Someone married Ebert? I wonder what his boyfriend thinks about that.
Regarding Ebert's question about how much money the unions have stolen compared to corporations like Enron, if you include in the definition of stealing the tens of millions of dollars every year they throw at politicians their members don't support, I'd say they're in the same ballpark. At least.
(BTW, has there been any studies done of a correlation between body mass and slavish devotion to one-sided documentaries? Just wondering.)
Instead of Agent Orange let's substitute DDT. Now millions are dying worldwide because GOVERNMENT abolished its use.
Hate corporations? buy stock
You haven't avoided the corporate world, bozo! You are a DIRCECT beneficiary of that world and of all the legal protections it enjoys. Your prosperity and fame WOULDN'T EXIST without the entreprenurial and technological advances bestowed upon you by corporations.
Is there anything more blockheaded than a leftist discussing economics? I don't think so. Ebert apparently doesn't know that the Sun-Times and every TV network he appears upon is a corporation.
And the Ubergeeks at Microsoft have patented the human body.
I would bet that he was at Canyon Ranch, perhaps the priciest of these "health ranches." And he's claiming to speak for the working man. What a joke.
Oprah Winfrey learned that it is not wise to incite panic about the meat industry. Roger Ebert may be about to learn a similar lesson.
But in addition to that consider the pure ignorance of his economics. He just refuses to recogonize the essential role competition plays in keeping an economy dynamic, growing and prosperous. That's a typical leftist position, and Ebert is nothing if not a typical leftist, right down to the fact that as a kid he was undoubtedly holed up in his room by himself watching movies and daydreaming while other kids his age were learning about team effort and competitive spirit on the playground. Leftism is the pursuit of daydreamers.
Competition can be ugly, exasperating and painful, but it's also the core element of the human drive to improve not only ourselves but the whole world around us, too. Without it we'd still be living in grass huts on the African savannah eating berries and hiding from predators.
Ebert and his fellow daydreamers think we can simply discard this element of human nature without harm, that the values of the "union" (i.e., fear of and resistance to change, antagonism towards profit and investment, competition, feather-bedding, no-work biases, diminished productivity) can sustain the economy. Nevermind that every economy so constituted has failed miserably over the last one hundred years. Nevermind that our own fantastic prosperity over the past twenty-five years springs directly from Ronald Reagan's successful breaking of the unions. For simpleminded Ebert, unions are good and corporations are bad.
Ebert also has his facts wrong when he claims to "have been waiting for opponents of stem cell research to attack the private ownership and patenting of actual living organisms, but [he] waits in vain." There has been a great deal of discussion about this with many pro-life groups opposing such patents. Ebert makes this kind of error frequently when he writes on politics. He's a dilletante, dabbling in areas where he has no expertise but affecting great expertise just the same. He's an excellent example of the kind of misguided notions that populate the minds of those who live their lives in the world of make-believe.