Here's an idea! Make a car that people want to buy!
did ya miss it..UAW nixes bailout plan...
by hillbilly 71 Replies latest jw friends
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beksbks
They have been, that's one of the problems. Americans love the SUV, or they did until the gas prices rose to slightly approach the prices the rest of the world has been paying for years.
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beksbks
Hill I haven't the inclination to be too thorough right now, I just got home from work
Wal mart pays what wal mart pays, because they can. They make huge profits, and that has become the bottom line in this country.
People have worked and succeeded and dreamed in this country since it began, and people are still willing to work. But they're getting paid less in every way than they were. REAL dollar wise, we are getting less. And since we are getting less, we are using more credit and saving less. It's a systematic dismantling of the middle class that started with Reagan, and if you really care about the truth, this country, and what is right, you'll explore that idea and it's ramifications.
Now I'm heading for all the fluff threads, I'm tired and warm and cozy.
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UnConfused
We've heard over the years of the CEO's of the Big 3 making millions in bonuses and salary despite the poor performance AND we've heard about the UAW janitors making 67 bucks an hour. At the same time we've been buying more foreign cars. This TOO BIG TO ALLOW THEM TO FAIL has to stop with BANKS and CARS.
IF we bail them out demand a whole effing lot more from both the UAW and management. -
sammielee24
Too bad Beks...people just don't get it. Wages 15 years ago at $10 an hour are still wages at $10 an hour now - the difference is as you said, your wage is only worth $8 an hour now so the government came up with an easy credit scheme to pay you think you had more to play with. People used credit to buy that furniture - to save for it with reduced buying power, would have tripled the time you needed to save for it. So all of a sudden no interest loans for furniture and car companies come along and suddenly it seems as if you aren't doing too bad - putting off payments on those no payments for 3 years loans etc. The real issue of faltering incomes would never be addressed and never have been.
I never heard of any janitor in the UAW making any 67 bucks an hour but what the heck...
Did anyone ever think for a tiny, fraction of a moment...just a fleeting thought - that maybe if you had government leaders that worked as hard as the union leaders to bring equality and benefits to the table for their people, that just maybe, you might have a government that actually worked for the people? The successes of the UAW are just that - successess....why would anyone take that away from them? They served the people...that's their job.
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
- The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis." (1)
- The very next day that amount grew to $8.5 Trillion in taxpayer guaranteed funds that the criminal's in-charge have been handing out like candy on Halloween. The excuses from Congress about bailing out the automotive industry and saving roughly three million U.S. jobs is being held up as "too expensive' and would be 'just throwing good money after another bad investment.' A fifteen billion dollar bridge loan to the big three would not constitute even a droplet in the shipload of money that this government has already squandered on the Banksters and the Corporations. Congress is saying that we can afford to lose all those jobs and the directly dependent jobs that need that industry to survive. Compare that to the $306Billion that went to Citigroup in the opening paragraph. This fact alone proves Congress iseither out to kill these jobs or is incompetent; and either way they should not be in a position to rule on this matter. The Dictator has already shown us where he stands, and this ought to be remembered at his trial, after he leaves office.
- The congress killed their attempt to reach a real deal by sighting the Unions failure to give away their stake in their own jobs and they didn't sight any of these possible conditions, which could easily have been attached to that deal.
- "They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers start building only cars and mass transit that reduce our dependency on oil.
- They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers build cars that reduce global warming.
- They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers withdraw their many lawsuits against state governments in their attempts to not comply with our environmental laws.
- They could have given the loan on the condition that the management team which drove these once-great manufacturers into the ground resign and be replaced with a team who understands the transportation needs of the 21st century.
- Yes, they could have given the loan for any of these reasons because, in the end, to lose our manufacturing infrastructure and throw 3 million people out of work would be a catastrophe." (2)
- The following day subsidiary plants that furnish parts to GM began to close, telegraphing "failure-to-survive" to the world, and a delayed but a failed further attempt (by Bush) will only prolong the agony. The Dictator has promised a small portion of what's needed, because he too wants this deal to fail-and everyone at the table except the unions is negotiating in bad faith as there are literally trillions available, and not this magic $750 Billion that seems to stretch to cover everything that no one bothers to track. And no one seems to remember this $8.5 Trillion Mastodon in the national living room.
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jaguarbass
They, the wealthy, the masters, the shadow government. The multinatinal corporations.
Had to get America in the Global market place, because that was the only way they could beat us and rob our energies.
And for the most part they have.
When we used to make everything ourselves. When people were employed making a living wage.
No one could touch us. Everyone envied us, Everyone wanted to come to America.
No country would ever invade us.
The only reason they would consider invading us is to steal our wealth, energy.
And we were to big and geographically protected.
