From Streetcars To Spaceships

It's the engineering, stupid.

I was just pointed to this article by my friend Erik Smykal. If it doesn't scare the ever-living piss out of you, you're not paying attention. Unless, that is, you're Iranian or Chinese or Indonesian or whatever and you're sitting there right now feeling smug.

A nation without productive capacity is a hot-house orchid and will not endure. A nation whose citizens don't understand the workings of its machines and homes and organizations is, well, 1990 Kuwait just waiting to get used, abused, and broken by the first people capable enough and self-justifying enough to do it.

And, oh by the way, programming and engineering and factories that make real salable goods are the keys to great buckets of money and them what don't know it or do it don't get that money.

If you have children, raise them to be competent. Raise them to be able to understand how wood shrinks when it gets dry and what makes a plant grow tall. Raise them to understand Boolean algebra and why languages are built the way they are. Raise them to understand their world.

Because our nation is wealthy and indolent and rude and has pissed a hell of a lot of people off on a regular basis for a couple of centuries now. Unless you want our future to look like that of French aristocrats circa right about 1760, then do your part.

And even if you don't have kids, you're not off the hook. Ask yourself, what have you done to make the next generation competent, honorable, and strong? If you don't a solid answer right on the tip of your tongue then it's time that you started doing your share.

Bob's Red Mill leads the way again.

In 1970 mechancial engineer Robert Moore and his wife moved to Milwaukie, Oregon with the intent of retiring, studying the bible, and living a more spiritual life. Like many other people at the time, they explored healthier foods and Bob got interested in stone-ground grains. Interested enough that he set up his own little mill. You know, just as a hobby.

Thirty years later Bob's Red Mill is a leader in stone ground flours, cereals, and, overall, over 400 hundred products. All created and sold by a little over 200 employees and still, despite considerable setbacks, in MIlwaukie, Oregon. Estimates suggest that his little post-retirement project may now be worth something like fifty million dollars.

Well, yesterday was Bob's birthday and he made an amazing announcement. He's giving the company to his employees. He's setting up an employee stock ownership plan and everybody who has been there three years or more is fully vested as of today.

It would appear that it's not just at software companies that a normal, hardworking person can take and hold a normal, everyday job and wake up one day with stock worth more than their house.

Milwaukie City Councillor Susan Stone said, "What a wonderful 81st birthday present from Bob to his loyal employees! Bob is one of the good guys! I think it's a smashing idea!"

I couldn't agree more.

Like fellow Milwaukie company, Dark Horse Comics, Bob's Red Mill has made honest products they can be proud of, stuck to their plan, and never tried to get by with copying what the megacorps told us was what we wanted, and as a result have persisted, thrived, and made a better world for all of us.

Here's to Bob. Here's to his employees. And here's to Milwaukie, Oregon for fostering yet again a company that we can all be proud of.

No, Joss does NOT "need" for the network execs to give him another show.

So I see that there is yet another round of hubbub because Joss Whedon is being considered again to helm a television series. Part of me hopes that he gets it but part of me feels that J.W. just isn't up to the job of working within a network. We should know this by now. It seems to me that it's long past time that he lined up his own financing and became in charge of his own production or partnered with some kind of longer-term thinking person.

The man doesn't "need" network execs to wake up one morning and become different kinds of people with different pressures upon them or a different culture to be working within. He might as well be said to "need" to be ten years younger or six inches taller. Network television is what it is and it's time that we stopped being surprised every time it keeps not working out.

What's the classic definition of insanity? Doing the same thing and expecting *what* again?

Maybe he needs to turn to Felicia Day as a mentor instead of thinking that it's the other way around. Maybe he needs to put more oomf behind the production mechanism that made Dr. Horrible possible.

But one way or another, what he really "needs" is his own Desilu. His own United Artists. Capital, an executive team, and operational support that isn't under the control of Fox or Sony or any of the vast media conglomerates. They are what they are and no number of fan petitions and, let's face it, no amount of series profit will change that. Frankly, by the standards of those kinds of public companies, he's little people and they will never truly change to suit him.

Time for him to grow up and buy his own house. He needs to accept that he has less in common with J.J. Abrams than he does with Woody Allen for, for that matter. Shakespeare. So he needs to get busy building his Globe Theater.

Sooner he does, the better for all of us.

If you want to know about what's going on in Haiti, then you really should ask some Haitians.

