Part II of VI

(Substitute for Course #101 continued)

The Second Industrial Revolution

A lot of Thanksgiving was celebrated when dumb & unselfish Native Americans put some life into Plymouth Rock. Survival was the only thing the pious “New” Englanders prayed for, hanging on by hanging & burning asserters of independence according to 3000 – year – old laws while their own fanatical zealotry was somehow tolerated in England & the Netherlands.

Their later claims of firsthood, however, is as hypocritical as their insistence on leadership in preference to Virginia which certainly was first colonized. The 1^st settlers of the Virginia Co. on Roanoke Island (now in North Carolina) vanished. But the follow up at & near the James River was a colonial success story. It was a weedy beginning as tobacco & indigo proved to have some saving grace.

Recently Hawaiians paid lots of money for a thousand indigo plants to prove they could reproduce some bluish paint stuff. If native Hawaiians permitted, I could show them a million of those indigo plants near South Point of the Big Island, Hawaii, which farmers, cows, wild goats & pigs hate.

Everyone was taught the story of sweet, young Pocahantas who saved old adventurer John Smith, turned into the only real Christian & married John Rolfe (1585 – 1622). As missionaries for nicotine & blue dye, they followed Sir Walter Raleigh’s smoke screen. What was good in the troubled eyes of native sachems would earn millions for our economy & would cost billions in physical destruction & pretended healing.

Whether Pocahontas died from nicotine or small pox, the good girl didn’t tell me when I visited her interesting tombstone south-east of London. Rolfe’s son became a tobacco trader. Do taxpayers still owe their dues to the absentee – owners of patented tobacco plantations or their concessions?

Nathanael Greene remained a Quaker at heart while he learned from George Washington Chinese strategy – that the softest is the hardest in the long term. Both became masters in winning victories from the jaws of defeat. Dying at the age of 38, his widow had to learn how to manage the farm in Georgia which a grateful new Nation had the Greenes rewarded with.

The widow had her problems. Came Teacher Eli Whitney (1765-1825), jobless for once, accepting the invitation of the widow. Manually inclined & smart enough to get along without a teacher’s cane, Eli constructed a “Cotton Gin” which separated the seeds from the cotton. What had needed 50 slaves, was easily handled by his invention.

Too little rewards for his patent rights forced Whitney to return to New England; he became a genius in inventing interchangeables for his production of guns. Hunting & killer people made him rich. But he was one of the first who recognized that this trick could be applied to the mass production of ever more modern machinery. Thereby he opened the door to the 2^nd Industrial Revolution which England & France had not yet recognized in spite of their early headway in locomotives, movable engines, rail-roading and related industries, using steam power!

But evil Southerners who could have used the cotton gin & additional inventions to get rid of Black Slavery used technical progress only to produce more wealth by more slave trading & personally procreating half – castes, quadroons & octoroons for their pleasure, for ploughshare & political empowerment.

Instead Southernness made too good use of Eli Whitney’s replaceable parts in mass production or ordering from the North, all the weapons of mass-destruction as they also developed the generals & police forces for enforcing their slavocratic perversion of Southern democracy & white-only freedoms. No Adam Smith, & not even Milton Friedman, would approve this abuse of free enterprise by its enemies.

There was an old saying among social scientists: “A diplomat is sent to a friendly country to spy on it.” An industrial spy has the advantage of knowing what to look for, how to do it expertly & how to get back home with his pockets full of patent rights & all the secrets of completing his tricks by doing at home what was well done abroad.

In England, it took multi processes in multi-plants to convert Indian, Egyptian & U.S. cotton into wearable cloth.

Well educated Francis C. Lowell, of an illustrious Massachusetts family, used the know – how of relatives & friends to combine his cotton – picking raw material in all needed processes to come up with bales of cotton cloth in one location. That industry needed a whole township in Massachusetts. It would be called by family names; but as the founder lived only 42 years, his heirs just had to name this industrial factory town Lowell.

Before cotton became King in the South, the Lowellites wanted their “first” to survive most easily as a monopoly. No better way than to have Congress put high custom duties on imported textiles. The struggle for dominance was one of the initial features of “free” trade. Capitalism doesn’t require consistency. All entrepreneurs are used to talk out of both corners of their big mouths: President Jackson & John C. Calhoun were roughnecks who meant what they said. To them this problem meant federalism versus states rights. But, this early Confederate couldn’t yet nullify Washington’s power.

Today all governments use lies & related trickery in protecting their own growers & manufacturers while holding their competition abroad to free – trade – born commercial treaties. There is nowhere a Constitution requiring honesty. Fairness is no capitalistic 11^th commandment. Spinsters are no longer in fashion. Spin monsters are relatively harmless compared to those liars & killers under the Bush umbrella.

What was called “The American System” for Lowell & his protectionist followers was espied by a German long – time visitor as a great & patriotic uniter of the land & worthy of protection by governmental legislation. Friedrich List left a hospitable U.S.A. & returned to North Germany; he preached the union of many of the German lands (big Prussia & the score of smaller ones). His mission was to drop all their custom duties within the possibly largest union & high protective duties against all which wouldn’t join his “Zoll – Verein” (Custom Union).

Thus, the exclusion of British Hannover, Austria with its alien inclusions & South Germany which was leaning toward Austria. The German theorists became practical & introverted by our “American System”. All of which lives on in secrecy in spite of all our “Gap” talk & theoretical customs’ treaties & their preferences by giving their agriculture & some other business tax preferment on the sly. No honesty needed if one can get away with small breaches of solemn treaties & big sermons.

Seeing half a dozen of tobacco & cigarette billionaires get away with perjury & obvious lies to congressional committees, I got furious beyond a good measure of health damage to my old & sick body. Poorer witnesses to more correct statements usually end up in jail for contempt of Congress if not also for contempt of contemptible judges. Would I have become less “Madd” at these destroyers of human lives if I had chosen to marry a rich young girl while teaching as an attractive elementary teacher in Hamburg, Germany?

On a teachers’ tour in pursuit of Biblical geography, I had befriended a slightly older Dresden colleague. He retaliated by inviting me to his home where we got both invited by the owner of a huge cigarette & cigar factory; both man & his industry did business under the name of “Reemtsma”. Seated next to the rich daughter of teenage beauty & more, we got so deeply engaged that we ate nothing after the good soup.

