Capitalists Take Viscious Beating in Polls

January 15th, 2008, 04:28 PM

Is There Any Politician Reading These Polls?

Big Business is Even More Unpopular Than You Thought

By Robert Weissman
15/01/08 "Counterpunch" -- -- The U.S. public holds Big Business in shockingly low regard.
A November 2007 Harris poll found that less than 15 percent of the population believes each of the following industries to be "generally honest and trustworthy:" tobacco companies (3 percent); oil companies (3 percent); managed care companies such as HMOs (5 percent); health insurance companies (7 percent); telephone companies (10 percent); life insurance companies (10 percent); online retailers (10 percent); pharmaceutical and drug companies (11 percent); car manufacturers (11 percent); airlines (11 percent); packaged food companies (12 percent); electric and gas utilities (15 percent). Only 32 percent of adults said they trusted the best-rated industry about which Harris surveyed, supermarkets. [1]
These are remarkable numbers. It is very hard to get this degree of agreement about anything. By way of comparison, 79 percent of adults believe the earth revolves around the sun; 18 percent say it is the other way around.[2]
The Harris results are not an aberration. The results have not varied considerably over the past five years -- although overall trust levels have actually declined from the already very low threshold in 2003.
The Harris results are also in line with an array of polling data showing deep concern about concentrated corporate power.
An amazing 84 percent told Harris in a poll earlier in 2007 that big companies have too much power in Washington. By contrast, only 47 percent said that labor unions have too much power in Washington (as against 42 percent who said labor has too little power), and 18 percent who said nonprofit organizations have too much power in Washington.[3]
These results have proven durable. At least 80 percent of the public has ranked big companies as having too much power in Washington since 1994. In 2000, Business Week and Harris asked a broader question: Has business gained too much power over too many aspects of American life? Seventy-four percent agreed.[4]
The November 2007 poll also asked about support for measures to control corporations. These results are eye-opening as well, though perhaps not in the expected way.
Harris asked which industries "should be more regulated by government -- for example for health, safety or environmental reasons -- than they are now?" Only oil companies (53 percent), pharmaceutical companies (53 percent) and health insurance companies (52 percent) crossed the 50 percent threshold. Even the tobacco industry managed to escape in the survey with only 41 percent favoring greater regulation. These data trend significantly negative -- against greater regulation -- over the last five years.
Does this show that while people distrust Big Business, they equally distrust the government to constrain corporate power?
No.
The U.S. skepticism to regulation is only skin deep. When polls present specific regulatory proposals for consideration, U.S. public support is typically strong and often overwhelming -- even when arguments against government action are presented.
For example:

* After hearing arguments for and against, 76 percent favor granting the Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco, with 22 percent opposed.[5]
* After hearing arguments for and against, 75 percent favor legislation that would significantly increase energy efficiency, including auto fuel efficiency standards, and the use of renewable energy.[6]
* Eighty-five percent favor country-of-origin labeling for meat, seafood, produce and grocery products, and three quarters favor a legislative mandate.[7]
* Seventy-one percent say it is important that drugs remain under close review by the FDA and drug companies after they have been placed on the market.[8]
* And, from a Harris finding a week after the poll showing skepticism about industry regulation in general, the polling agency found that those who think there is too little government regulation in the area of environmental protection outpaced those who think there is too much by a more than 2-to-1 margin (53 to 21 percent).[9]

What the Harris findings on attitudes to regulation do show is that the business campaign against regulation as an abstract concept has been very successful.
It highlights the need for consumer, environmental, labor and other corporate accountability advocates to defend the concept of regulation, and to connect the rampant corporate abuses in society with the deregulation and non-regulatory failures of the last three decades. There's little doubt that the general public attitude toward regulation significantly affects the willingness of politicians -- none to eager to offend business patrons in the first place -- to take on corporate power.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor and director of Essential



Lots of people don't trust capitalists.

January 15th, 2008, 04:49 PM

Or maybe lots of people are merely reflexively cynical.

"All politicians are crooked" - patently untrue.

"All cops are thugs" - patently untrue

"Capitalists cannot be trusted" - not only untrue, but if it was true, capitalism would crumble overnight.

Read "Systems of Survival" Jane Jacobs, 1992. It forwards a pretty strong theory about the mutual corruption of governance and commerce, and proposes remedies.

Simple, blanket cynicism, as opposed to skepticism (which actually requires work), is lazy and dumb.

Pangloss

January 15th, 2008, 05:58 PM

Well Pangloss you should raise your concerns with the people at Harris polls and see how fast they laugh you out of the office.Or go out into the street and conduct your own poll, your opinion differs sharply with the majority.

January 15th, 2008, 05:59 PM

edited

January 15th, 2008, 06:19 PM

DB: Who peed in your cornflakes? Certainly not me.

As to majority views, if I followed that particular wisdom, I'd eat at McDonalds, listen to classic rock & watch TV, be a file clerk and in debt up to my eyeballs.

Naah, I'll pass.

