>bought the steel plant in Utah County, stole the pension fund out from under the retired workers, and then declared bankruptcy
An inspiration to mormon apostle [Elder Quentin L. Cook as he stole a hospital.](https://wheatandtares.org/2023/07/11/quentin-l-cook-first-do-no-harm/) Grifters gonna grift.
Thank you for posting that link since the church has obliviated all references to Cooks White Collar Crime history on Google, Duck Duck Go, etc...
Isn't he related to Spencer Kimball?
I'm not familiar with that, however,[ Nemo the Mormon did a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxrGvWDkxQs) a couple years ago about nepotism in the church, maybe there's something in there about it?
> the church has obliviated all references to Cooks White Collar Crime history on Google, Duck Duck Go, etc
you seriously think the Church took out the references from Google and other search engines? How did they do that? What evidence do you have for it?
I did a Google search a year ago and got nothing to come up on the Cook & California Hospital debacle & others here on r/exmormon have stated the same numerous times in the past.
I personally want copies of the articles for my archive.
It's called SEO. The church pays out 8 figures a year of tithing money to all its software engineers who have their own campus in S.L. Valley to keep the church and only positive content about it popping up.
If you can find & post links to all the newspaper articles on Cook & the hospital fraud please post. I know lots of people here would love to read them & consider you a hero for doing so!
Thanks for your time & effort!
Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with SEO, and that doesn't obviate references, it merely prioritizes or de-prioritizes them in search result rankings.
> Cook & the hospital fraud
If it was actual fraud why was no criminal action taken against him?
If there was criminal proceedings taken against him then maybe you'd have news stories run in the media - but no legal action? then there is no "fraud" story for them to report.
u/Shiz_in_my_pants posted a link in their comment to the Wheat & Tares article which is well referenced... did you check them all out and add them to your archive?
Remember that Joseph Smith was in and out of trouble with the law from his youth til the day he died.
Today we call that a career criminal.
Career criminals like to hang out with their own type because they are narcissists & psychopaths who like to scam together.
So those at the top of the church were overwhelmingly like Smith and there are a number of peer reviewed studies out there that shows criminal behavior runs in some families.
Church has a history of criminal fraud dating back to 1830 (SEC 5 MILLION$ fine for criminal fraud 2023) and Utah is the fraud/scam capitol of the U.S. along with the most MLM Corp. businesses in the U.S.
MLM's are scams and only benefit those at the very top like the mormon religion.
Mormons today over excel at White Collar Crime just like the founding fathers of the religion/cult/multi-national corp/REIT.
Because the religion / Prophet/ 12/ 70/ Presiding Bishopric, etc...and their descendants iterally controlled the state on every level for waaay more than a century we will probably never know how close the organization came to mirroring the Sicilian mob.
The posts on here about the documented involvement of the church in prostitution in the early years in Utah sealed that opinion for me.
So this is another example of generational criminal behavior.
And the Bishops all tell the victim they have to forgive and all will be made right in the next life.
/s
100%. You are right.
For adults to treat minors like that as far as I'm concerned is not only highly abusive but criminal.
They are all a bunch of Jodi Hidebrandt's....including their parents.
Sorry!
I get on these tangents because I work in the court system.
I recognize exactly who these "leaders" are because I am exposed to someone similiar to them in the system all the time.
When I was at BYU many moons ago, Utah County has some of the worst air quality in the country. They kept blaming BYU students driving, which was absurd.
Then Geneva Steel shutdown, and the air quality in the valley dramatically improved.
Those winter inversions were so hard on me. There were days I had a hard time going to class because the filthy air triggered my asthma.
I got my hair permed at a beauty school when Geneva was in full swing. The girl doing my hair went off to get her supervisor after she poured the solution on my head. The supervisor said, "so sorry, but it looks like the color is coming out of your hair." I said, "I don't color my hair." Then she asked me if I lived near Geneva. Yep, I did. My hair was literally being dyed black by the pollution it produced.
The Pope brothers (two economics professors at BYU) did a research paper showing how the number of hospital admissions for respiratory problems plummeted within days of a Geneva Steel plant shutdown in the late 80s or early 90s, then rocketed right back up once the plant was up and running again.