The 17 – year – old needed no parents’ aid to propose to me. I may have counter – proposed without foresight. But only 19 or 20 at the time & thinking of letting my small earnings allow me to continue my ambitious studies for a future Ph.D., I asked for patience, reconsideration & a period of friendship. My older brother who had provided for our large family decided that I had to share somehow in his greater human love for our own family. I exchanged but a few letters with the tobacco girl before she invited me to her engagement party with someone more eager than this slow poke.

Since then many students, teachers & friends proposed marriage to me while I was married to my job. Only in my loneliest hours during my many failures and sicknesses, I think, I felt sorry for myself & for the lost opportunities to guide someone close to me & be guided by her in sickness & in health. Are these only problems of the millions? Or are they of necessity in our form of capitalism?

A few years earlier, I was a promising student in the almost – American University of Frankfurt on a scholarship program. As I struggled along, one of my kind professors handed me a holiday dinner invitation to the Sondheimers, perfect strangers to this lonely poor boy.

My teacher had a son almost my age who didn’t need his “Frack” etc. that evening. He also gave me an idea about those multimillionaires. Among their properties were a number of silver mines in Bolivia & Mexico with platinum ones here & there. And there was lots more. To my luck, the professional son instructed me in manners & mannerism of the élite. So I was prepared, like any boyscout, scouting for girls, although I decided only to talk when first talked to.

Even more than by the delicious & mostly unknown food on my plates & on trays all around, I was flabbergasted by the very young – looking, very lovely, blonde & blue eyed, girl to my left who couldn’t get her sparkling eyes off this also blond & blue-eyed student. She touched my face, my left hand & soon held it in her right one.

With the main meal over, the more manly older guests & relatives retreated to the smoking room while we non-smokers & children were to have dessert in the salon. I expected my neighborly teen to get up and go ahead &, perhaps, ask me to follow her to the ends of the world. She didn’t because she couldn’t.

“You must carry me. I cannot walk”. I did as she demanded while placing an arm around her neck. She was so light. No burden at all. But so fragile, frail & delicate & yet so attractive in the face & even in her slender body & silky cover-up. She looked like dessert.

We sat together for hours until her parents joined us to talk business, the like I didn’t know or understand. Her mother wanted a prime scholar as her son-in-law. Her father opted for a business career for me – a year of apprenticeship, a year as a junior partner & next a director in any part of their world. They talked & talked while my girl hung on me & cried bitter & sweet tears. I was dumbfounded.

For a few days I was the dummy in the lecture hall until my teacher saved my soul: “You will be happier as a scholar, researcher, lecturer & public speaker.

Let business people do their own organizing, buy-up the whole world & let their greed rule their empires. Don’t go down into mines with them. Go on studying even if your bread is not buttered. Only you know what you want to do & what you ought to be. See you tomorrow.” I went, I saw & I conquered myself. My first masterwork was a great adieu, well expressed in a fancy envelope. But, whenever I had serious problems in tests, diplomas, jobs & health, I remembered the lovely incapacited poor-rich girl who could have given me her millions for a life without care, without challenge & without actual life.

But I saw capitalism first “hand” & thought it worked, to paraphraze Steffen’s prediction about Russian – Lenin Communism. And both of us & US had to relearn ever so often.

It was said often that Americans were foremost in practical applications of European science theories. To those it must be most surprising that Germans became the appliers of one of our greatest inventors.

In fact, Robert Goddard (1882 – 1945) invented the first liquid – fuel rocket. Later in life, he also worked successfully to create a solid – fuel rocket. Encouraged by Charles Lindbergh, he was set up at Roswell, New Mexico. Bad dreams of silly anti-scientists still convert his theories & test flightiness there as a U.S. secret reception area of flying saucers with the legendary Martians & most remote worlds’ little metal & precious-stone men.

If the jocund reading by actor Orson Wells of H.G. Welles’s “The War of the Worlds” excited our idiots, it was the Hitler crowd which profited from the findings of our Goddard to construct the Vergeltungswaffen, VI and VII weapons of revenge, too late though for the great loser.

Lindbergh & Hitler, the foremost Jew-haters didn’t mind at all that a wealthy Jew like Daniel Guggenheim had financed & built the Roswell industries which assured & reassured Goddard’s gift to them.

Meyer Guggenheim (1828 – 1905), introduced with his emigration to the USA Swiss needlework. With the help of his New York – born 7 sons he manufactured & handled this art in a wholesale way. All were heavies. So they left needle work to women & took to metallurgy as soon as they got hold of mines here & there.

Their Philadelphia Smelting & Refining Co. struggled against the gigantic “American Smelting & Refining” until they became their leading co-owners. Son Simon made himself the new chef, even while he served a term in Congress as a Senator from Colorado.

His brother Solomon went back to his father’s land of birth to study more intricate embroidery, settled that wholesale business on relatives & friends & went down into mines all around the world. When gold glistened around the Canadian Yukon River, he took his share through his “Yukon Gold Co.” Like all his 6 brothers, he set up his own Philanthropic Foundation to bless great architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

But I personally mention their tremendous impact on our economy only because of their big brother Daniel (1856 – 1930) who had first gone back to papa’s Swiss lace, silk & embroidery fancies before he ranged all over Alaska, Africa & South America to collect mines & give bread to the world. His great interest in Aeronautics made his early flights safer through new instrumentations. Had he lived when Adolf Hitler rose to power, no Lindbergh could have restrained him. Together with tester Goddard, the USA would have had the flying robots with explosive heads to hit Dr. Brown to the punch.

The orthodox anti-Zionist Sondheim was a realist in business matters. He realized that the prayers of the devout wouldn’t change the Hitlers of this universe as the executioners & executives of Acts of God. So I understood that he got rid of his large European assets in a hurry to depend on those in the Americas.

At least one of the Guggenheims was a Zionist who owned at least a thousand more mines in Europe alone. A Nazi enterpriser cussed him for using his pet canaries in his Wales mines & elsewhere to warn miners of the greatest dangers through inhalation of carbon oxides. His prohibition of smoking was resented by other capitalists. (I guess that some of the West Virginia disasters & those in Mexico may have been self-inflicted by a habitual nicotinist & high-strung individualist who needed to smoke just one cigarette in a “safe” lunch corner.)

