From Pine View Farm

Titans of Industry category archive

A Free Pass for Plutocrats 0

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“Whose Lifetime?” 0

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Noses and Grindstones 0

Frame One:  Manager yelling at employee making burgers:  This is drive-through.  You have to work faster!  Faster!  Frame Two:  Manager to employee holding a reddened arm:  It's only a grease burn.  No need for the E. R.  Just put these condiment packs on it.  (Note:  True story.)  Frame Three:  Customer:  Are you stupid!  I said NO PICKLES!  Employee:  But you didn't say . . . Customer:  Get the manager!  Frame Four:  Employee tugging garbage bag to dumpster thinks,

Via Job’s Anger.

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The Voter Fraud Fraud and Machine Politics 0

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The Pusher Men 0

Transcript here.

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How Far Will Wells-Fargo 0

As usual, too damned far.

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The “Clean Coal” Con 0

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Everybody Must Get Fracked 0

Well, almost everybody.

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Everybody Must Get Fracked 0

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Fly the Fiendly Skies 0

Mother Goose with two pets in carriers at airline ticket counter:  I'd like you to fly my dog to Tulsa and my cat to Dayton.  Ticket agent:  Sorry, ma'am, this airline can't do that.  Mother Goose:  Why not?  You did it last week.


Click for more Grimmy.

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Protected Data 0

Reporter to Equifax rep:

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Fly the Fiendly Skies 0

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The Power of Google 0

Josh Marshall has a long and thoughtful piece on the power of Google (and, by extension, other concentrators of influence). The piece was prompted by allegations of Google’s bullying a website the views of which Google found distasteful (no, it wasn’t one of those websites that have been so much in the news lately). Rather, it seems from the context of Marshall’s remarks, which are all I know of the situation at this point (links are in the post) to be a website that questioned the concentration of power in the hands of corporations, including digital outfits such as Google.

I have always found Josh Marshall to be a careful and deliberate thinker and commend the post to your attention. Here’s a bit:

But what is more interesting to me than the instances of bullying are the more workaday and seemingly benign mechanisms of Google’s power. If you have extreme power, when things get dicey, you will tend to abuse that power. It’s not surprising. It’s human nature. What’s interesting and important is the nature of the power itself and what undergirds it. Don’t get me wrong. The abuses are very important. But extreme concentrations of power will almost always be abused. The temptations are too great. But what is the nature of the power itself?

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All That Was Old Is New Again 0

In The Roanoke Times, John Ketwig recalls yet another little-mentioned time when the United States had an active Nazi movement, back before the prefix “neo” would have been germane.

I shall not attempt to excerpt or summarize it. Just go there.

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The Pusher Men 0

Transcript.

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Fly the Fiendly Skies 0

Rat tge airline gate agent makes and announcement:  Folks, I'm getting a lot of questions about baggage policy, in-flight meals, and wifi, so I'm gonna try to answer everybody's questions at once.  In each of these situations, there is one option that makes your flight more pleasant.  We will never choose that option.  Rat talking to official:  It's nice to give the cattle some clarity.


Click to see the image at its original location.

I used to travel for work. I was stepping on airplanes two or three times a month to fly all around the USA to marvelous sites such as Fargo, North Dakota, and Monroe, Louisiana (no offense to the persons in those cities; I was always treated with hospitality, but the getting there . . . .). If I never step on another US airline, it will be too soon.

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“Making Lazy Circles in the Sky” 0

At the Boston Review, K. Sabeel Rahman discusses the return of “Vulture Capitalism.” Here’s how he starts his essay:

In 1913 the great American lawyer Louis Brandeis railed against “The Curse of Bigness” in Harper’s Weekly, documenting the troubling concentration of economic power among the new tycoons and trusts of the industrial age, from railroads to steel to oil. By establishing monopolies, he argued, these private actors could dictate prices and shape the terms of access to essential goods, thus allowing them to exploit, extract, and otherwise dominate society.

But behind the monopolies lay an even more dangerous force: the financiers who jointly invested in these companies through a variety of legal and corporate vehicles. For Brandeis, this “money trust” of “banker-barons” was the ultimate villain in the industrial economy since it existed beyond the ordinary scope of traditional checks and balances. In his famous pamphlet, Other People’s Money, he warned that financiers had “acquired control so extensive as to menace the public welfare.”

Follow the link for the rest. The time it takes to read it will be well spent, because all that was old is new again.

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Fly the Fiendly Skies 0

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Fly the Fiendly Skies 0

Close up on man saying to woman,


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The Pusher Men 0

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