In 2010, Torvalds became a United States citizen and registered to vote in the United States. As of that year, he was unaffiliated with any U.S. political party, saying, "I have way too much personal pride to want to be associated with any of them, quite frankly."[51]
Medal Of Honor 2010 [2010][L][ENG] Hack Working
In summer 2004, viewers of YLE (the Finnish Broadcasting Company) placed Torvalds 16th in the network's 100 Greatest Finns. In 2010, as part of a series called The Britannica Guide to the World's Most Influential People, Torvalds was listed among The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time (.mw-parser-output cite.citationfont-style:inherit;word-wrap:break-word.mw-parser-output .citation qquotes:"\"""\"""'""'".mw-parser-output .citation:targetbackground-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133).mw-parser-output .id-lock-free a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Lock-green.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat.mw-parser-output .id-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .id-lock-registration a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat.mw-parser-output .id-lock-subscription a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg")right 0.1em center/12px no-repeat.mw-parser-output .cs1-codecolor:inherit;background:inherit;border:none;padding:inherit.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-errordisplay:none;color:#d33.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-errorcolor:#d33.mw-parser-output .cs1-maintdisplay:none;color:#3a3;margin-left:0.3em.mw-parser-output .cs1-formatfont-size:95%.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-leftpadding-left:0.2em.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-rightpadding-right:0.2em.mw-parser-output .citation .mw-selflinkfont-weight:inheritISBN 9781615300037).[75]
The early forms of labor organization in the United States were largely mutual aid societies or craft guilds that restricted entry into a craft and enforced workplace standards, as was also the case in Western Europe. It didn't raise too many hackles or cause too many hassles because craft workers were relatively few in number and most companies were small. But industrial development in the early nineteenth century slowly widened the gap between employers and skilled workers, so the workers began to think of industrial factories as a threat to both their wages and status. They soon formed fledgling craft unions in an attempt to resist sudden wage cuts, longer working hours, and unsafe working conditions, while also protecting their political, social, and economic rights. Most of these unions were local in scope, but as both labor and product markets became more national due to improvements in transportation, and as employers continued to decrease wages and de-skill jobs, workers came to believe that they would have to organize on a wider basis if they were to be effective. But they faced enormous resistance from employers and had little success until the 1890s.
At the BAC's first general meeting in Washington on June 26, 1933, ten days after the NRA itself was created, the NRA director asked Teagle to chair the NRA's Industrial Advisory Board, which drew the majority of its members from the BAC as well (McQuaid 1979, p. 685-686). Teagle brought Hicks, his recently retired industrial relations vice-president at Standard Oil of New Jersey, to join him in Washington as his personal assistant. (At this point Hicks was paid about $98,500 a year as a personal consultant to Rockefeller, in addition to his $163,500 a year pension from Standard Oil of New Jersey -- both those figures are in terms of 2012 dollars). Teagle, along with Swope and other business executives, then spent the summer of 1933 overseeing the development of the NRA. In short, the overlap between the corporate community, the Rockefeller industrial relations network, and the NRA was very extensive. This seems to be even more the case when it is added that other top businesspeople came to Washington to serve the NRA as "presidential industrial advisers" on temporary loan from their corporations. In other words, and this conclusion will rankle those who see the American government as independent of "big business," the corporate community was subsidizing, staffing, and building a new state agency. Moreover, it was happening at the very time that the corporate community supposedly had lost power and legitimacy, according to the modern-day experts that rule the academic roost when it comes to the understanding of the alleged ups and downs of corporate power (Finegold and Skocpol 1995; Hacker and Pierson 2002; Hacker and Pierson 2004; Hacker and Pierson 2010)}
Although highly conservative and anti-government, the du Ponts became Democrats in the 1920s to push for repeal of prohibition, which they favored for reasons that are still disputed -- maybe to make federal income taxes less necessary through the collection of taxes on alcoholic beverages, or to keep the role of the federal government in American life to a minimum, or to make sure that respect for government was not lost through the flagrant disregard for the law (Okrent 2010; Webber 2000, Chapter 2). They also were drawn to the Democrats because one of their top employees, John J. Raskob, who served as vice-president for finance for both General Motors and the DuPont Corporation, backed fellow Catholic Al Smith for president in 1928 and then took over as the head of the Democratic National Committee.