During my early oral history project, I wrote down what an official of the Palestine – Treuhand Gesellschaft (PALTREU) told me in 1934 & again 1946: Hitler was a bit of a Zionist & wanted Jews in Palestine to survive. He had fallen in love with the huge but sweet “Jaffa Apfelsine” (orange), developed by Russian pioneering Zionists. Already in 1933, shortly after coming to supreme power, he allowed rich Jews to get some capital to English “Palestine Trust Territory” (Mandate) on condition that at least an equivalent sum go into his treasury along with 3 cases of his favorite fruit. Although my contact was not allowed to reveal names before the Great War & couldn’t recall them after W.W. II, he supposed that the Guggenheims got the man his Jaffa oranges & got some good cash abroad via Palestine. Anyway, even if they saved only a little more than their lives, their exile was bearable in or out of their many, many mines abroad.

To many Daytona (Ohio) wise guys John H. Patterson (1844 – 1922) was the joke of the town of the Wright Brothers when he bought the “National Manufacturing Co.” Yet, under the style of “Nat. Cash Register Co”, it filled all registers with cash, credit & creditable monopoly. What didn’t the smart guy think of to become the merchants’ merchant?

The Otis brothers, Charles R. (1835 – 1927) & Norton R. (1840 – 1903) had only to improve their father’s, Elisha P. (1811 – 61) invention to lift the family’s elevator empire. Using their 30 patents, they had first installed steam elevators in the Washington Monument & the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Only in 1889 their first electric elevators raised New York hotels to sky scrapers. The Otis name remains most elevated in the striver & the strife of the lowest & highest among US.

When houses in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark & Hawai’i could remain unlocked without the fears of intruders, New Englanders of religious origin brought original sin into the cause of “my home is my castle”. The Yale family kept banks under their lock & key. Linus Yale improved his father’s lock, stock & barrel.

Mid – 19^th century, the genius of the Yale family manufactured the first dial – operated combination locks. That certainly improved the pin – tumbler locks of ancient Egyptians. When Henry Towne became president of the Yale Manufacturing Co. in Stanford, Con, he used the latest machinery to mass – manufacture the ancient safety lock.

These days, nobody feels safe behind locked doors unless he has millions in a bank safe with special safeguards & being doubly protected by good insurance policies. Such industry “employs” more locksmiths & lockpicks than police but is worth billions in our economy.

This is no attempt to name the hundreds of rail-roading entrepreneurs who took advantage of the American people, their compliant congressmen & powerful advocates of the legal & illegal stripe. But who wouldn’t take advantage of being offered hundreds of millions of acres just for the asking & stealing it from the American people who had stolen it from native Americans & the native bisons, called buffalo by Buffalonians.

Golden – spike example here are the Easterners who also passed for Californians. Charles Crocker (1822 – 88), Leland Stanford (1824 – 93), Colis P. Huntington (1821 – 1900) & Mark Hopkins (1813 – 78) did the best they could to make their Central Pacific the most valuable pearl of the Great West. They learned to exploit thousands of Chinese coolies by their speed – run through the Sierra Nevada cruel heights & the Rocky Mts. granite.

Nobody cared how many Chinese without government protection were humiliated, drowned in their soap suds or beaten to death by Irish patriots after Sunday mass. Crocker made himself president also of the Southern Pacific Railroad, taking turns as commander – in – chief with Stanford & Huntington.

Hopkins, also a New Yorker, first tried to rediscover gold in California by merchandizing & land speculation around the claims & diggings. He got into the politics of “free” land & the new rail communications which made the Pony Express a piece of past history. They quickly made the novel telegraph their means of fast letter charges.

Huntington, a Connecticut peddler, settled in a small N.Y. shop. His greed for California gold formed friendships with politicians who aided in his obtaining huge loans & grants. Beyond the first 2 Western colossus trainlines Huntington hunted for shares & influence in the Chesapeake & Ohio R.R. & the canal shipping on both rivers. As his wealth grew mountainously, his reputation sank to low levels. Yet, he & his partners became models for pioneering & spreading newer forms of robber capitalism. Their investing in new colleges & some also – culture made them more than acceptable to historians as men of action.

Robert Fulton (1765 – 1815) pained & painted his way to Benjamin West in England for 2 decades while France exploded & thereby made engineering every one’s dreamjob. Not recognized as a genius in his 1^st guestland, he tried to construct a submersible for Napoleon. But the latter learned in Egypt that the sea belonged to England. Therefore, poor Fulton returned to the new USA.

To the delight of both, the allround – educated Robert R. Livingston (1746 – 1813) supported Fulton back in New York. Both were to be honored when their steamer “Clermont” made the Hudson River dangerous. Later their steamboat “New Orleans” ran perilously on the Mississippi.

Courts decided that Fulton deserved patent rights although John C. Stevens (1749 – 1856) owned already patents on his engines & boilers. In fact, his Manhattan – Hoboken ferry used modern screws instead of propellers. Angry at dilatory non-actions by his sponsors, he operated the first steam locomotive in the Americas in imitation of English forerunners. But did he got sufficient credit, or honors, for making his “Phoenix” the 1^st ocean – going steamship?

Great credit is due to Ezra Cornell (1817 – 74) for giving US good wire insulation; this finally allowed well – insulated wires to be connected to high, wooden poles to carry electricity without loss of power. Without this inventor no wires could have been buried deep.

He personally oversaw the construction of the 1^st American telegraph line between Baltimore & Washington, D.C. Together with a few moneyed monitors, he was the founding spirit of the “Western Union Telegraph Company” in 1855 in spite of Jay Gould (1836 – 92), the dishonest carmagnole of bribery & physical interference.

This genuine Gould, in alliance with James Disk (1835 – 72) & Daniel Drew (1797 – 1879), nearly ruined Cornelius Vanderbilt’s (1794 – 1877) shipping & railroad investments. Looting from all “their” companies, they caused Black Fridays & even blackmailed big Union Pacific. With the help of his books & newspapers, Gould ruled in spite of himself. Western Union Telegraph Co. owes him its survival.

To our luck, many of the great names in our Economy were gifted & dedicated inventors. Samuel Morse (1791 – 1872) was a good painter. Returning from training in England & France, he moved to New York & its initiation into electricity. Like a few others elsewhere, he also discovered the telegraph. If his patent rights were somewhat dubious, his dot – dash idea for transmitting electromagnetic messages over wires was original & of great service for a long time. As a child I mastered his alphabet & used it freely among friends. Any way, the telegraph was big business’s bold ally, a good way & means to make money. It seems that Morse also made money by Daguerreotype & more modern photography.

Alexander G. Bell (1847 – 1922) was a teacher’s son & a dedicated teacher himself. Father & son amazed Scotland when they attempted to teach the deaf but not the dumb. They continued their experimentation in Boston. They called electronic enhancement of sound waves phoning. With the assistance of our Supreme Court, they retained all patent right against European claimants. The Bell Telephone made them famous & rich.

