That's part of it, yes. However, on goods like soda, there are tremendous price pressures that keep competitive pricing inline. For instance, if Coke decreased the price of soda, Pepsi would have to follow. So Coke gains no market share and simply loses profit for both firms. Neither firm could increase prices either without significantly risking share. Pepsi's and Coke's prices are inextricably linked without any likely measure of collusion.
That is sort of what I was trying to say but not as well as you did. I think you are exactly right though.
Let me explain something to you Drifting that might help you understand why people laugh at your sources. You can tell me to fuck off or to get a clue and I won't be offended. You can also try listening and thinking about it. I'm not too concerned either way.
When people chide you for your sources, the sources themselves and the validity of those sources is really a secondary issue. People who believe CNN, MSNBC, Wikipedia, or any other online source to be infallible gospel are just as stupid as those who invoke conspiracyofthemoment.com as a primary source. Dismissing or embracing a source soley based on its track record, be it good or bad, is unwise.
That said, what I think you're missing is that the primary umbrage I, and others, take with you is not your sources per se, but rather what your sources say about you. Let me explain.
When two people debate, regardless of the issue or how far apart they are on the issue, they share a core assumption. That assumption, in a nutshell, is that there is reality and that there is fantasy. If I claim that giraffes have short necks and you claim that giraffes have long necks, we, despite our disagreement, are tacitly agreeing that giraffes have necks of a certain length. One of us might be correct, both of us might be wrong, or both of us might be partly correct. Regardless, we both agree that the nature of reality dictate that giraffes do not have whatever size necks we wish to assign to them on a given day.
When people use as their primary sources highly questionnable material from agenda-driven sources, they are attacking this tacit agreement regarding the nature of reality. Instead of submitting themselves to the infallibility of fact, they demand that their own opinions supercede those facts, and that nature is whatever convenience they require in a given moment.
This is why people dismiss your arguments, including the occassional truth and insight therein. You show little signs of being an honest observer and a slave to reality.
Your final statement sums up your viewpoint. You seem to believe that, just because we may share a high-level economic, moral, or sociological viewpoint, that I too should embrace anything that can be construed to fit my purposes. I am sorry, but I refuse to pretend that reality is whatever I deem it to be regardless of the basic standards of logic, reason, and evidence.
"Think for yourself" is very apropos. Thinking is the act of applying fact and logic to reality, not the act of inventing reality via opinion and imagination.
...highly questionnable material from agenda-driven sources
what makes a "conspiracy" site any more "highly questionable" than say CNN.
And what makes CNN any less "agenda-driven" than conspiracycrackwhore.com ?
You dressed up your rhetoric nice and sexy, FFG, but at the end of the day, you simply told me what i already knew.
You dismissed the argument based on your assumptions about a source. Your own uninformed and biased assumption about what a certain information source is or isn't was the sole rational for this entire argument.
Get back to me when you want to start arguing over what is and what is not fact, instead of what is and what isn't an acceptable source for facts.
If I was to smile and I held out my hand
If I opened it now would you not understand?
different TYPES of mastercards and visa....are competition...
sorry...but i do not think you know what competition is my friend...
I have two mastercards. I have one offered from The Hudson's Bay comany. It has a higher interest rate, but sometimes it gives me discounts at The Bay. I have another one from The Bank of Montreal. The Bank of Montreal one has much better bonuses and a lower rate. When I use the HBC one they make money off of it and when I used the BMO one they make money. So when I decide to use the one that is better for me as the end user how is that not competition? If there wasn't cometition between cards the cashiers at The Bay wouldn't give a shit which card I use, in reality they always ask you if you will be using their card.
what makes a "conspiracy" site any more "highly questionable" than say CNN.
And what makes CNN any less "agenda-driven" than conspiracycrackwhore.com ?
You dressed up your rhetoric nice and sexy, FFG, but at the end of the day, you simply told me what i already knew.
You dismissed the argument based on your assumptions about a source. Your own uninformed and biased assumption about what a certain information source is or isn't was the sole rational for this entire argument.
Get back to me when you want to start arguing over what is and what is not fact, instead of what is and what isn't an acceptable source for facts.
You still don't understand it. This isn't about your sources, primarily. This is primarily about the message you are communicating.
To keep the Burmeese Generals in check, --by the 60's they were a bunch of very uppity millionaires,-- the CIA expanded to buying poppy from Hmong villagers in Laos which they refined right there in VietNam in Pepsi factories. (You saw it in the Mel Gibson movie, Air America. I know you didn't believe it. It was beyond imagination but it happened.) Parenthetically, today, "Free Burma" activists at American colleges wonder why Pepsi keeps doing biz in such a nasty country. They want a trade blocade and Pepsi won't cooperate. Heck, Pepsi RUNS the drug machine in Asia. During the Nixon years, Pepsi bottling companies were used for refining the tar into powder. Go see AIR AMERICA. It's all there. PEPSI, bold as brass.