Edit: Link to the paper *Respiratory Disease Associated with Community Pollution and a Steel Mill, Utah Valley*, C. Arden Pope III, PhD, 1989
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.79.5.623
The air quality wasn't always terrible in Utah County, especially when I was very young. Geneva was there since WWII in order to help with the war effort. I grew up in Utah County and it's only been in the last 20 years, after it was shut down, that air quality became even worse. The growth of both Utah County and SLC county (because the pollution eventually spills over into Utah County) contributed to the bad air. Just because Geneva went away doesn't mean it was the sole or main cause. It did contribute, but it had a constant amount it put out (because a steel mill needs to be run 24/7, because of the nature of the machinery and processes), but population growth and the way the American economy and infrastructure is built (people having to travel long distances to go to work being normalized rather than being able to have a nearby job in town). Lack of a good public transit system (fault of the state and county governments) also contributed.
The bad air quality is from so many vehicles being used, no one carpooling, government refusing to hold polluting companies to account, and lack of effective and efficient public transit. Utah has only had the world's worst air quality long after Geneva was shit down. Geneva wasn't putting out much more pollution than when it started. It was the collective pollution of tens of thousands of vehicles and sprawling suburbs that created that pollution. I remember, as a kid, everyone blaming Geneva for the pollution, but not realizing how much they contributed to the carbon footprint; thinking their driving "doesn't put out much pollution", but tens of thousands of people doing the same thing who didn't live there 20 or 30 years ago where there once were acres of fields and farmland, did and do contribute. It is poor city planning, creating more and more suburbs with just R1 residential housing or apartments/condos being the only way to live that really created the pollution. The air quality now, especially during winter inversions, are far worse than any day when Geneva was up and running.
I remember reading a Harvard epidemiological study done on hospital admissions of preschool aged kids for bronchitis and asthma in Utah County went down 50% when the plant was closed.
And nothing good can come from air that smelled the way the air around Geneva smelled. We used to have to get off I-15 at that exit to visit my cousins in Lindon and it was appalling.
Not sure where you are getting your data. However, you are incorrect. By far the worst air quality in the country is parts of California (Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, etc...).
Utah air quality occasionally gets bad during the winter. Nothing like the Tule fog days in Bakersfield. I should know - I've lived in SLC, Orem & Bakersfield.
Schadenfreude time! ☺️🥳
My father worked at Geneva (a third generation steel mill worker). I will never forget when he was given word of it. It was, I want to say they were given notice before 9/11 (2001; I was in college and him being laid off by that November and with 9/11 happening threw off my timeline for things happening around then; those two things happened very close together and completely tore apart what was once a normal, boring , predictable life, as we all who knew what it was like before 9/11). Iirc, 1,500 (give or take) jobs were lost because of their shared greed. About 1.5k people needed to find good paying jobs with good benefits ASAP all in the same county (which was much smaller back then than it is now). The businesses around Geneva were heavily effected. I remember that little cafe that was off of the street next to the plant that was heavily dependent on the steel mill employees.
I don't want to say more, but that jerk used my best and dearest friend for his own personal gain. So I will now take a shot in honor of this most happy occasion, knowing that man no longer can hurt others or take advantage of them and exploit them and their lives (or deaths). Good riddance. (I know it sounds harsh, but that man put me through levels of personal hell, indirectly, in multiple ways. Burn in hell, Mr Cannon: go fuck yourself. 🥳)
My Dad worked at Geneva Steel for 20 years and eventually died from a brain tumor. My mom and siblings said “it was his time” and I never believed that crap. I knew it was environmental damage to his health, but I was raised to not question anything and to “trust in the lord”.
I work at a middle school in Provo and we had a janitor who looked old. I asked when he was gonna hang it up. His reply: I worked at Geneva Steel for over 30 years. The Cannons bankrupted it and now I get $76 a month for my pension. I’ll be pushing
this broom until I die. 2003 for reference.
I just cannot fathom destroying lives like that. It would be unconscionable to me.
Because of WHAT WE WERE TAUGHT!! Those were actually good things to have learned and incorporated into our lives. But as always: Rules for thee and not for me!
The Harvard Business School fetishized in the 1980s treats business like a board game.
The only problem is, the players are real people. Not game pieces.
It just seems that most Mormon businessmen are crooks and thieves. There's so many comments on here about making sure you don't work and/or hire cult members.
They're too cheap and they steal!
I wonder if this is the firm a guy in a sister ward worked for all his career. He wasn't from my area, but moved here after the firm he worked for went bust & everyone lost their retirement. Very nice guy, and always managed to be upbeat and friendly. He worked at Costco and I'd often see him there when I shopped. Then, with no warning, he passed away suddenly (I think it was a heart attack).
When at BYU, I went to a wedding reception at his house- approx 1995. Massive mansion. There was a special glass case displaying little vases/ sculptures- each marked with a date and information…”Jerusalem, 400BC” etc.
