So the Koch brothers sent an internal compliance officer to an international subsidiary and she found evidence of wrongdoing? They then sent another team over there less than a week later and it confirmed her initial findings: that the French subsidiary, one of nearly a hundred within the Koch empire, had paid bribes. They publicly admitted as much in December 2008.

Yet it wasn't until 6 months later that she was fired for incompetence.

If you read the article carefully, the author goes out of his way NOT to tie the two events together, instead relying on your mind to put the two statements together to imply that there is a connection.

I'm sure that if you dig deep enough in any organization with 50,000 employees, there are a few people doing bad things and trying to hide it. But it's like blaming Obama every time a prisoner at Gitmo gets kicked in the nuts. Sure, he is ultimately responsible, but he can't be all knowing. It looked to me that the Koch brothers took action on the bribery thing and fired the people responsible. You want perhaps Hari-Kiri?

And for the Iranian thing, any time you make a law prohibiting something, you imply that there are legal and illegal ways to conduct your business and by making some action illegal, you free the public to engage in the non-illegal actions. If a law is passed that says "you may not cross a street in the middle of the block" you imply that it's OK at the intersection. I'm sure Koch hires many smart lawyers to help them walk the straightest line possible while avoiding the bear traps.

You can hate on them all you want, and for all I know they may be Satan's half-brothers, but the article is a whisper campaign tries to paint a much broader picture than the events warrant.

Dmtdust wrote:

You defend the sale of goods to avowed enemies of our state? Interesting.

Not a bad strategy as long as critical percentage of the the goods are defective or compromised.  China read Sun Tzu before we did.

Dmtdust wrote:

You defend the sale of goods to avowed enemies of our state? Interesting.

Don't put words in my mouth. I wont be your strawman.

Now I understand better why you believe these journalistic smear jobs, you see only what you want to see.

I sure wish they would go back to teaching forensics in school. Now that opinion comes dressed as law or science, you need a critically trained mind to sort the wheat from chaff.

I'm just saying that at the time of the action, it was legal and allowable, both here and in France.

Way down in the piece wrote:

Regarding sales to Iran, she wrote, “During the relevant time frame covered in your article, U.S. law allowed foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies to engage in trade involving countries subject to U.S. trade sanctions, including Iran, under certain conditions.”
Koch has since stopped all of its units from trading with Iran, she says.

So, not only was it allowed at the time, but they voluntarily stopped doing it.

If they are smart businessmen, and all indications say they are, they probably weighed following the literal interpretation of the law and realized that the perception of wrongdoing was going to cost them more than the action was worth, so they stopped. As a side effect, the French division in question stopped trading with Iran, Algeria, Egypt, India, Morocco, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. And what do these evil, bribing, corrupt money grubbing capitalists at Koch-Gilitch do? They make "distillation, pollution control and water filtration equipment". So now all of those poor Iranian children have to rely on Chinese water filtration equipment, which is probably made out of recycled plutonium and compressed Dengue fever. The Iranian dust-up was over distillation equipment to make methanol. I thought you greenies liked alternative energy?

I don't pretend to be an international lawyer, but if you stacked all of the law books that a multi-national company such as this has to abide by, it would probably reach to the top of the tallest building they own. In such a situation you can only do the best you can at navigating the morass of international laws and contradictory regulations. Hell, I have a hard enough time navigating the laws of the Federal, state, county and municipality that I run my business in, and I'm a software developer, a profession lucky enough not to have a lot of overwhelming regulations to abide by. But I am contemplating starting a new company building control devices to add on to existing HVAC units to improve their efficiency. But as much as I wanted to, I could never actually build my devices here in the USA, just the regulations dealing with solder fume mitigation run to more than 100 pages.

So Goob and Phreddy are accusing Bloomberg of being left leaning??   Bloomberg News is a user based subscription only available to those who pay $1,650 p/month for bloomberg financial services.

Basically, you are now accusing those that live off of the bankers of being leftists big government supporters.

Essentially, you are playing a defensive game of "Break the Ice" with the very ideas you endorse.

GooberMcNutly wrote:

But as much as I wanted to, I could never actually build my devices here in the USA, just the regulations dealing with solder fume mitigation run to more than 100 pages.

That's because many so-called capitalists would be (and more to the point, have been) happy having illegal migrant child workers solder their parts in the unventilated basements of burnt-out unlit derelict factories. You should see how many pages are devoted to not dumping the bodies workers killed on the job in swamps or down disused elevator shafts, then going down to The Club to moan about the high price of quicklime over brandy and cigars.

phreddy wrote:

Not only should our schools be teaching forensics, but economics and logic as well.

Don't ignore history and civics, which recent posts indicate you may have. Time to face facts you two, a completely unregulated system wherein factory owners have no motivations except profit leads to death and disfigurement for workers and various kinds of pollution for the rest of us, not to mention self-righteous assholes like the Kochs using wealth to dictate politics and law.