A Pepsi Co. chairman was Nixon's most excellent pal ever since days when Nixon was White House Case Officer on Cuba during the Eisenhower administration. Nixon broke champagne bottles at Pepsi plant openings regularly after he and Ike left Washington until he returned to DC as president, with a decade between posts giving him time to do some serious bonding with Pepsi. In that time, Dick also ran around with his Cuban-exile crew who worked for the CIA, doing the worst kinds of mischief: murdering Che Guevara, downing commercial Cuban planes and killing JFK.
If I was to smile and I held out my hand
If I opened it now would you not understand?
A Marxist threat to cola sales? Pepsi demands a US coup. Goodbye Allende. Hello Pinochet
By Gregory Palast
guardian.co.uk
Sunday November 8, 1998
'It is the firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup... Please review all your present and possibly new activities to include propaganda, black operations, surfacing of intelligence or disinformation, personal contacts, or anything else your imagination can conjure...'
'Eyes only, restricted handling, secret' message. To US station chief, Santiago. From CIA headquarters. 16 October 1970.
You would be wrong to assume this plan for mayhem was another manifestation of the Cold War between the 'free world' and communism. Much more was at stake: Pepsi-Cola's market share and other matters closer to the heart of corporate America.
In exclusive interviews with The Observer last week, the former US Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, told the story in - and behind - these and other top secret CIA, State Department and White House cables recently released by the National Security Archives. Korry filled in gaps in the story by describing cables still classified, and disclosing information censored in papers now available under the US Freedom of Information Act.
Korry, who served Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, told how US companies, from cola to copper, using the CIA as an international debt collection agency and investment security force.
Indeed, the October 1970 plot against Chile's President-elect Salvador Allende, using CIA 'sub-machine guns and ammo', was the direct result of a plea for action a month earlier by Donald Kendall, chairman of PepsiCo, in two telephone calls to the company's former lawyer, President Richard Nixon.
Kendall arranged for the owner of the company's Chilean bottling operation to meet National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger on September 15. Hours later, Nixon called in his CIA chief, Richard Helms, and, according to Helms's handwritten notes, ordered the CIA to prevent Allende's inauguration.
But this is only half the story, according to Korry. He claims the US conspiracy against Allende's election did not begin with Nixon, but originated - and read no further if you cherish the myth of Camelot - with John Kennedy.
In 1963, Allende was heading towards victory in Chile's presidential election. Kennedy decided his political creation, Eduardo Frei, the late father of Chile's current President, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, could win the election by buying it. Kennedy left it to his brother, Bobby, the Attorney-General, to put the plan into action.
The Kennedys cajoled US multinationals into pouring $2 billion into Chile, a nation of only 8 million people. This was not benign investment, but what Korry calls 'a mutually corrupting' web of business deals, many questionable, for which the US government would arrange guarantees and insurance.
In return, the American-based firms kicked back millions of dollars to pay for well over half of Frei's successful election campaign. By the end of this process, Americans had gobbled up more than 85 per cent of Chile's hard-currency earning industries.
The US government, the guarantor of these investments, committed extraordinary monetary, intelligence and political resources to protect them. Several business-friendly US government front organisations and operatives were sent into Chile -including the American Institute for Free Labor Development, infamous for sabotaging militant trade unions.
Then, in 1970, US investments, both financial and political, faced unexpected jeopardy. A split between Chile's centre and right-wing parties permitted an alliance of communists, socialists and radicals - uniting behind the socialist Allende - to finish the presidential election 1 per cent ahead of his nearest rival.
That October, Korry, a hardened anti-communist, hatched an off-the-wall scheme to block Allende's inauguration and return Frei to power. To promote his own bloodless intrigues, the ambassador claims he 'back-channeled' a message to Washington warning against military actions that might lead to 'another Bay of Pigs' fiasco. (Korry retains a copy of this still-classified cable.)
But Korry's prescient message only angered Kissinger, who had already authorised the Pepsi-instigated coup, scheduled for the following week. Kissinger ordered Korry to fly in secret to Washington that weekend for a dressing-down. Still not knowing about the CIA plan, Korry told Kissinger in a White House corridor that 'only a madman' would plot with Chile's ultra-right generals.
As if on cue, Kissinger opened the door to the Oval Office to introduce Nixon. Nixon - who described his ambassador as 'soft in the head' - did agree that, tactically, a coup could not yet succeed. A last-minute cable to the CIA to delay action was too late: the conspirators kidnapped and killed Chile's pro- democracy Armed Forces Chief, Rene Schneider. Public revulsion at this crime assured Allende's confirmation by Chile's Congress.
Even if the US president's sense of realpolitik may have disposed him to a modus vivendi with Allende - Korry's alternative if his Frei gambit failed - Nixon faced intense pressure from his political donors in business who were panicked by Allende's plans to nationalise their operations.
In particular, the president was aware that the owner of Chile's phone company, ITT Corporation, was illegally channelling funds into Republican Party coffers. Nixon could not ignore ITT - and ITT wanted blood. An ITT board member, ex-CIA director John McCone, pledged Kissinger $1 million in support of CIA action to prevent Allende from taking office.