Pangloss

January 15th, 2008, 06:42 PM

2008 election charade: White House bought by big money

By Larry Chin

Global Research, January 15, 2008
Online Journal


Part 2

As previously written, the 2008 election is a manipulation, rigged by political elites working behind sock puppet candidates. This fact is even more obvious when one follows the money.
What big money interests want
OpenSecrets.org is one vital resource that tracks campaign money flows in detail, and virtually in real time. Not surprisingly, both the mainstream corporate and so-called alternative media have devoted scant attention to this corruption.
As culled from the OpenSecrets.org list, here are some of the prominent corporate contributors behind leading candidates (as of 1/11/0:
Republicans
John McCain
Blank Rome LLP
Citigroup
Bank of New York Mellon
Merrill Lynch
Goldman Sachs
JP Morgan Chase
Credit Suisse
Lehman Brothers
Morgan Stanley
MGM Mirage
Univision
Mitt Romney
Bain Capital (note: Romney’s own company)
Goldman Sachs
Merrill Lynch
Citigroup
Marriott
Kirkland & Ellis
Morgan Stanley
PriceWaterhouse
JP Morgan
UBS
Lehman Brothers
Rudy Giuliani
Ernst & Young
Credit Suisse
Merrill Lynch
Citigroup
Bear Stearns
Lehman Brothers
Bracewell & Guiliani (Guiliani’s own firm)
Morgan Stanley
UBS
Milbank Tweed
Goldman Sachs
JP Morgan
Bank of America
Mike Huckabee
State of Arkansas
Wal-Mart
Tyson Foods
Morgan Stanley
Democrats
Hillary Clinton
DLA Piper
Goldman Sachs
Morgan Stanley
Citigroup
National Amusements
Emily’s List
JP Morgan
Kirkland & Ellis
Skadden Arps
Merrill Lynch
Time Warner
Lehman Brothers
Bear Stearns
Ernst & Young
Blank Rome LLP
Barack Obama
Goldman Sachs
Lehman Brothers
National Amusements
JP Morgan
Exelon Energy (parent of Commonwealth Edison)
Citigroup
Citadel Investments
Credit Suisse
Skadden Arps
Morgan Stanley
Time Warner
UBS
Harvard University
John Edwards
Fortress Investment Group
Act Blue
Goldman Sachs
Skadden Arps
Deutsche Bank
Citigroup
This is the bare tip of the iceberg that OpenSecrets.org's database exposes. The site also tracks the money coming from lobbyists, wealthy individuals, and industries, cross-references money flows by industry, and updates the financial status of every campaign -- for those who bother to look it up. There is dirty money that is not even being reported.
What is c
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=7808

January 15th, 2008, 08:18 PM

There are more billionaires in Russia than the US. Did those guys just get lucky with hotdog stands? I would suggest that while the Soviet people thought everything was being evenly distributed to the masses there were those in power funnelling money out the back door. But they weren't capitalists and thus are to be trusted entirely with everything.

January 15th, 2008, 08:31 PM

The billionaires came after the collapse Kreskin, early in the stages of capitalism, one of the suggestions of the IMF was to of course privatize the public infrastructer and state enterprise of any kind, during this time the billionaires rose under capitalism, of the eight major winners (billionaires) only one remains in Russia in prison for fraud and theft.

January 15th, 2008, 08:40 PM

Tony’s Bu$ine$$.

The Rising Son of the House of JP Morgan.

By Glyn Myerscough

He was impregnably armoured with his good intentions and his ignorance.
Graham Greene – The Quiet American.

15/01/08 "ICH" -- - As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair takes up an advisory post with JP Morgan, at an annual salary of £2 million? – some might ask is JP Morgan a successor company of the JP Morgan private bank whose senior executives met in secrecy – from both the US government and nation – with representatives of the private banks of Rockefeller, Kune, Loeb and Co at Jekyll Island on 22nd November 1910 to write what, on the eve of the Second World War, became the US Banking Bill, creating the Federal Reserve Bank?

Others might ask if a failed Prime Minister who has demonstrated such flawed judgement, choosing to believe in the lie of WMD rather than admit he was wrong – in legal parlance, is that not guilty but insane – (as the US rushed headlong into a war of aggression against a harmless failed state, brought to its knees after ten years of economic sanctions which killed half a million Iraqi infants, and by some independent counts has since slaughtered in excess of another 1 million), might actually be able to conjure up any words of wisdom worth a £2 million salary? Or to put it another way, is there anything Blair knows which JP Morgan doesn’t already know?

UK columnists are ‘subtle and nuanced’ suggesting Blair’s network of contacts – the doors he can open – make him such a marketable commodity. This fanciful notion is completely at odds with mainstream feeling across the UK political spectrum where Blair is quite simply persona non-grata. The population at large detest Blair who made it known he did not want a peerage. In point of fact it seems he was never offered one - because of the huge public outcry it would have provoked after the cash for honours cum political donations scandal. Scandals which even now rumble on, as it emerges Peter Hain, cabinet member and minister with portfolio, admits to £103,000 in undeclared political donations - some via a mystery think-tank, which hasn’t published any thoughts - due to administrative error?

So what on earth could JP Morgan want with a man like Blair? Why would they want to pay him a purported £2 million salary? We might find the answer in France where the US’s new poodle in new Europe, President Sarkozy is touting Blair for the EU Presidency. Since his resignation Blair has effectively been airbrushed from political existence - like the failed Soviet Siloviki of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Could Blair, the rising son of JP Morgan, be the New World Order’s chosen man in the new European century? Are we witnessing the rehabilitation of Blair as a ‘political asset’?
Returning to that secretive meeting of private bankers on Jekyll Island in 1910 – to write the US banking bill creating the Federal Reserve Bank – a meeting incidentally chaired by a certain Paul Warburg. Not many people this side of the Atlantic know the Fed’ has stockholders just like any other public corporation. They are, reportedly, paid 6% risk free interest every year on their equity holdings.

January 15th, 2008, 08:57 PM

January 15th, 2008, 09:21 PM

A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC, in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics. The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. The total number of iatrogenic deaths shown in the following table is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251."
Drugs Number One Killer
The authors conclude: "When the number one killer in a society is the healthcare system, then, that system has no excuse except to address its own urgent shortcomings. It's a failed system in need of immediate attention. What we have outlined in this paper are insupportable aspects of our contemporary medical system that need to be changed -- beginning at its very foundations."
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...bed-drugs.aspx