The major question that must be answered by any theory attempting to understand the American power structure is how a law so vehemently opposed by organized business groups could pass so easily despite their very large lobbying effort. For historical institutionalists, the passage of the Wagner Act shows that corporate leaders had lost whatever power they once had in Washington (e.g., Finegold and Skocpol 1995; Hacker and Pierson 2010). For many Marxists, the increased unity and militancy of the working class forced a worried corporate community and a timid New Deal to accede to labor demands (e.g., Goldfield 1989). For other Marxists, it was a clever cooptation move made by corporate moderates and AFL "labor bosses" to limit the rise of Communist leadership in the labor movement (Aronowitz 1973; Aronowitz 2003; Davis 1986).
The unions were particularly concerned about a possible Republican victory because of the highly visible but ultimately futile efforts of the American Liberty League. The du Pont family and their close allies, the Pew family, which owned Sun Oil, gave nearly one million dollars to the Republicans (that's $16.1 million in 2010 dollars) and one-third of the Republican National Finance Committee was identified with the Liberty League (Wolfskill 1962, pp. 205-206). The du Ponts also gave another $350,000 and the Pews an additional $20,000 to the Liberty League and other extremely right-wing groups, with names like the Crusaders, the Sentinels of the Republic, and the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution (e.g., Webber 2000, p. 27). This money was used to supplement the Republican campaign in a variety of ways.
In addition, the act legitimated laws already passed in 11 states that allowed employees to decline to pay dues to an established union if they so desired, in effect holding out the temptation to workers of being "free riders," i.e., people who benefited from any union successes, but did not have to help pay for the efforts to win them (Dempsey 1961, pp. 25-27). (These laws are called "right-to-work laws" because employers insist that their support for the right to resist joining a union is based upon a principled defense of the rights of individual workers). Although 12 more states passed such laws by the end of 1963, they were repealed in Delaware, Indiana, Louisiana, and New Hampshire, which meant that there were 19 right-to work states in 1965, when the union movement still had considerable political muscle. By the end of 2012, there were 24 right-to-work states, twelve in the South, five in the Great Plains, five in the Rocky Mountain region, and two in the Midwest, due to successful campaigns in Louisiana in 1976, Idaho in 1986, Oklahoma in 2001, and Indiana and Michigan in 2012 (Dixon 2007; Dixon 2010, for good sociological studies of right-to-work laws).
Despite these apparent victories in the Supreme Court for the corporate community, the decisions did not go far enough to satisfy even the corporate moderates, who decided to join with ultraconservatives in an attempt to bring about changes in labor law through the legislative process. The outcome of this attempt was not what they originally hoped for, but it did set the stage for victory by another route in the 1970s. It is also important to describe this all-out effort so readers can decide for themselves if the reigning academic school of though on corporate power is right when its leaders say that business was not well organized until the early 1970s and did not really start to win on labor issues until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Put more specifically, political scientists David Vogel (1989) and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010), along with historian Kim Phillips-Fein (2009) seem to be nearly oblivious to the class conflict that went on in the 1960s at the legislative, regulatory, and factory levels, which was rendered all the more volatile and difficult because white pushback against the integration of neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces was at the same time weakening the unions at the ballot box.
It is this defection by white trade unionists from the Democrats, not the alleged sudden organization of the corporate community, which explains the right turn in the United States on labor and many other issues. A fractured liberal-labor alliance was defeated by an enlarged corporate-conservative alliance that was revitalized by the resentments of white Democrats and independents over the demands by the civil rights movement, feminists, environmentalists, and soon thereafter, the gay-lesbian movement. I know it sounds strange coming from a class-dominance theorist, but the problem was not that the corporate community somehow got its act together and asserted itself. This corporate-assertiveness theory is the great conceit of the liberal conventional wisdom of the twenty-first century, which comes close to explaining away the defections from the liberal-labor alliance that were the main cause of its demise, or at the least, the start of its decline and fall (Hacker and Pierson 2010; Phillips-Fein 2009). 2ff7e9595c
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