I know that the earthquake and resulting several crises in Haiti have a lot of us struggling for answers or at least a better sense of the variables. Like a lot of people I've gone to the sites of CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, and all the other usual suspects.

But some of the best perspective I've gotten has come from a little site called Haiti Exchange. They're not glossy or high tech but whatever you find there will be straght from Pascal Antoine and other people who know these subjects from the inside.

If you have the time, you might also want to visit the site of the U.S. Haitian Consulate. Plenty to see there or to find out about from there as well.

Let's all do the best that we can.

-Rustin

Grow up. Now. The world needs adults. Not crybabies.

The next time you find yourself looking at the all too many crises out there, then, in addition to corporate fraud and all the usual suspects, you should add another thought to your reflexive response.

When hundreds of millions of adults try to live by a toddler's rules this is what you get.

We've become a nation infested with permanent children who model their behavior on what makes sense to a typical three year old. I've been saying it for years and I plan to go on saying it.

If we intend to get serious about what has caused and is causing global climate change, the rise of the Right Wing, the advancing power of monopolistic corporations, shifts to anti-reason evangelical churches, and a host of other crippling problems, then we need to get serious about this. If we don't successfully address the fundamental flaws in how people think then no number of arguments from reason add up to much more than self-congratulatory mental masturbation.

As far as I can see, ever since the 30's more and more parents have been raising their children to never grow beyond the worldview that is appropriate for a toddler and more and more of society has been adapting to validate that idiocy. Corporations, not surprisingly, love this sh*t and encourage it whenever they can. So do all too many political and religious groups. Dr. Spock played his role. So did the proud spoiling of children that so frequently is done by the first generation of a family to reach prosperity. So has the shifting nature of our schools and other educational institutions.

"We're all special in our own way"? Bugger off.

But the truth is, how it happened matters far less than what it is causing now and what it will take to reverse the trend.

To these "believers" the world is broken up into the world of We Children, which includes them, their friends, and their activities and The Grownups, which includes most property, the government, and all the Big Things done by magical Others whom one addresses with begging, Being Good, tantrums, and the like. Rarely, mind you with actions meant to substantively shift the factors that caused a thing to happen in the first place.

One is then either granted beneficences/gets one's way or is "punished" based on how effectively one has convinced The Grownups to do what one wants. Their lives are lived around the parallel goals of performatively being a Good Child ("but I tried hard!") and getting things with tantrums ("we'll make them do what we want!) And when their typical sloth and ineffectual behavior doesn't work out, they hold up the child's logic of But Don't You Love Me Anyway? and It's Not My Fault!!

To them everything in the world has agency. Somebody caused it. Intentionally. Nothing ever just happens or is an unintended consequence of some entirely differently motivated activity, let alone something caused by, you know, physics. And, as any preliterate child can tell you, if it affects them it was addressed primarily to them. If you are housemates with such a person and your moving to a new city means that they need to find a new housemate, then you are moving, first and foremost, to hurt them. They are far less interested in finding and addressing the true causes of a problem than in assigning blame. After all, if they can pull off the claim that it's somebody else's fault, then they should have a "right" to be kept immune to the consequences.

These people can be identified, as much as anything else, by the speed with which they will respond to a difficulty, or especially the prospect of work, with what other people "should" be doing instead. By which they mean what they think would be right. With little or no knowledge or interest in why the existing situation is as it is or in how or why the people responsible make the choices they do. After all, the usally rather shallowly hidden subtext is that since that other person "didn't do it right" why should the speaker have to do work to address it? After all, that would be "unfair". I never cease to be amazed at how much these idiots think that they have usefully contributed, in fact, "done their share" of solving the problem by describing, in a callow, off the cuff sentence or two, something like "well, they shouldn't be storing things there anyway."

I always tell assistants of mine that I don't want to here the word "should" coming out of their mouth in a use like that. Each and every moment spent in that kind of thing is obstructive distraction from actually addressing the problem.

On a related front, they will find just about anything acceptable (that doesn't cost them too much) if they've been told a good story about why and how it got that way. Again, I tell my assistants, just because somebody "has a reason" doesn't make it okay. Charles Manson has reasons. Sarah Palin has reasons.

These people, in terms of the issues they're even willing to face, find bare facts to be alien, incomprehensible gibberish. Even, as I said above, hostile things "meant" to hurt them to be fought back into the shadows where they won't have to risk seeing them. But, oh, they sure do love their stories. Or, as we've all grown to call it, a persuasive narrative.