Bell Jr. improved Edison’s phonograph, founded Science journals & improved anti – Semitic propaganda while presiding over the National Geographic Society. It seemed he loved naked savages above the most cultured. But Morse & Bell must be credited with the snowballing of our form of capitalism. Still, Bell in his grave could not prevent his friends of the Supreme Court splitting his monopoly into regional telephone companies, all minor monopolies with new competitors.

With more than 1000 patents in his name, Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931) took over the lead of the 2^nd Industrial Revolution from Bell & Morse. Nobody could have been more inventive before he had advanced in his teens. As a tiny sales “man”, he was superb with a print press & chemical experiments on the train. The only troubles he encountered was the selling of inventions, too modern for their time. Would Alexander G. Bell have become so successful if he hadn’t used Edison’s carbon transmitter for his phone?

“The wizard of Menlo Park”, startled USA with his electric light bulb & a phonograph. The movies owe him their existence. He worked speech into their mimicking of words. Let us at least mention Edison’s battery, dictaphone, mimeograph & the distribution of electric power from one central station.

From West Orange, Edison directed the “General Electric Co” which employed the services of some of the most famous engineers, scientists & inventors. Among the foremost was Charles P. Steinmetz (1865 – 1923); trained in Germany & Switzerland, he was forever researching & studying to escape from evil mockers of his hunchback & stunted growth. The improvement of dynamos, lightning conductors & scores of natural & unnatural phenomena made him the favorite of American college students. He helped also organize the growth of General Electric Co into a central power of U.S. industry.

Edgar Thomson (1808 – 74) had an important leadership role of the very beginning of the Second American Industrial Revolution. He was lucky to learn from his father engineering & administering it. But European railroading taught him more than home schooling. He did his best through running trains for the Georgia Railroad. Then for Pennsylvania Railroad for which he could find & “track” its course through the Allegheny Mountains.

Meek Edgar Thompson combined his Philadelphia studying & teaching about use of electricity with what he was taught in England. With the help of Edwin Houston, his former high school teacher & then colleague he created an arc street lamp.

With Edison’s bigger company, he assisted in putting together the “General Electric Co.” He then went back to teaching at M.I.T. but kept inventing & became known for 700 patents, among them electric welding & a centrifugal cream separator for any good milk. Many physicians also give him credit for developing stereoscopic X-Ray imaging. From 1853 – 1937, he was the star & often outshining Edison but refused to preside over an economic empire which owed him so much & really needed him.

As its president for over 2 decades, he combined with it canals & railroad belonging to his state. Was he flattered, when he aided the American Steamship to float to life! His social & educational activities were phenomenal as though he owned his state & its students; continuing his labors in dangerous places, he fell victim to his own devices. His name was kept alive by grateful citizens. He didn’t try to dominate them like other wealthy industrialist. He only supplied their bread & butter while doing more for that state than Mellon, Morgan Carnegie & Frick combined whose evils are forgotten while their after – life charities made them most famous & redeeming their heartless souls.

HP, Hewlett-Packard, gave Edison’s light bulb a better personal aspect until transformers became the specialty of James W. & Willie D. Packard. Their motor car was a temporary success. Their offspring used hp as symbol for subdued control if Bill Gates wished their lowcase computer would survive in time but not in quality. Who knows what Walmart’s input was? (Others claimed Edison’s patent rights)

George M Pullman (1831 – 97) assumed, like other inventors, that moving his business to Chicago, would make him most successful. With his brother he found the best model for a train wagon & made this car popular. But he had trouble to make railroaders love his nightcar which nevertheless, developed into the famous sleeper we oldster’s can’t forget although we never slept in one. In them black inspectors, agents & organizers found their best living standards before the Civil Rights Acts made all more equal citizens.

Trains would have caused thousands more accidents if George Westinghouse (1840 – 1914) had not engineered ever better brakes. In addition, the safety man combined his own with patents he had to pay for. Thus, he produced electronically controlled Smith systems & signals for still more safety. His “Westinghouse Co.” became a monster in size. Had he not lost the spark in this electrifying genius, he might have made our great railways survive the onslaught of gasoline-driven motorcars which took over an idiot nation, to pollute the world, to crowd the cities and even lousy, little villages. The car is the greatest disturber, murderer & eternal threat of this age. It makes our industry & our humanity cheap, hopeless & sickening. Unless we create a near – 100% solar, wind & water industry – economy – this world is doomed. But the Bush Republicans still bet on oil, oil, oil.

Gerard Swope (1872 – 1957) was a great engineer with an acute business sense. Within 18 years, he ran much of the great company which he had expanded worldwide, the once small Western Electric to General Electric as we know it. Gerard became sole President under Chairman Owen D. Young.

The Zionist in Swope convinced hard-headed Young to feel also responsible for the welfare of their employees & customers. This “Swope Plan” turned into F.D.R.’s “National Industrial Recovery Act”; the good man helped establish health organizations cooperative housing & was invited to organize everywhere organizations of goodwill & good deeds. The “Institute of Pacific Relations” was his final coup.

Owen Young (1874 – 1962) started public life as a lawyer & counseled many top industrialists but remained a decent human being throughout. He was sorely tried though during his chairmanship of RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. That led him to cofound N.B.C., the National Broadcasting Company.

The courts didn’t allow his heading too many alltoofree enterprises. That is why he assisted Gerard Swope’s attempts to force General Electric to become the electrifying spark of U.S. technical superiority without losing the sense for justice & good deeds.

Germany did not consider him an angel because he was asked by our Republican Presidents to plan the Dawes Plan which settled German war guilt for W.W. I & made them pay for the invasion & vandalism perpetrated under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Charles T. Yerkes (1837 – 1905) muddled along as a broker & banker. As a bondsman in Philadelphia, he was caught by the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire & jailed. He served only a third of his sentence. His corruption engineered part of his Chicago’s reconstruction which almost give him ownership over the city. Unable to continue his crimes in Chicago & Philadelphia, he became the head of a strange syndicate which constructed the London “Tube”, now called Subway. His philanthropy made Chicago & Philadelphia forgive his crookedness.

Ransom Olds (1864 – 1950) developed the internal combustion engine &, eventually, sold the original Oldsmobile at a low price. If he had charged more, his solid car could have provided the basis of our “mobile” industry. So Ford, General Motors & a wild host of others earned Olds’s old glories.

