UAW inflexible on concessions...

Once the PBGC guarantee kicks in, a tax credit for health
insurance premiums kicks in also, costing the taxpayer big
time.

Not the ones involving the federal government's guarantee of
pensions.

It has been well reported that the unions are compromising a
lot. Hachi needs to cite the article where he claims the
unions refuse to give anything. There is no question that
union leadership is running the numbers and playing the
odds. My point is they are not stupid.

It is a dumb public that got us to this point. I say let the
Big 3 go under, and taxpayers, suck it up while we
transition to better auto makers (Toyota, Honda et al.).
Let's promote some smarts on this topic instead of Hachi's
nonsense.

 

When a wall street secretary or admin assistant gets a bigger bonus
that the average Union worker's yearly salary, something is gravely
wrong with our economic system.

If the old senile neo-cons on this list would expand their reading
material to European sources they might start clear the scales from
their eyes and the cobwebs from their brains.

 

When a wall street secretary or admin assistant gets a
bigger bonus
that the average Union worker's yearly salary, something is
gravely
wrong with our economic system.
------

Your premises are that (1) the Big 3 are making a viable
product and (2) Wall Street secretaries' skills are
necessarily less than a union worker's; and (3) people do
not choose where to work. I reject all.

 

Oh hell, I thought you were a reasonable person.. My bad.

 

Oh hell, I thought you were a reasonable person.. My bad.

 

Rriiiggght, everyone who disagrees with you is a communist.

 

everyone who disagrees with you is a communist.

 

Wall street secretaries and administrative assistants don't get that kind
of bonus. You might have stumbled across a report of one here and there,
but it is not the norm.

 

Wow. Me too...

We can only buy so much. But we've been buying it from China.

I'm not one to talk...I *LIKE* Japanese cars and other Japanese products,
esp cameras.

I understand that.

Thanks for an enlightening post. Better than coming back with a NYAH-NYAH!

 

I had in mind the wishy-washy way American consumers think
these days; the keeping up with the joneses; the emphasis on
jobs that churn money instead of create something useful;
the "I paid money for health insurance so I am going to milk
it for every dollar and then some," instead of realizing
that what one pays for with insurance is peace of mind.

To me, to bailout or not to bailout is short term happiness
and long term pain (e.g. maybe the economy is stabilized for
awhile, but then we get to watch the Big 3 die a slow death,
like years, with them foisting their crappy product on an
equally stupid American public) vs. short term pain and long
term happiness (lots of unemployment for the next few years
as the Big 3's labor force migrates and higher taxes at some
point, but then we get a far more rational auto industry run
by Japanese car makers).

I am revulsed at how many think being a Democrat means
saving your blue collar neighbor's job, no matter what this
job is.

"Buy American," never made sense to me, maybe because I have
a feel for much of what I would pay for an American car goes
to these bilious, unskilled upper class executives and their
families.

Ditto. The way I am posting in these political threads here
in the auto newsgroups is a measure of my contempt for our
leaders in government these days.

 

Don't mind Ed Syphillis. The disease is getting to his brain, just like it
did Big Al.

To him everyone that is a conservative is a neo-con. If he'd look up the
term, he'd see that a neo-con used to be a LIEberal like him. He thinks
that the natural state of man is LIEberal and that conservatism is an
abberation, when he's the abberation.

Sir Charles the Curmudgeon

Sir Charles the Curmudgeon

 

Actually it wasn't so much government delay that made things worse, but also
some actions the government took, like the Smoot-Hawley Tarriff. And
historians are now beginning to realize that a lot of what FDR did didn't
really help, it just papered over things and in some ways may have kept the
depression going until 1939.

Sir Charles the Curmudgeon

 

wow, nailed it good there, Elle. Wealth isn't being created, it's being
moved/stolen.