Now they have stolen our jobs and made us dependent upon them so they have gotten our wealth and energy.
They stole our jobs by getting us into the global market place.
We allowed ourselves to loose meaningful jobs that paid a living wage and insurance so we could buy everything super cheap at wall mart.
They did it just like you boil a frog ,just turn the tempature up a little at time. One job here one job there.
This has been going on since the 70's
If you put a live frog into a boiling pan of water he will jump out.
If you put him in a pan of cold water and turn the temperature up slowly he will stay in there and boil to death.
I bet 10 years from now we will have a hard time defending ourselves.
We will have exported manufacturing to the point that we wont be able to make guns and tanks and planes.
Our enemies, who ever is not American, whoever wants to rob our wealth.
Globalist, multinationalist, multinational corporations.
Conquered us by sort of a modified trogan horse.
They built the little red school house, harvard and cranked out lawyers, cranks and economist to disseminate their poison and decimate our economy.
We have crippled ourselves with lawyers and lawsuits and flacky economist and crooked bankers.
They dont want steel mills in the north, they want clean air and unemployment lines.
They dont want to make cars in Amerca when they can make them in Mexico or China or Korea and have much bigger proffits.
When a company is a corporation on the New York Stock exchange, every year they have to make more money.
There comes a time when the easiest way and maybe the only way to make more money is to move out of the US and get cheap labor.
The problem with that.
Is that the only thing that 90% of the people in America have to offer is labor.
So they are willing to go down and blame it on the worker and the union.
And as sure as the sun will rise in the east and set in the west these players these Ceos will rise as a phoenix and make cars with cheaper labor in Mexico and China and Russia anywhere that they can exploit the worker.
It was a good run while it lasted. And its just a game to the major players.
They are playing a big chess game and we are the pawns.
And life is better if you work your way up to be a castle, ie wealthy local business man, a real republican making 200,000 or more a year.
Knight millitary man like McCain, and his father.
Bishop, faithful and descreet slave, televangelist, religious leader, the pope,
Qeen the president.
King, the magnate, the multinational corporations that run the world.
This has been going on since the masons came out of Egypt.
A good book to show you how government works is Poland by James Michner.
But there is no end to books available telling people who want to know what is going on.
Once you find out, I guess try not to be a pawn. Try to marry into the King class.
Jehovahs loving organization cranks out pawns by the millions.
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sammielee24
Unfortunately JB you are right for the most part. I do however, remain optimistic that populations will wake up, hopefully before it's too late. Revolutions are started when people have had enough and usually they are started by a failed middle class who have both the motivation and intelligence to win such a war and that always leads to change. Hearing people balk at giving a loan of 15 billion to a car company when the government has lost 10x that much rebuilding Iraq is a mystery to me - not to mention all the corruption and scams that went on with all that money. Jobs lost here and a lowered standard of living seem to be okay with a lot of people..all the while allowing for example, the banks and investors to keep paying dividends and 3 million dollar bonuses with your tax dollars. I honestly don't get it. I thought there was a time when everyone wanted something better...that's why you go to university, to better yourself..if the mindset remains that a person should expect less out of their country, out of their government, then eventually that is what they will get. sammieswife.
Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders </form> JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER Published: December 13, 2008
BAGHDAD — An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Max Becherer/Polaris, for The New York Times WATER Students used water from a faucet at the Khulafa al-Rashideen school in Baghdad in October. Access to potable water plummeted after the 2003 invasion.
‘Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience’
Read and search an annotated draft of the report on Iraq reconstruction.
Enlarge This Image Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images COMMUNICATION Landline phone service plunged after the invasion, forcing Iraqis to rely on cellphone companies, above.
Enlarge This Image Michael Kamber for The New York Times ELECTRICITY A new generator in Baghdad in 2007. Electricity output is now only slightly higher than it was before the war.
Enlarge This Image Nabil al-Jurani/Associated Press OIL The production of oil at Iraqi fields, like the one above, 370 miles southeast of Baghdad, has been below prewar levels.
The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.
In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”
Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.
Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.
The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.
By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money.
The history contains a catalog of revelations that show the chaotic and often poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort.
¶When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.
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SacrificialLoon
So the Republicans are trying to bust the union.
http://thenewshole.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/12/12/1713569.aspx
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beksbks
I heard that last week. No suprises. Bastards. We've worked to create and maintain a middle class for nigh on 200 years. These fu*%ers are determined to destroy it.
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Robdar
I heard that last week. No suprises. Bastards. We've worked to create and maintain a middle class for nigh on 200 years. These fu*%ers are determined to destroy it.
Yep. And the thing that bugs me is that there are so many workers who think Unions are a waste. They forget that, among other benefits, they get to enjoy a 40 hour work week because of Unions. How can a company unionize when it's members are happy to sell themselves into slavery?