As for the Bigger World out there, that's Parentland, where things are done by a magic and fundamentally unknowable web of processes.

The idea that assets and institutional frameworks are things run by people much like them that can be shifted or even acquired with things like well thought-out work is not only alien, it's anathema since such thinking is a threat to that We Little Kids worldview. Wow, will they get angry fast if they figure out that something you say weakens their structure of rationalizations and appeasements.

In my experience both certain types of Good Little Corporate Citizens and many doctrinaire Marxists tend to remarkably blatant forms of this. "All property is theft" comes naturally to people who believe that all things of value were preexisting, and that therefore anything but an "even" distribution of all material goods, with each person "getting" exactly the same as each other person is "unfair".

It frequently strikes me how blatantly such people will use the language of young children to describe policy issues. Something that is "unfair" obviously should be responded to with a tantrum, oh, I'm sorry, a "protest", to convince the Magic Adult People in government to Fix It and give everybody their Fair Share.

You know. Just like in kindergarden.

Things don't happen for reasons; they Just Are.

And, notably, they're usually real fuzzy on the details of how this collection and redistribution is supposed to take place. After all, that's the territory of Magic Adult People.

As far as I can see, the very core of most Marxist thought fits very well indeed into the Permanent Toddler way of seeing things.

To wit:

-all property is prexisting

-all labor is of equal value, to be measured solely on the basis of exertion and time used. Moving the same rock back and forth all day in a dark room for a year is of exactly the same value as the same time and degree of exertion used to build a set of chairs or succesfully raise a crop.

-therefore, all members of the manager class (i.e. "bad parents") are useless since no literal sweat raises on their brow. And, of course, management accomplishes nothing since all that they do is shift the choices of what labor is done, which we already "know" adds nothing since all labor is equal, and move capital, which we "know" should in a "fair" world just be evenly and randomly distributed anyway.

Note, by the way, that authoritarians like Rudolf Guiliani use different parts of the same logic. To idiots like that, all that it takes to be a good manager is to order people to do something and you've now "fixed" the problem. Organizational actions aren't caused by responses to scarce or ample resources. They're not caused by compensation structures or training or culture. Actions just HAPPEN. So if you want different actions to happen, you just say that you'll beat them up or give them candy based on whether they do what you want or not. Simple, right?

Bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.

Randites, whatever their problems, are generally utterly and entirely free of this kind of thing. In fact, Ayn Rand's books give all too painfully eloquent portrayals of quite a few aspects of what happens when fools like this get their way. Her endless pages of people competing for who can seem the most pathetic and helpless before various Committees of Distribution only seem exaggerated to those of you who have never dealt with any number of "consensus-based" organizations.

In 2006 I wrote a bit of a note on one aspect of this that got reproduced here.
(My letter starts right below the first image.)

This article in the Atlantic (once you get past the title) does a pretty decent job of covering a major example of how it can utterly permeate a subculture. And has. And then damage all of us through the consequences of their ill-considered actions.

And please don't say, "oh, that's magical thinking" and then dismiss it on the logically fallacious ground that by having described it (poorly, by the way), you've now put it entirely under a Somebody Else's Problem field. To describe a thing is not to "reduce it to a problem already solved". If you really think that, then say it to my face, go out there, cure a few dozen people of these behaviors, and come back to me with proof. Unless and until you can do that, pay attention. This applies to you. We are all subject to the damage this causes.

People like this, in my experience, are also real fast to judge their own work and that of their friends by the standard of "it's good enough" while judging things like products in the supermarket by a standard where any perceived inadequacy is the same as complete failure. And why bother to write in complete sentences or spell correctly? "You know what I meant!" and intent is all, you see. But a product on a store shelf that isn't perfectly vegan, and organic, and entirely free of all chemicals, GMO organisms, and on and on and on, is just the same as a factory farmed beef patty from Walmart. Unless it was made by somebody they know, a punk band, or some other variation on Little Kids Like Us, in which case all sorts of things are forgivable.

And stealing isn't bad if it's done from a large institution. Or, in fact, doing anything you want to such an institution is morally fine. After all, they're just Magic Adult People and hence have infinite resources and can't be hurt by the actions of Little Kids Like Us. Which is, of course, logically inconsistent with the stated reasons that many will give for actions like ecosabotage ("we'll hurt them so bad that they'll give up and leave!") but entirely consistent, as I've written above, with protests that are, ideally, as loud and obstructive as possible and for which coherent messages about why and what are trivial or even counterproductive. It's a logic for tantrums that any two year old would respect and agree with.