Henry Ford (1863 – 1947) was a good worker for Edinson’s industries. The zeal for his own enterprise & trusting investors took Henry to the internal combustion engine with cheap seating structures around them. His price was right. The primitivity of his first 2 models was striking & attractive to country folks. But how compete with the biggies, especially with General Motors?

He simply bribed dedicated workers with $5 a day while the other few automakers wagered on that much for a 6-day work week. Surprise! His ever many more workers could afford to buy the car which made them sweat to make it solid & safe. Ford could barely build all automobiles ordered.

He was also sorry to have made his workers almost middle class spenders which made them uppity & wanting ever more pay as unionizers worked all around Detroit. He blamed much of such “radicalism” on Jews. Like Alex Bell his was a fervent anti-Semite. But he loved to associate with Frederick J. Fisher (1878 – 1941). All the Fisher brothers helped to develop acceptable automobile bodies by the hundred thousands. When the Fisher Body Co. Became part of General Motors, Ford remained friendly to these successful Jews. How can we forget that beautiful young Republican Fisher when she addressed the Republican Presidential Nomination Convention in the name of all other innocent victims of H.I.V.? She caused great stir, many tears of sympathy. Yet she died in the knowledge that Republicans write off human lives with their blame game. Can Microsofty Bill Gates teach those evil ones by his good example?

Studebaker is a brand which signifies solid & most reliable structure of the best horse – drawn wagon & its great money value in that vast industry. Clem Studebaker (1831 – 1901) rose from $68 to riches & power over the world’s agriculture & biggest business. He had begun putting together a well – built gasoline car as early as the more learned manufacturers. He certainly was an honest mover of our economy if not with any striking philosophy like clever word makers.

The Studebaker Corporation was saved by Harold Vance (1890 – 1959). But when it merged with Packard, he immediately tried to commercialize atomic capacities to keep industries going when the world would have to economize fossil fuel. He thought that solar, wind & water could never move our billion motors. It would be better for the world if he could be proven wrong.

We must remember that David Packard engineered much of what General Electric became famous for. When he & his friend Hewlett formed HP or hp, David P. was its first President & later CEO.

He was related in several ways to James W. Packard (1863 – 1928), 2 generations before him who was more versatile. Together with a brother he built one of the earliest autocars & tried to make it a big thing by founding the “Packard Motor Car Company” in Detroit.

All the Vanderbilts were pioneers in vast enterprises & borrowed beyond their credit. As stubborn fighters they acquired railways, steam ship companies, canals, factories of all sorts & land speculation with indulging also a mass-production of beefy & piggish products. Often they ventured their capital in forbidden areas & tried to preserve their monopolies when trust-busters found allies in Congress. Yet, they employed a huge workforce & certainly contributed to our expanding economy.

The locomotive companies were part & parcel of the railway industry. Can both be recreated as solar – plus wind – driven movers of masses? Thorstein Veblen 1857 – 1929 was well-trained in the theory of economics. But he was too critical of modern offshoots to ameliorate uses & abuses. His stinging criticism in readable books like “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, & of the “Industrial Revolution & Absentee Ownership”, made him unwelcome at good universities. I liked his negative approach to rabid capitalism until he turned into something of a Fascist; but he still used terms he cleverly coined like “ostentatious display” & “conspicuous consumption”.

Charles Kettering (1876 – 1958) received much of his practical engineering training at the National Cash Register Co. With a less famous partner he developed Delco at Dayton where his genius took control of engines & their electrical components. We owe him our first electrical ignition system and the 1^st self-starter. Naturally, his enterprise was absorbed by General Motors.

Not much attuned to money-making, he stayed with G.M. as researcher for 3 decades with most beneficial results. The giant of the auto industry owed Kettering the best fuels, shock absorbers, safety glass, fine – tuning transmissions & the Freon freezer in the radiator.

At the age of 71 he joined G.M. retiring president to construct the Sloan – Kettering institute for Cancer Research where our leading cancer researchers received the education which they utilized to set up their various monopolies & money mints.

Alfred P. Sloan graduated from Hyatt Roller Bearings to United Motors. He was foremost among the suppliers of parts & accessories to General Motors. G.M. bought his genius as a fairy low accessory who, however, worked his way up the corporate ladder until he was preferred as the president for 14 years & chairman of the board for another 9 years.

The good man allowed the trade-in of older G.M. cars which so many of us took advantage of. That allowed many of G.M. employees to get the most modern automobile almost every year. By also using the German Diesel engine, he got the American monopoly in heavy vehicles. To nobody’s surprise, he picked Kettering as his partner for one of the most renowned & treasured charity, the Sloan – Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. Independently of Kettering he also headed several institutes for science research. Both were among our very best & model men for idealists in the business world. Millions owed these 2 great ones decent pay & the wide – spread notion that simple workers could enter our middle class & be happy as productive members of an almost perfect society. Oh, how have we fallen so low & are still falling! Hopelessness & fear of our future is becoming our lot unless our commercialism becomes again humanized before our form of mean capitalism bankrupts our system.

William C. Durant (1861 – 1947), a Boston boy, built horse – drawn vehicles in Flint which put him at the head of competition. After nearly 2 decades of enrichment, he bailed out David D. Buick’s (1854 – 1929) insolvent automobile biz which he expanded into G.M.C., General Motors Company. Later Durant also acquired Cadillac & Oldsmobile. With the help of Louis Chevrolet (1878 – 1941) of Swiss engine & race car fame. When this old-country speedster went back to the races (cars built to his design & airplanes too), Durant worked himself into financial problems. For good cash he let, in 1920, Pierre Du Pont (1870 – 1954) assume the whole big biz & its presidency, in spite of his own troubles with the explosive Du Pont clan. Decades of ups & downs finally found him peacefully resting, but not rusting, & share a few millions with neighborhood public schools.

All the Du Ponts were involved, since the American Revolution in big & biggest business carried out by thousands of serviles. More than other families, Du Pont stood for U.S. industry in its biggest sense. They started with land speculation, powder factories, gun development, steel industry, electric street cars, insurance & hotels. Willard Hotel in Washington & Equitable Life Insurance Building were the trademark of the Du Ponts. Being involved in all that matters & the adequate advertizing of all, insurance of all & political involvement in Maryland & Washington, one Du Pont finally did a bit of murdering too. We didn’t hear much about punishment of the wealthiest even those with homosexual inclinations. Did their pharmaceutical power provide the pills which cause silence? As a strong link to the labors of a million, & sometimes, the entire country & the rest of the world Du Pont is representative of our economic superpower.