Separately, Anaconda Copper and other multinationals, under the aegis of David Rockefeller's Business Group for Latin America, offered $500,000 to buy influence with Chilean congressmen to reject confirmation of Allende's victory. But Korry wouldn't play. While he knew nothing of the ITT demands on the CIA, he got wind of, and vetoed, the cash for payoffs from Anaconda and the other firms.
Korry, speaking last week from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, disclosed that he even turned in to the Chilean authorities an army major who planned to assassinate Allende - unaware the officer was linked to the CIA plotters.
Once Allende took office, Korry sought accommodation with the new government, conceding that expropriations of the telephone and copper concessions (actually begun under Frei) were necessary to disentangle Chile from seven decades of 'incestuous and corrupting' dependency.
US corporations didn't see it that way. While pretending to bargain in good faith, they pushed the White House to impose a clandestine embargo on Chile's economy. But in case all schemes failed, ITT, claims Korry, paid $500,000 to someone referred to in their intercepted cables as 'The Fat Man'. Korry identified him as Jacobo Schaulsohn, Allende's ally on a committee set up to compensate firms whose property had been expropriated.
It was not money well spent. In 1971, when Allende learned of the corporate machinations against his government, he refused the compensation. It was this - the Chilean leader's failure to pay, not his perceived allegiance to the hammer and sickle - that sealed his fate.
The State Department pulled Korry out of Santiago in October 1971. On his return to the US, he advised the government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation to deny Anaconda Copper and ITT compensation for their seized property. Korry argued that, like someone who burns down their own home, ITT could not claim against insurance for an expropriation the company had itself provoked by violating Chilean law.
Confidentially, he recommended criminal charges against ITT's top brass, including, implicitly, chief executive Harold Geneen, for falsifying the insurance claims and lying to Congress.
Given powerful evidence against the companies, OPIC at first refused them compensation, and the Justice Department indicted two mid-level ITT operatives for perjury. But ultimately, the companies received their money and the executives went free on the grounds that they were working with the full co-operation of the CIA - and higher.
In September 1970 in a secret cable to the US Secretary of State, ambassador Korry quotes Jean Genet: 'Even if my hands were full of truths, I wouldn't open it for others.' Why open his hand now? At 77, one supposes there is a desire to correct history. He says only that it is important to take out of the shadows what he calls - optimistically - the last case of US 'dollar diplomacy'.
signed,
your friendly and much maligned nut,
drifting
If I was to smile and I held out my hand
If I opened it now would you not understand?
So whenever goods cost roughly the same amount, you assume that "large corporations are agreeing on prices"?
What about the corporations that do agree on price?
A few years ago here we used to have 3 mobile telephone providers with more or less the same price. After 4-5 years of price stagnation, a price collusion was proven by a justice decision, these providers were fined and since then the prices have dropped.
I can't see where this decision lies within a "liberal market" (liberal as in almost free market), but I think the court decision was right. I can't see the link with your quote from Adam Smith either. What laws should be abandonned to stop thes types of practise?
Comments
That is sort of what I was trying to say but not as well as you did. I think you are exactly right though.
Cute diatribe.
what makes a "conspiracy" site any more "highly questionable" than say CNN.
And what makes CNN any less "agenda-driven" than conspiracycrackwhore.com ?
You dressed up your rhetoric nice and sexy, FFG, but at the end of the day, you simply told me what i already knew.
You dismissed the argument based on your assumptions about a source. Your own uninformed and biased assumption about what a certain information source is or isn't was the sole rational for this entire argument.
Get back to me when you want to start arguing over what is and what is not fact, instead of what is and what isn't an acceptable source for facts.
If I opened it now would you not understand?
I have two mastercards. I have one offered from The Hudson's Bay comany. It has a higher interest rate, but sometimes it gives me discounts at The Bay. I have another one from The Bank of Montreal. The Bank of Montreal one has much better bonuses and a lower rate. When I use the HBC one they make money off of it and when I used the BMO one they make money. So when I decide to use the one that is better for me as the end user how is that not competition? If there wasn't cometition between cards the cashiers at The Bay wouldn't give a shit which card I use, in reality they always ask you if you will be using their card.
You still don't understand it. This isn't about your sources, primarily. This is primarily about the message you are communicating.
Show me in my original post, what "message" i was "communicating"?
So far, all i see is that you checked the source for the link, and got pissy.
So, what is this hidden message i communicated in my original post?
ONE MORE FOR YOU:
If I opened it now would you not understand?
oh wait, i know, something in the name "Palast" probably implies i am a conspiracy theorist.
signed,
your friendly and much maligned nut,
drifting
If I opened it now would you not understand?
What about the corporations that do agree on price?
A few years ago here we used to have 3 mobile telephone providers with more or less the same price. After 4-5 years of price stagnation, a price collusion was proven by a justice decision, these providers were fined and since then the prices have dropped.
I can't see where this decision lies within a "liberal market" (liberal as in almost free market), but I think the court decision was right. I can't see the link with your quote from Adam Smith either. What laws should be abandonned to stop thes types of practise?