I think that we all know some of the more obvious other symptoms of this way of seeing and interacting with the world. Emo, anybody? People who have children of their own walking the streets in fuzzy pajama pants in patterns a ten year old should be ashamed to be seen in?

I have trouble even trying to explain to people under the age of thirty that the idea of walking around in costumes in the ways that so many now do (ooh, look at my authentic military camoflage shirt! Ohh! I'm wearing a jersey just like Michael Jordan's!") was, from ancient times until the 1980's, the kind of thing that people were expected to outgrow about the time they gave up bedwetting. In fact, when a show from the seventies or earlier wanted to make entirely clear that a particular child was Just A Little Boy or Little Girl, (say, as the innocent potential victim in a bank robbery) one of the classic quick signifiers was to have the child "still" wearing a cowboy hat or a pretend army jacket. After all, what surer proof could one need that this kid is barely more than a toddler?

Oh, we certainly do have our carefully worked out rationalizations these days (I'm supporting the team!) but funny how those rationalizations always neatly correlate with opportunities to Play Pretend. And, when folks are drunk or tired or simply don't expect to be judged, they sure come out with plenty of admissions of "this makes me feel like I'm a pilot in the Top Gun program" or whatever.

Personally, I wanted a leather jacket for years. For somebody who lives the life I do, they've ungawdly practical. But I did without for years because I had no willingness whatsoever to buy one with patches from some unit I've never been in, let alone a fake map as a liner meant to help the owner fantasize about being a daring pilot over WWII China.

Oh, and fwiw, I fucking well did contract work for Avirex.The co-inventors of the "bomber jacket". They offered me access to their company store and insider discount. But I had no willingness to do that sort of thing.

It's fantasy, folks. And unless you're in the business you should be ashamed of yourself.

And no, you're not a goddamn pirate. Or a ninja. Or a pro sports celebrity.

I'll come back to this subject again. As I keep saying, I'm convinced that this pattern of behavior is central to why so many people keep making such terrible decisions. I'll probably come back at some point and expand this piece. But for now I need to go out and get back to work.

Because if you're not creating useful results, you're just wanking.

Happy holidays.

-Rustin

 

Much later addendum: I just love this video. It does a wonderful job of showing that "I must be profound because I throw tantrums all the time" ethos of much of the supposedly "radical anarchist" crowd.

I also think that this article about Black Bloc does a very good job of laying out some of how these dynamics play out in practice within the Occupy movement. 

Bush is out. Fascism is more of a risk than ever.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
- Benito Mussolini

Personally, I have found the overuse of the term "fascism" in my lifetime reprehensible. It is not "fascism" when your teacher won't let you get out early to see your friends. It isn't fascism when Walmart stops carrying some music label. Not every act of potentially capricious authority is fascism.

But some things are. And, as folks tend to forget, fascism has always been built from the ground up as partnerships between public idealogues, authoritarian movements, and corporations who have used those movements to protect and maximize their profits in return for funding and legitimizing the otherwise very unestablishment face of the movement.

In other words, whether we're talking Germany, Italy, Ethiopia, or the Klan, frankly, fascism has always had roots in the kind of people we these days call trailer trash. This has made for a very useful dynamic in the eyes of the monsters who have served as fascism's architects. The low-class, usually unemployed thugs of bottom-of-society movements have made very useful shock troops to undermine groups like farm worker unions that threaten the profits of corporations. And the quiet but increasingly public support of those corporations has provided material resources and a much-needed veneer of respectability to the otherwise socially rejected masses of those authoritarian movements. All while the least honorable among the media take their funding from the corporations while inflaming the conflict and then reaping the increased revenues from getting to feature the very violence and hatred that they helped build in the first place.

Any of this sound like what we're seeing now with the "birthers", the "teabaggers", the health insurance industry/Big Pharma, and FOX?

If you still have any doubts, I suggest that you read this piece on the recent appearance of activities in America, like the disruption of our ongoing town halls, that have always in the past been leading and reliable indicators that a country would soon be suffering a fascist regime.

