In my cleaning and reorganizing I found the box from an old product of mine. Sort of anyway; at this point the product had already been made obsolete by the explosion of fax modems (we built the product in the 80's; here it's being sold in 1993). Anyway, this is what it looked like after we'd sold it to a group laundering Columbian drug money (yet another reason I am a no-go person in the US):
I was also reading an old interview* with Walter Wriston, the former CEO of Citicorp (Citibank) who retired in 1984. Anyway, he is asked,
What's the future of one-stop shopping for all your banking, insurance, and investment needs?The real issue is who is going to run these financial supermarkets. Will it be something called a bank? Or will it be General Electric, Merrill Lynch, or Fannie Mae? All I can tell you is the banking business used to have about 70 percent of the financial assets of the world. Now we have about 30 percent. Do you know any industry that went from 70 down to 30 percent of market share and survived?
It's still an unancerwed question if America's heavily regulated banks can compete against huge corporations with massive cash flows. All I'm saying is that the share of financial assets administered by banks is shrinking every day, while the share administrated by the General Electrics of the world is growing.
Banks are regulated. Tightly regulated. International megacorps are not only totally unregulated, but they have more money and power than most smaller nations, and have more than enough power (as we've seen) to dictate the actions of even the biggest countries in the world.
Remember, when I say revolution now I'm talking about killing the corporation. It's an abomination and should not exist. We need to go back to small businesses, craftspeople, and guilds. Hmmm… Maybe we should start a body modification guild.
* WIRED 4.10 US, October 1996
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