John N. Willys (1873 – 1935) was barely in his twenties when he could already buy a bicycle factory. Soon he dared compete in car sales. He became rich enough to buy out the Overland Co. Renamed the Willys – Overland, it became big in name. Buying at lowest price a skeleton of a vacant factory in Toledo, he manufacture & sold about 20,000.

Post War I stagnancy got him & his auto production into troubles which grew worse during his political honors as our ambassador to then fascistic Poland. On return to real life, Willys got out of his financial problems by an early death just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to break out of the Hoover Depression. Had he survived into W.W. II industrial developments, he could have made the Willys – Overland the better Jeep.

I noticed a few Willys in China. Someone there seemed to have preferred them to the Jeeps. Were they sturdier & simpler? That is almost what the recently – produced Chinese automobile seems to owe its inexpensive, robust & stay – on – rough roads image.

Even a bit primitive, they will do for the lower echelon of the 10% of Chinese who are prosperous enough to buy them in spite of high taxes, almost equal to the imported cars. To US idiots of luxury, conspicuous over-consumption & show off they could offer a lesson if they were teachable & a bit more unselfish.

Why do we blame China for wasting our billions on their cheap goods while unable to sell them our beautiful trash. Our cruel negative trade balance with all civilized & half – civilized is US sin & punishment for it.

Harvey Firestone (1868 – 1938) started the 20^th century in Akron, Ohio, with rubber balloon tires. He guessed that the automobile was to become the biggest moving item not only for swell heads but even the meek & modest surviving men. Even his tires would move the less heavy car & could be replaced & making old & oldest automobiles worth their investment.

Thanks to him, trucks replaced trains for transporting goods. His ambitions, or greed, planted his own rubber plantation in the still obvious American Colony of “freed” slaves, Liberia. Now the Brits have no longer such colonial monopoly. He could afford ignoring trade unions & offering low wages. Yet, thousands of worker-owned cars had to use Firestone tires. Only in recent years, his successors broke their economic mastery by producing substandard tires which killed drivers who liked speeding. Thus, his heirs also hurt our national car industry, especially Ford that used Firestone rubber rubbish on all their vehicles.

Richmond Service Stations once monopolized the gassy retail sales to automobiles. Now the big oilers & car monopolists control their own over-priced gasoline industry. Chevron & Texaco oil too.

As long as “leadership” made this country lead the world in several powerful industries, this fantastic principle didn’t harm the great reputation of Owen D. Young. His social, economic & political hegemony through thorough law studies & legal practice allowed him to start at the “top”.

As general counsel & vice president of General Electric, he tried to settle labor disputes & also patent rights of G.E. famous engineers & inventors. Esteemed by Presidents of both parties, he was in charge of finding solutions to post World War I unemployment. His chairmanship of RCA “Radio Corporation of America”, was just one step in this direction. Since his command position in USA had been established, he founded also the NBC “National Broadcasting Company”. Those who took over radio wholesale varification, stayed also on top when Broadcasting added the motion picture & TV bully jobs for thousands of enrichment enterprises. More than anything, these establishments remain the models of progress & greed, whatever may be negative in this anti – people people’s entertainment, opinion making & everything that makes US decay before we are ready to concede defeat.

Owen D. Young became the obvious almost universal, choice for #1 International diplomat. But he let his creation be called “Dawes Plan” in over-estimated recognition of a Vice-President & finesser of public finances who, after all, had presided over WWI reparations requirements which kept all failing economies of the West somehow going.

Young thought he had saved the damaged economies of the victors in WWI as “his” “Bank of International Settlement” presided over the distribution of German army’s punishment for invading & vandalizing occupied neighbors’ countries. Germany was condemned by Young to pay nearly 2 billion for 2 generations. Thus the most praised old hand of finance became the most hated devil of the Weimar Republic which favored Hitler’s revenge. But everyone’s hatred was easily diverted by the Christian world to Jews & slowly but surely accepted as hate policy & scapegoating by all the other nations & colonies of hatred.

Soon healthy Americans had given up walking long distances to preserve their health (English: Constitutional) & steely bodies, so they could show off their pricy motor cars (automobiles). Veterans of our wars invented ideas of great profits by leasing to lazy tourists their cars & expensive limousines. They loved to put their hurts in the driver’s seat. In California, I met one of the fist Hertz investors & speedy new financiers. Soon half a-dozen of all you know invented competition the hundredth time.

The big car industrialists were wealthy & inventive enough to buy up those daring little, rich ones. General Motors got rid of their Hertz rentals only recently but may hang on to the money – making “General Motors Acceptance Co” in spite of offers of billions for it. Financing the meeker motor mobilists became doubly rewarding. Interest for those without credit was highest. Their disability to continue debt-payments made them forfeit the possession. The creditor just stole their investment & resold the aging car several times over, just as their second-hand cardealers sold repaired “totals” which were not legally resalable. A little crime never mattered to the big bastards. Conspicuous suburbia consumption led to the gasoline – guzzling Subaru trend & to a more protective Humvee.

John A. McCone (1909 – 91) rose to the presidency of Consolidated Steel Co. His later Bechtel – McClone conglomerate eventually rose to the summit of all large corporations.

Stephen D. Bechtel (1900 – 89) followed his father as President of the Bechtel Corp. He made it the largest construction comp. The Hoover Dam 1931 was the result of this spirited & proud interest in public monumentals. His son Stephen assisted in the design and development of pipe lines, power plants, factories, oil refineries, the Alaska pipeline & the D.C. subway.

Thereafter they controlled sub – companies worldwide & developed monopolistic designs. They were trusted too much. War time contracts without bidding competition led to over-pricing, over-earning & over-failing in matters of solid safety and total reliability. A new administration may legislate sub-dividing this ichtosaurian monopoly. Of course, this economic monster controls the flow of oil but –

Also Haliburton enjoys the no-bid preference because Vice President Cheney was its head & still gets his retirement millions as one of its unrivalled non-bid government contracts. The monopolist & terrorist can sign contracts himself unless he orders his President, Secretary of War & Secr. of Treasury to sign the gift.

I had a frustrated schoolgirl of a disoriented Berkeley family as a protégée, helping 3 sisters to survive in a hungry household with an always drunk father & the mother a permanent absentee.

After I prepared the intelligent but always out – of – school girl, just like her junger sisters, for the G.E.D. test, she got some higher education. She finally married the son of a British baron who worked for a Bechtel subgroup all – over the world. Whenever they went to or came from Australia, they stopped at my home in Hawai’i & told me things, the new lady could not put in her long letters to me.