I thnk that the article actually, in some ways, understates the problem. I have said from 2002 on that the TSA was designed from the get-go as a training ground and then reserve of brownshirts. Minimally-screened, recruited largely from the unemployed and underemployed, given arbitrary and intrusive powers "justified" by a fear-based logic that was made both sacrilege and dangerous to question, they have continued, with an expanding mandate, almost no supervision, and minimal training in jobs that get them used to treating the public as hostile adversaries to be controlled, questioned, and kept within ill-defined and non-negotiable limits.

Every day that somebody holds a TSA job they are further conditioned to make a trustworthy goon who will follow the unexplained and possibly counterintuitive orders of The People In Charge. They are already building adversarial dynamics with, well, real cops. The cops find them contemptable. Undertrained, puffed up, poor, and posturing. The TSA employees find the cops arrogant, uncooperative, questioning of the limits of their mandate and jurisdiction. If push comes to shove, TSA staffers will have been hardened by years of public displeasure and frustration. Trained to demand unquestioning obedience from the public, where even a joke about their techniques or concerns are considered grounds for arrest and detention.

Make no mistake. The "birthers" and their ilk are dangerous. A clear and present danger to our democracy and basic rights and principles. But if we're to look at this honestly, we need to stay vigilant about the armed, staffed, equipped army of fascism-ready bully-boys who walk our streets and control our rights of way right this very minute.

This is NOT a drill.

Shame about all those highway deaths.

Funny, we've got all these studies about our dangerous roads, especially crowded highways, because of texting, alcohol and drugs, fatigue, and so on. I read the articles and they suggest remedies. More laws. More cops. More signage. More checkpoints. Wider highways. Cutting down all the trees to clear the sightlines. Driver training. Sorry, but I look at those and think "what the hell are they doing in cars in the first place?" Mass transit addresses all of these, ya know.

I've taken plenty of forms of mass transit so f*cked up that I could barely see. Tired, drunk, distracted. Never seen any of that affect the safety of the vehicle yet.

All of this, I might add, applies just fine to cabs and jitneys. How many cabs could we subsidize to what degree to keep drunk drivers off the roads and have it cut net costs for a given city?

Do I sound snotty? Yeah, I guess that I do. But as far as I can see, this is yet another case of "normal" Americans who live in a way that results in vast processions of deaths, cripplings, torturous pain, and billions upon billions of dollars of costs but even when confronted with all of this they can talk about it for years and shake their heads disapprovingly and suggest yet more spending and never once even consider that maybe instead of more subsidies and more police state tactics, maybe the rational answer is TO STOP DOING THIS THING THAT KEEPS KILLING PEOPLE.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Old 1920's shorts used to treat it as a given that the drunk guy in the Betty Boop or Keystone Kops or whatever film would then shamble off and get on a trolley. A simple, safe (compared to cars) trolley that would then deliver said drunk person to a location a few blocks from their door. This was just obvious common sense with technology we had by 1915. If you think that we can't cost-effectively do it now well, I don't even know what to say.

Oh, right. Yes, I do.

Go play in traffic.

-Rustin

Antitrust enforcement may finally return from the dead.

There is an article in the New York Times that says that the new antitrust enforcement director at the Justice Department wants to do something new, enforce laws against trusts. This would be amazing if she can pull it off and, frankly, just by trying she is making public the resistance to real reform of far too many people in and around the Obama administration.

I'm not going to reiterate the article. It's quite a good piece. But I do wish that it had handled one crucial point differently. Over and over again it brings up the most common argument that people like General Motors and ConAgra and Microsoft use to justify their positions, that these corporations are "more efficient" at providing good products for good prices than smaller operations.

Oh, you mean like the Hummer? Like Windows Vista? Like an economy where everything but dish towels is made with high fructose corn syrup?

Yeah, sure. Looks really efficient to me.

It would have been nice if just once the article had thought to mention that this "efficiency" argument may be wrong.

Don't believe the hype.

-Rustin

More thoughts on rail rights of way

A while back I wrote a post on how the federal government should buy up the rights of way used by Amtrak and expand them. My feelings about that goal haven't changed. But I thought that a specific point merits qualification. As one of my fellow travelers reminded me when I took Amtrak from New York to Portland last month, this isn't just a matter of money. Companies like Burlington Northern are understandingly unwilling to hand over their rights of way for the simple and understandable reason that they don't trust Amtrak to maintain them. And if they're not maintained, all that revenue from freight transit goes away. This isn't just about the goverment ponying up cash. It's not even about eminent domain issues, though, admittedly, those both merit discussion another time.

Fundamentally, this is about the condition of those rights of way. The condition of the trackbed. The capacity of the switches. The standards that can be counted on in keeping those lines clear and functional.