Last edited by Tall Paul (2011-10-04 18:20:52)

phreddy wrote:

There is a big difference between reasonable regulations and the purposefully punitive ones environmentalists, anti-capitalists, and some of you yahoos would enact.  I have said it before, the manufacturers in this country are feeding all of us.  If you bite that hand too hard, it will go away and we all suffer.  It's not as though they don't have alternatives.

What manufacturers? When the rulers of banana republics can be bribed to ignore death, disfigurement, child labor, and environmental degradation while using their troops to put down strikes by workers who want more than a few pennies per hour for 12 hour shifts, there is nothing that can be done to make it attractive for companies NOT to offshore their production.  The only option to bring jobs back is to penalize these predatory companies through the tax code, and/or forbid the importation of their slave-made products.

phreddy wrote:

There is a big difference between reasonable regulations and the purposefully punitive ones environmentalists, anti-capitalists, and some of you yahoos would enact.  I have said it before, the manufacturers in this country are feeding all of us.  If you bite that hand too hard, it will go away and we all suffer.  It's not as though they don't have alternatives.

Have you ever been to a maquiladora to see what conditions are like, how little workers are paid, and what kind of pollution they spew?  I thought not.  In the clothing factories in San Pedro Sula, Honduras they are currently paying about $15 a day.  The river that flows nearby is dead, and its color changes from a silty brown to a weird green with orange overtones when it passes the outlets maquiladora zone.  Under national law, they are exempt from all taxation.  Moreover, virtually all of the profit they generate is taken out of the country.  But at least in Honduras, entrepreneurial capital is not burdened by onerous environmental regulation, a meaningful minimum wage, job-killing taxation, or any kind of control on removing capital to foreign banks.

GooberMcNutly wrote:

If I wanted to force people to work for me or starve, I would start a union.

Wronger all de time.

You don't offend me, you confuse me. I just don't see how offering someone a job they are free to either do or not do for whatever wage I offer them is "pathological"? They are free to walk away any time.

Oh, unless it's a union job in a "(no) right to work state". Then, if you are a welder you can either work under whatever the union says you will get paid, or you can't work at all. And, as a business owner, I have to pay what THEY say a person is worth, not what I and the worker agree they are worth, or be unable to get any workers for any price.

This whole thread started on a smear piece about the Koch brothers. Now it's about how I'm a pathological something (what? "Pathological" is an adjective...) because I want to start a new business that hires real Americans to do a job? I can make money even if I pay a decent wage. I can't make money if I have to pay a middle-man just in order to be allowed to hire those people. I also don't have the money to pay off lawmakers to give me a sweet exemption or tax amnesty.

Ah, I'm just cranky today. Too many late nights working for our little socialist utopia.

Well, If I'm a welder and working in a town with only union shops, I have to either work for the union boss or find another line of work. If I'm the owner of the company, I either pay what they demand or close my shop. Do you see how both the worker and the boss are really rendering unto the same Caesar?

There was a time in this country when unions became important in order to protect the workers safety. They did a fantastic job of holding owners accountable to the rights of their workers. But when they began to operate in unison in order to pressure owners to pay more for each unit of labor while charging the laborers for the privilege of working that they turned from an organization focusing on preserving it's members rights to one that employs the same strong tactics merely for it's members enrichment. Do you see the moral distinction there?

Can you please refer to where I was talking about undocumented immigrants?

phreddy wrote:

Fled wrote:

Have you ever been to a maquiladora to see what conditions are like, how little workers are paid, and what kind of pollution they spew?  I thought not.  In the clothing factories in San Pedro Sula, Honduras they are currently paying about $15 a day.

Precisely!  If you don't like foreign slave labor making your shirts, you had better start thinking about how to keep manufacturing in the U.S.  Penalizing them for your vague notion that "corporations are bad" is exactly what drives them offshore.  Think about it.

Short of bringing back slavery and repealing industrial safety and environmental protections, there's no way we can match the incentives offered by the banana republics and the People’s Slave Labor Camp Of China.  Do you want to live in such a society?

phreddy wrote:

Fled wrote:

Have you ever been to a maquiladora to see what conditions are like, how little workers are paid, and what kind of pollution they spew?  I thought not.  In the clothing factories in San Pedro Sula, Honduras they are currently paying about $15 a day.

Precisely!  If you don't like foreign slave labor making your shirts, you had better start thinking about how to keep manufacturing in the U.S.  Penalizing them for your vague notion that "corporations are bad" is exactly what drives them offshore.  Think about it.

Oh, I think I know what you mean.

I don't get why you posted that here, JR, but my chin is on the floor and my hope for the future has received an unexpected boost.

Just a little Non Sequitur. Politics can be so boring when you lack the opiate of the masses.