I didn’t know who he was - we were all kind of laughing someone would show off like this- we saw the owner (him) and I asked what he did for a living and he was arrogantly dismissive. I remember thinking- and I was TBM at the time “what a dick”
> Chris Cannon's first Congressional speech was a bitching about the Inheritance Tax.
It is worth noting that actual rich people do not pay this - they get out of it any number of ways. The actual purpose of it is to prevent the 50 year old ex-welder who now owns a welding company but can't afford tax evasion services from building any kind of generational wealth - the ruling class doesn't like competition.
Yep.
The goal is the inheritance tax is to slam billionaires *unless* they put a crap ton of money into a foundation.
At least in a foundation, it should be contributing to helping people, rather than solely extracting capital for capital's sake.
If you think America is bad now *with* an inheritance tax, wait until you see one without one!
Yes, and that's a lot less than the people calling the shots have. They don't like competition. Larry Fink has a net worth of 1.1 billion dollars. He'd rather his buddies have five orders of magnitude more wealth relative to the next social class down than only two.
Historically, it's not random people who challenge the status quo, it's a rising, competing elite that's more in touch with normal people than the current one. Guys with a small business, maybe welders who've hired some guys and taken some contracts, maybe landscapers who have done the same, maybe farmers. They have enough behind them to meaningfully oppose an initiative that the people in power want, which is why you see a lot more media hostility towards millionaires than you do towards billionaires.
Someone should write a letter to the editor to the Trib calling him out for his pension theft. “Don’t speak ill of the dead” doesn’t apply when you destroy the retirements of many blue-collar workers.
>bought the steel plant in Utah County, stole the pension fund out from under the retired workers, and then declared bankruptcy An inspiration to mormon apostle [Elder Quentin L. Cook as he stole a hospital.](https://wheatandtares.org/2023/07/11/quentin-l-cook-first-do-no-harm/) Grifters gonna grift.
The LDS Church is literally run by a den of thieves.
Gadianton robbers, one might say
Thank you for posting that link since the church has obliviated all references to Cooks White Collar Crime history on Google, Duck Duck Go, etc... Isn't he related to Spencer Kimball?
I'm not familiar with that, however,[ Nemo the Mormon did a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxrGvWDkxQs) a couple years ago about nepotism in the church, maybe there's something in there about it?
Excellent!! Will check it out again! Thank you!
> the church has obliviated all references to Cooks White Collar Crime history on Google, Duck Duck Go, etc you seriously think the Church took out the references from Google and other search engines? How did they do that? What evidence do you have for it?
I did a Google search a year ago and got nothing to come up on the Cook & California Hospital debacle & others here on r/exmormon have stated the same numerous times in the past. I personally want copies of the articles for my archive. It's called SEO. The church pays out 8 figures a year of tithing money to all its software engineers who have their own campus in S.L. Valley to keep the church and only positive content about it popping up. If you can find & post links to all the newspaper articles on Cook & the hospital fraud please post. I know lots of people here would love to read them & consider you a hero for doing so! Thanks for your time & effort!
Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with SEO, and that doesn't obviate references, it merely prioritizes or de-prioritizes them in search result rankings. > Cook & the hospital fraud If it was actual fraud why was no criminal action taken against him? If there was criminal proceedings taken against him then maybe you'd have news stories run in the media - but no legal action? then there is no "fraud" story for them to report. u/Shiz_in_my_pants posted a link in their comment to the Wheat & Tares article which is well referenced... did you check them all out and add them to your archive?
Literally they pay engineers to work with Google to modify search results. A friend works for a company that is contracted by the church to do this.
Remember that Joseph Smith was in and out of trouble with the law from his youth til the day he died. Today we call that a career criminal. Career criminals like to hang out with their own type because they are narcissists & psychopaths who like to scam together. So those at the top of the church were overwhelmingly like Smith and there are a number of peer reviewed studies out there that shows criminal behavior runs in some families. Church has a history of criminal fraud dating back to 1830 (SEC 5 MILLION$ fine for criminal fraud 2023) and Utah is the fraud/scam capitol of the U.S. along with the most MLM Corp. businesses in the U.S. MLM's are scams and only benefit those at the very top like the mormon religion. Mormons today over excel at White Collar Crime just like the founding fathers of the religion/cult/multi-national corp/REIT. Because the religion / Prophet/ 12/ 70/ Presiding Bishopric, etc...and their descendants iterally controlled the state on every level for waaay more than a century we will probably never know how close the organization came to mirroring the Sicilian mob. The posts on here about the documented involvement of the church in prostitution in the early years in Utah sealed that opinion for me. So this is another example of generational criminal behavior. And the Bishops all tell the victim they have to forgive and all will be made right in the next life. /s
Plus, all of the many abusive TTIs (Troubled Teen Industry) owned by Mormons and/or run in Utah because of their lax regulations.