So let me clarify a bit. I still feel that the federal government should take this time of flux to take over the rights of way used by or suited to use by passenger rail. But I think that it's crucial to point out that any such deal would have to include detailed provisions by the government, with penalty provisions for non-compliance and institution of transparent management procedures, that commit the resulting authority to expand the capacity of the lines and then maintain them at that expanded capacity.

In fact, I increasingly wonder if the smart thing to do might be to contract with the current owners to handle making most of those necessary upgrades before the handoff takes place. And with those terms tied to compliance. We know that, in theory, the freight rail companies want the resulting lines upgraded; we just need to get them to do the work done soon, in ways that suit expanded capacity and passenger rail as well.

And, crucially, the freight rail companies have the typical culture of oligopolists. As I've documented in my Flickr sets, these are not firms that judge success by normal standards of efficiency. So writing the contracts and managing the resulting situation would be, admittedly, seriously non-trival.

To put it another way, this isn't a job for a Robert Moses. It's a job for a Lyndon Johnson. For a savvy and cynical master of back room negotiation with a deep understanding of whose interests are best served how and what will motivate whom to make things better and the brass to get the contracts signed.

Of course, in theory, the above description just about perfectly matches the stereotype of a Chicago politician. Haven't we got one of those as President at the moment?

Which takes us back to what more and more of us are saying more and more frequently. If he's going to get the right things done, Barack Obama needs to spend less time trying to be an elegant statesman and more time channelling some ethical combination of Huey Long and Joe Kennedy.

Maybe we can get him to start drinking with Charlie Rangel.

I don't want to live in a society run by a bunch of Generals

Anybody who's paying attention is bound to see that every year our world is controlled by a smaller group of companies and their friends. The current crisis is just accelerating that. Twenty banks become five. Ten insurance companies become three. And it's nothing new. Since Enron we supposedly understand the importance of objective and external accounting measures. So it confuses me that nobody much seems to be upset that the once Big Eight accounting firms are now the Big Three. Big Two? Big ONE?

Well, let's step back a bit and remember that in much of America, not only is this round two or three of this kind of corporate domination (anybody remember Standard Oil? U.S. Steel?) but that many of our largest corporations were founded, not by inventors or marketers or people who cared about some particular kind of product at all. They were founded by financiers who set out from the get go to win not, fundamentally, by making better products but by owning as much of the market as they could and through techniques that are mostly illegal or should be. By beating up and marginalizing those who tried to succeed through the "naive" approach of making things that people wanted and selling them under good terms at a good price. They intended to win through sheer power and monopoly and to large extent they've succeeded.

I sound kinda vague, don't I?

Well, many of these companies have a tell. You see, they were quite open about their intent at the time, so you will find that these companies aren't named after founders or their products, or the places where they were. Nor after mythical figures or their products or any of the other types of names that show some kind of love  by those in charge for what they have wrought. Instead the names are as arrogant and dismissive of particulars as their strategies.

They're all Generals.

General Motors.

Founded in 1908 by as a holding company by William Durant, who owned two car companies by the time he had been in business a year and owned two more by a year after that.

General Dynamics.

Rebuilt by financier Isaac Rice, who, starting as the Electric Boat Company, making submarines for the Japanese, Russian, British, and Dutch militaries in the early 1900s, and then renamed and reorganized the company under the current name in 1952 when their takeovers of Canadair and Convair, paid for with the company's large post-war cash reserves, caused then to reorg and become a "modern" conglomerate.

General Foods.

Renamed General Foods in 1929 when Postum, personally being run E.F. Hutton (the guy, not the company), used money from stock sales to buy up, in quick succession, the makers of Jello, Minute Tapioca (owners of the process later used to make Minute Rice), Log Cabin Syrup, Maxwell House Company, and others.

General Electric.

Created in a merger by J.P. Morgan of the pre-existing Edison Electric Company and Thomson-Houston Electric Company (itself a result of several mergers), in effect creating a monopoly on many patents and processes for all electric devices.

If a company has a name that starts with General, they are bad people. And do I even need to get into Union? Union Carbide, perhaps?

One day soon I'll get back to this in more detail but for now remember two things:

1.) Any company named General anything can be assumed to be scum.

2.) They were founded to be scum and those scum behaviors were woven into the DNA of the firm by the day the name was first announced.

Happy Holidays.

Rustin