me you deny it.
Shygetz
I am not ignoring that fact; I stated that it is a symptom of the primary mission of companies, which is to satisfy investors. I stated multiple examples of how satisfying investors is more important in both the long run and the short run than satisfying customers. I gave real world examples of companies existing for years without customers because they satisfied investors during that time. I gave hypothetical examples of how a company could out-compete another company by satisfying investors more while satisfying customers less. You have been proven incorrect. Learn how to deal with it.
searp
Tom Delay IS the modern republican party. The cronyism and corruption are the very definition of the modern republican party.
All the foot soldier conservatives are just grist for the mill. The people giving away the country to corporations (“privatization”) don’t give a damn about anything else, they are too busy making money and taking care of their friends.
My point is this: conservatives that aren’t self-hypnotized have to see at this point that all the philosophical stuff from this administration is just smoke for a gigantic makeover of our government as the plaything of corporate interests. It isn’t starve the beast; the game is to teach it new tricks.
We have seen this before, just not in this country.