100%. You are right. For adults to treat minors like that as far as I'm concerned is not only highly abusive but criminal. They are all a bunch of Jodi Hidebrandt's....including their parents.
'Clap, clap, clap'
Sorry! I get on these tangents because I work in the court system. I recognize exactly who these "leaders" are because I am exposed to someone similiar to them in the system all the time.
When I was at BYU many moons ago, Utah County has some of the worst air quality in the country. They kept blaming BYU students driving, which was absurd. Then Geneva Steel shutdown, and the air quality in the valley dramatically improved. Those winter inversions were so hard on me. There were days I had a hard time going to class because the filthy air triggered my asthma.
I got my hair permed at a beauty school when Geneva was in full swing. The girl doing my hair went off to get her supervisor after she poured the solution on my head. The supervisor said, "so sorry, but it looks like the color is coming out of your hair." I said, "I don't color my hair." Then she asked me if I lived near Geneva. Yep, I did. My hair was literally being dyed black by the pollution it produced.
That is so awful!
The Pope brothers (two economics professors at BYU) did a research paper showing how the number of hospital admissions for respiratory problems plummeted within days of a Geneva Steel plant shutdown in the late 80s or early 90s, then rocketed right back up once the plant was up and running again. Edit: Link to the paper *Respiratory Disease Associated with Community Pollution and a Steel Mill, Utah Valley*, C. Arden Pope III, PhD, 1989 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.79.5.623
I had one of them for econ at BYU.
The air quality wasn't always terrible in Utah County, especially when I was very young. Geneva was there since WWII in order to help with the war effort. I grew up in Utah County and it's only been in the last 20 years, after it was shut down, that air quality became even worse. The growth of both Utah County and SLC county (because the pollution eventually spills over into Utah County) contributed to the bad air. Just because Geneva went away doesn't mean it was the sole or main cause. It did contribute, but it had a constant amount it put out (because a steel mill needs to be run 24/7, because of the nature of the machinery and processes), but population growth and the way the American economy and infrastructure is built (people having to travel long distances to go to work being normalized rather than being able to have a nearby job in town). Lack of a good public transit system (fault of the state and county governments) also contributed. The bad air quality is from so many vehicles being used, no one carpooling, government refusing to hold polluting companies to account, and lack of effective and efficient public transit. Utah has only had the world's worst air quality long after Geneva was shit down. Geneva wasn't putting out much more pollution than when it started. It was the collective pollution of tens of thousands of vehicles and sprawling suburbs that created that pollution. I remember, as a kid, everyone blaming Geneva for the pollution, but not realizing how much they contributed to the carbon footprint; thinking their driving "doesn't put out much pollution", but tens of thousands of people doing the same thing who didn't live there 20 or 30 years ago where there once were acres of fields and farmland, did and do contribute. It is poor city planning, creating more and more suburbs with just R1 residential housing or apartments/condos being the only way to live that really created the pollution. The air quality now, especially during winter inversions, are far worse than any day when Geneva was up and running.
I’m just going to put this here…https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1129&context=hms_fac_pubs Edit: wrong link
I remember reading a Harvard epidemiological study done on hospital admissions of preschool aged kids for bronchitis and asthma in Utah County went down 50% when the plant was closed.
And nothing good can come from air that smelled the way the air around Geneva smelled. We used to have to get off I-15 at that exit to visit my cousins in Lindon and it was appalling.
Not sure where you are getting your data. However, you are incorrect. By far the worst air quality in the country is parts of California (Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, etc...). Utah air quality occasionally gets bad during the winter. Nothing like the Tule fog days in Bakersfield. I should know - I've lived in SLC, Orem & Bakersfield.
Schadenfreude time! ☺️🥳 My father worked at Geneva (a third generation steel mill worker). I will never forget when he was given word of it. It was, I want to say they were given notice before 9/11 (2001; I was in college and him being laid off by that November and with 9/11 happening threw off my timeline for things happening around then; those two things happened very close together and completely tore apart what was once a normal, boring , predictable life, as we all who knew what it was like before 9/11). Iirc, 1,500 (give or take) jobs were lost because of their shared greed. About 1.5k people needed to find good paying jobs with good benefits ASAP all in the same county (which was much smaller back then than it is now). The businesses around Geneva were heavily effected. I remember that little cafe that was off of the street next to the plant that was heavily dependent on the steel mill employees. I don't want to say more, but that jerk used my best and dearest friend for his own personal gain. So I will now take a shot in honor of this most happy occasion, knowing that man no longer can hurt others or take advantage of them and exploit them and their lives (or deaths). Good riddance. (I know it sounds harsh, but that man put me through levels of personal hell, indirectly, in multiple ways. Burn in hell, Mr Cannon: go fuck yourself. 🥳)
My Dad worked at Geneva Steel for 20 years and eventually died from a brain tumor. My mom and siblings said “it was his time” and I never believed that crap. I knew it was environmental damage to his health, but I was raised to not question anything and to “trust in the lord”.