So I was prepared for former government officials to come from & go back to Bechtel as leading bureaucrats & government connectors like Schultz & Weinberger. None bothered about a little corruption, biggest USA contracts together with Viper-President Cheney’s oil monopoly of Halliburton.

John McCone became chairman of our Atomic Energy Commission & President J.F. Kennedy’s director of the C.I.A., Central Intelligence Agency. Had he not discovered the Russian missiles on their way to Castro Cuba, there might not have developed a cause for a possible World War III.

Even when aged, he still presided over international Telephone & Telegraph wile it was still #1 of world communications with me an occasional interpreter.

Avoiding the Hitler threat against him, Theodore Von Karman (1881 – 1963) [Many Jews of great merit were ennobled by an anti-Semitic Austrian emperor] didn’t return to his great job in Germany in “applied mechanics” & “aerodynamics”. He just remained at the California Institute of Technology where he had directed the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory.

During W.W.II, he founded the “Aerojet Engineering Corporation”, “the Rand Corporation” & also the “Jet Propulsion Laboratory”. Before our sweet government let the top Nazi Dr. Brown take it over, Karman also directed the beginnings of our rocket initiative & the entire space program. But the Nixon – Robert Kennedy – Joe McCarthy suspicions (or Jew hatred) removed the 30 leading Jewish scientists from duty into retirement. The Rand Corporation, also pushed into the back-ground, continued its honorable existence mostly in technology as well as politics.

The Lockheed Brothers from Niles, California, wore known as automobile mechanics in their home state & highflying enthusiasm got them to fly their models of fighter planes. Just after peace in 1919, Malcolm vanished into the unknown. Brother Allan presided over the now renamed “Lockhead Aircraft Company” for 3 years although his name had been altered from Lockheed. But he left it to more daring capitalists to vie & construct with huge government contracts within easy reach during W.W. II & the subsequent cold war.

Glenn Curtiss (1878 – 1930) raced on his bicycles & motor bikes before he competed with the poor Wright Brothers on their starting line. Curtiss went on & on flying his flying boat & hydroplane. During W.W. II he started a really big industry building at least 5000 “Jennies”. Had he not indulged in several more profitable industries, he might have become the founder of a great airline.

Eastern Airlines became part of General Motors & still failed. Pan America got hard hit by being made legally responsible for its Lockerbie, Scotland, disaster.

Edward Rickenbacker (1890 – 1973) a race – car driver, was the aviators’ ace of aces but all he touched in peacetime failed. He lacked the valid business urges. Hyman Rickover (1900 – 86) was his equivalent in the Navy. Even all his nuclear ambitions were achieved, perhaps to the detriment of our environment.

Trans World Airlines had great beginnings before WW II negated most private & business flights. Yet, Jack Frye overcame that dry, only try, period of bloody history to preside as president for 14 years. He did well initiating international flights. He did not witness the terrorist endangerment of our flight industry because he preferred to die in a car crash in lovely Arizona.

Continental Airlines had modest beginnings. Moving from homey Stockton, CA, Robert Six established “Central Valley Flying Service” just before World War II. Interrupted by his piloting around China, he was ready to buy a large minority of partnership in “Varey Speed Lines”. For 46 years as president of renamed “Continental Airlines”, he got it past the 2000 world mark when all of the airy liners got in serious troubles. The steady wars between owners-directors & employees on all levels supported the headmen in drawing huge salaries from “their” corporations but not investing their millions in safety & structural improvement. Now all are at sixes & sevens & subject to our President’s charity to corporate directors & shareholders.

Considering the biggest ones, I could tell personal anecdotes about American & United. I avoid these pacesetters only because my problems with both could give me a heart attack. Likewise Japanese & Luftwaffe (I mean Lufthansa). To my surprise, China Airline (Taiwan-centered) gave me as good service as did the late PSA, PanAm & TWA.

In Henry J Kaiser (1882 – 1967) we have the great practical hero who conscientiously worked for everyone’s welfare during trying years of our economy. He often succeeded where nobody had good answers to great problems. A “no” was unacceptable to him. From (1882 – 1917) he lived a most fulfilling life. Only in his moves as a young searcher, he moved from NE to NW to do what others wished him to do. But it was in Canada’s Vancouver that he founded his first construction company. He underbid all government competitors to make himself the peaceful WWI hero by building highways where our soldiers trotted if only for training & preparedness.

This was no imperial Kaiser; he knew how to build a conglomeration of like minds to build the biggest & the most important peace time projects. Hoover Dam owes him its tremendous significance to attack the Great Depression & next to fulfill the Roosevelt Revolution – Dam it he may have thought: the Grand Coulee after the Bonneville in Washington west, the S.F. Bay Bridge, etc. He underpinned such massive constructions by “cementing” the most importing building material of modern times & gave work with good pay to all willing to do their share in raising US to the summit of the world.

Nobody else could have engineered the massive construction of “his” 1400 Liberty Ships, none so speedily, none equally innovative. The tarrying & cautious unbelievers feared that those war winners could split into two, as they were thusly fast-joined together. That man had the courage of his convictions as our admirals admiringly admitted. Kaiser Aluminum & new whole new towns were his “children” during times of great need.

With Howard Hughes he developed his aircraft monopoly & with Joseph Frazer simple but popular automobiles in masses. His marvelous relations with his own laborers & nearly all his other employees were exemplary. Social achievements were part of his endeavors. To nobody’s surprise, Henry the Kaiser & his Permanente bore the best & largest health organization during his lifetime. My amoebic dysentery was part of his & his doctors’ disease research. Only after I moved from the Oakland area, small-brain successors failed me. In Hawai’i Kaiser accepted me again & let me pay, only to reject me a few months later as one already too cancerous.

Only Howard Hughes, better trained & heir to riches, equalled the Kaiser in the variety of grandiose entrepreneurship as he followed the older model without anti-Semitic jealousy. He made his tool company as vast as his Texas & became rich without any Confederate slavery notion.

His money was needed to “produce” great films which impressed all actresses for the taking. His RKO often trumped the bigger studios. A high flier, he owned plenty of flying records soon after he got his pilot’s licence.