We expect insurance to pick up every little inconvenience, every
sniffle. I remember a couple telling me they spilled a gallon of paint
on their living room carpet, and they put in for homeowner's insurance.
????? For a thousand dollar mistake? If you can't afford that, you
can't afford the house.

Americans are wimps who want what they want when they want it, and who
refuse to acknowledge that can't always happen (or rarely can happen,
more likely). They think "more is BETTER!" and so fill their lives with
cheap Chinese junk that lasts only as long as the next burning desire to
go shopping and spend money. That's led to a decline in the quality of
consumer goods, as retailers give in to the pressure of "lower prices!"
Now I can't even go out and buy something quality even if I want to.

Americans need to concede that they've created a world that not only
can't they sustain, but a world which will never return. And that some
people are better off and will have things they can't have and will
never have. Boo-hoo.

 

The bailout has proven that capitalism is not working.
Now the government will decide what cars are produced, what price to
ask for, who can own a government produced car etc.
Bush has found out that the current system is not working.
He has printed more money than anyone and financed a lot of
enterprises all over the world.
Sent troops and money all over.
The rest of the world must love that guy - or not.
Trilions of dollars spent on wars on pretty much everybody.
We are all getting used to being frisked at airports thanks to Bush.
He treats everyone as a terrorist and being the biggest terrorist
himself he must know.
Anyway after the communist system failed in the USSR then it is
obviously neccesary for the US to give it a try.
It will not work there either but who cares.
After a few decades of subsidising cars and giving everyone the same
kind of garbage you could change again.
The UAW will not be a world religion because the rest of the world
knows it is no use.

 

First, unregulated capitalism is not capitalism, because it
fails to promote/ensure as level a market playing field as
possible. Second, Democrats' hands are just as filthy.
Consider for one the repeal of the Depression era
Glass-Steagall act in 1999, deregulating banks to the max.
It had huge support from President Clinton and his people,
including the President of Citigroup. Third, a dose of
socialist policies is said to ensure a strong labor force,
which is vital to a healthy capitalist economy. Fourth, not
to wave hands nor fail to explain, but I think this all is
mostly cyclic. We will see a rough few years or even decade.
Eventually, there will again be enough madmen to de-regulate
markets enough that greed brings the system crashing down
around most everyone's ears for awhile.

 

Damn, we're getting all the wackos together here.
You got your commies, your anarchists, your neo-cons, your free-trade
globalists, your union-haters, your union-lovers, your U,S.-haters,
your Jap-car lovers, your Jap-car haters, etc, etc.
The whole fucking shebang.
Pretty nice seeing everybody coming together like this.
Who said GWB couldn't bring people together?
Sort of like the '68 Dem convention in Chicago, but not quite.
Lots of hot chicks there.
Funny. I was a UAW worker then, at IH in Chicago. Just out of the
Navy.
One of my workmates, a strapping WWII Army vet named Ed Zeiben, had a
solution to the distress in Grant Park.
"A couple 500-pounders'll take care of them fucking hippies."
Cooler heads prevailed, and Chicago's finest confined themselves to
cracking heads with nightsticks.
Most of the players and participants in that '68 Dem clusterfuck are
dead now. The UAW fights on.
I got a feeling they ain't going gently into the good night.
We'll see.

--Vic

 

Wrong. Regulated capitalism is fascism or it's cousin socialism.

 

Whereas unregulated capitalism has proven to be fraud and anarchy.

Which do you prefer?

 

But that it were as black-and-white as the uneducated
believe.

 

I don't like going to the doctor with the sniffles. I usually wait.
Now, I was underemployed for a while so I get a reduced rate (or, was
getting...) and told the doctor, I don't like to abuse the privilege. He
said, Don't wait so long! He said that by waiting it actually cost more
because they have to spend more time later. He agreed a sniffle is
nothing, but anything beyond that, don't hesitate.

The last case was the cat bit me. Not on purpose, but while I was giving
her a pill. The wound got infected, and I waited. He said I should have
gone as soon as it didn't heal.