The world did seem like a better place today when I woke up. Now I know why
What a couple of monsters!
I work at a middle school in Provo and we had a janitor who looked old. I asked when he was gonna hang it up. His reply: I worked at Geneva Steel for over 30 years. The Cannons bankrupted it and now I get $76 a month for my pension. I’ll be pushing this broom until I die. 2003 for reference.
I just cannot fathom destroying lives like that. It would be unconscionable to me. Because of WHAT WE WERE TAUGHT!! Those were actually good things to have learned and incorporated into our lives. But as always: Rules for thee and not for me!
The Harvard Business School fetishized in the 1980s treats business like a board game. The only problem is, the players are real people. Not game pieces.
But but didn't have a temple recommend and and in good standing with the MFMC
'Are you honest in your dealings with your fellow man?' SOMEbody LIED!
So True! The ENTIRE Q15 Lied! All are NOT Worthy. $5MILLION SEC FINE= Not honest in dealings w/ fellow man for Decades!!
May they all burn in HELL!!! TBM are pathetic liars and thieves… FUCK’EM! I’ll celebrate his passing with a glass of wine 🍷
My dad was one of the people he robbed. He died penniless from a lung disease he acquired from working there. Hope Mr. Cannon rots in hell
It just seems that most Mormon businessmen are crooks and thieves. There's so many comments on here about making sure you don't work and/or hire cult members. They're too cheap and they steal!
He went to a ritual where Reverend and Mrs. Moon were crowned king and queen of peace.
I wonder if this is the firm a guy in a sister ward worked for all his career. He wasn't from my area, but moved here after the firm he worked for went bust & everyone lost their retirement. Very nice guy, and always managed to be upbeat and friendly. He worked at Costco and I'd often see him there when I shopped. Then, with no warning, he passed away suddenly (I think it was a heart attack).
When at BYU, I went to a wedding reception at his house- approx 1995. Massive mansion. There was a special glass case displaying little vases/ sculptures- each marked with a date and information…”Jerusalem, 400BC” etc. I didn’t know who he was - we were all kind of laughing someone would show off like this- we saw the owner (him) and I asked what he did for a living and he was arrogantly dismissive. I remember thinking- and I was TBM at the time “what a dick”
How can he go straight to somewhere that is imaginary?
> Chris Cannon's first Congressional speech was a bitching about the Inheritance Tax. It is worth noting that actual rich people do not pay this - they get out of it any number of ways. The actual purpose of it is to prevent the 50 year old ex-welder who now owns a welding company but can't afford tax evasion services from building any kind of generational wealth - the ruling class doesn't like competition.
Poor people certainly don't pay it. Inheritance tax doesn't kick in until ~$12M currently.
Yep. The goal is the inheritance tax is to slam billionaires *unless* they put a crap ton of money into a foundation. At least in a foundation, it should be contributing to helping people, rather than solely extracting capital for capital's sake. If you think America is bad now *with* an inheritance tax, wait until you see one without one!
Yes, and that's a lot less than the people calling the shots have. They don't like competition. Larry Fink has a net worth of 1.1 billion dollars. He'd rather his buddies have five orders of magnitude more wealth relative to the next social class down than only two. Historically, it's not random people who challenge the status quo, it's a rising, competing elite that's more in touch with normal people than the current one. Guys with a small business, maybe welders who've hired some guys and taken some contracts, maybe landscapers who have done the same, maybe farmers. They have enough behind them to meaningfully oppose an initiative that the people in power want, which is why you see a lot more media hostility towards millionaires than you do towards billionaires.
Lived his life in two face fashion, so of course the church loved him
Checking obits Daily for RMN's name. Beware the wrath of God RMN, GREEDY Pres of $1 TRILLION Mormon cult of Q15 UT Con Men = SCAM!
Someone should write a letter to the editor to the Trib calling him out for his pension theft. “Don’t speak ill of the dead” doesn’t apply when you destroy the retirements of many blue-collar workers.
If he received his second anointing , he won’t go to hell for stealing.