But allowing the world of luxury to worship him, made him asocial although his excuses were based on new science developments, germ theories & environmental concerns. Had he been modest in wealth & recognition like Kaiser he might have ended in sanity without getting entangled in numerous killing law suits. Much of the blame for his dirty death should have been assumed by the Mormon Church which may also have forged one of his last wills. In death, he defeated those mighty crooks, but his memory as a great, great contributor & employer & creative capitalist is forever soiled in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. This is a nice occasion to move away from such overbearing capitalism which reveals only anti-democratic & anti republican caesarism with all the instinct of piracy, robber – economy & revolting political imperialisms, now so evilly lead by Gingrich, Lott, Bush Jr, Dr. Frist & their corrupt allies.

John Wanamaker (1838 – 1922) proved the Sondheim & Reemtsma paradigm of religion & business combine their double effectiveness. Philadelphia was a good starting ground. From running the local Y.M.C.A. & his brother’s – in – law clothing shop, his prayers got him a fashionable place for modes & their costumes. What was rampant in Germany at that time, the department store and emporium for nearly all mechandize, became his N.Y. reinvention. Definitely, his military drilling of all his employees was a great invention. It pleased many Presidents. Benjamin Harrison rewarded J.W. with a secretaryship as Postmaster General which remained the repayment of the leading organizer of victory until Truman chose the first professional for that job.

Roland H. Macy (1822 – 77) did a whale of fishing as a teenster. He did his California stint with thousands of gold rushers but not gambling away his savings like most. Just dry buying, selling & profiting as an honest competitor. Expanding into big department store storytrader within the 20 years, he could have lived it up. He left a proud, huge retail enterprise valued at more than its few millions cost price. The Macy tradition by itself was calculated in terms of immense “goodwill”.

Isidor Straus (1845 – 1912) had European & Confederate experience in glassware & crockery. That didn’t stop him from taking over Macy. The man made Democrat President Grover Cleveland adopt the gold standard, so dear to Republicans. He drowned with his wife on the Titanic.

Once the “White House” in New York was a capable competitor for Macy pioneers. Its East European founders & long term owners enjoyed the propaganda highlighted by its D.C. namesake. Decades later, heirs were no match in smartness, good quality selling & advertizing its available goods.

As I sat as a young fellow in a Repertory Theater of San Francisco’s intelligentsia, an ugly – mouthed heiress asked me if I could understand Will Shakespeare’s original language of all. I shocked her by translating the “Taming of the Shrew” into her common English. That was the last time I heard of this commercial White House as a gung – ho emporium before I read that a bigger one also with a bankrupted future had swallowed a big business.

Now you can buy overpriced fashionable consumer goods in big marts or specialty stores in person or over the internet’s cyber space.

Marshal Field (1838 – 1906) tried retail business in New England. Eventually, his Chicago enterprise became a huge department store which, for a time, even edited & sold important books & encyclopedias. As a true emporium it was world – famous even beyond several great public buildings & good causes. It was a good part of a local economy which represented thousands of good job opportunities.

Perhaps, Joseph Kennedy’s (1888 – 1969) Chicago’s Merchant’s Mart became richer, more influential, because he connected it with his banker’s insider trading in valuables & futures, as his biggest money makers.

Although already rich, he married in Boston into the political powerhouse of the Fitzgeralds. Still, he lacked the capital of acquiring the huge market building. His clever money talk converted a Jewish money success into sharing all the costs of the acquisition.

Joseph, the Kennedy, let his partner do some practical work while he himself oversaw the crooked accounting. Showing his dumb sleeping partner in print how had business losses were, he made the Jew sell him his huge investment at a great loss. His laugh about poor Semitic understanding made him a permanent anti-Semite &, later, an admirer of Adolf Hitler. He made young John F. Kennedy “shake hands with a great man” on his way to London as the US ambassador to the country this Irishman hated. Maybe, the children of the Austrian muscle man & governor of California & his Shriver (Kennedy) wife will earn millions from the Merchant Mart along with the children of Kohlberg & John F. Kennedy’s still living daughter Caroline.

Before Walmart Supermarkets cornered the world’s retail market, it was Sears – Robuck that owned every farmer’s, furnisher’s & folksy outfitter’s heart.

Richard W. Sears 1863 – 1914 got bored with his steady rail road job. A load of watches got caught at his R.R. station when refused by supposed buyers. It may have been his own idea to retail watches by mail catalogue. Newspaper advertizing helped to enlarge his on-time watches’ mailing.

Because of occasional breaks & splintering, he invited watch repairman Alvah C. Roebuck (1864 – 1948) to join him who survived his former partner by more than 3 decades. Jewelry was going well, too, along with time tickers.

Before the end of the century, Sears, Roebuck & Co issued yearly a free retail catalogue of over 1000 pages. With slight changes in title of the company & many headquarters from Minneapolis to Chicago. Neither original partner remained rich while new merchandizers of fame & fortune took over. They became richer but didn’t promote the former solid quality. In fact, they continued to sell well through their many chainstores where poor leadership supplemented poorer quality. Many of those stores exist as repair shops with ambulant tool & repair vans.

Julius Rosenwald (1862 – 1932) was imbued with the Abraham Lincoln mystic because he was born across Abe’s house. Moving from Springfield to Chicago, he started men’s wear stores. He was a big owner when Sears Roebucked there too. He was readily chosen the bigger one’s vice president.

As Sears’ president for 15 years & chairman of the board for 7 more years, he enlarged the mailorder wholesale business. Thinking of ancient biblical prophets, he introduced profit – sharing features for all his employees. He remained mindful of all good causes among minorities with special difficulties because of U.S. racial phobias.

Samuel Walton (1918 – 92) became the “King fish” of Missouri who ran a chain of Ben Franklin chain stores with 5 & 10¢ items. He moved to Arkansas; from there he enlarged the number of his cheap discount shops. Quantity for this man became more important than quality. Was the man’s intent to undermine solid stores of good repute as he was reducing the struggling Mom & Pa corner stores which got so long away with highest pricing because they were open hours before Mall stores & stayed open longer too. Sam himself ran his thousands of chainstores as C.E.O. & sat as chairman until he died.

By that time, he was already accused of hiring illegal new-comers across boarders & having little children & prison inmates fabricate his goods in India, Pakistan & China. Abroad Walmart has to pay for Social Security & all health requirements; at home the biggies avoid those “unnecessary” expenditures. Those asocial money makers get the most of Bush II tax gifts as they gather their billions & ever more billions. Walmart earned the most billions. At least 3 or 5 Waltons are among the richest persons in the world. Only in 2005, President Bush let Exxon Mobil earn more than Walmart. Both got the monstrous tax relief too. Our top oiler believes in Socialism for the wealthiest only.