Friendly reminder that Eddie Lampert effectively drowned Sears Holdings (Sears & Kmart) in the bath tub. He single-handedly wiped out two major retailers, hundreds of smaller ones, and tens of thousands of jobs in one of the most successful corporate raids ever executed.

What a greedy shit bag.

I'll be honest: I'm no fan of big corps, but I'm kinda sad that I can't still buy a build-it-yourself house kit from Sears.

East Indian trading company had a navy

As though they “work” now? (I heard the unwritten /s and just wanted to clarify)

That was what I thought as well, I wanted clarity to ensure that OP didn't mean Cosby, as that would also make sense.

Since literally all of the economic policies of the last 5,000 - 12,000 years that most people know about were designed to fuck the poor, the fictional middle class, and anyone else that wasn't rich to begin with. It wasn't called "Horse and Sparrow" economics for no reason. They didn't rebrand it to "Trickle down" economics for no reason.

Prior to 12,000 years ago, one can actually find sensible, and sustainable economic policy that lasted from 15,000 to 25,000 years ago, until the late 1700s. In the form of the six nations. Archeology confirms that 25,000 years ago isn't an unreasonable estimate, just possibly unsupported by current data. Their best data says that the 6 nations were there, and doing much the same thing for at least 20,000 years.

Sigh..we deserve the worst as a species.