If Congress does approve a bail out for the car companies

what would it mean? It cannot start purchasing their inventory? Give them money to do... what? If no one is buying a car, at least, the one offered by GM and Ford (and Chrysler) what can billions of dollars do?

I think that their survival is important to our economy as a whole, I just don't know how giving them money can help. Unless they can use this to make loans to the ones who do want to purchase?

And that's about it. Won't save a single job. Not a single one.

But what do I know? :eyes:

for years with the big 3 it means nothing. The repugs won't let it pass
because the democrats are asking for accountability.

I'm glad to see you are no longer towing the corporate line
and FINALLY RECOGNIZE that critisim of GM is not
an attack on its workers, which you have tended to lump that
into the same pile with people that admonished the corporate
waste and stupidity.

Maybe, I'm wrong, but I think you have finally come that far.

And attacking GM IS an attack on it's workers AND America. But I don't think you or most here can understand that. But the Republicans do, and THAT is their focus on denying the bailout to the Big Three.

workers who might have bought the cars the UAW produced at GM were losing their jobs? Where was the UAW when the Maytag Company, an excellent company that sold superb products, was sold lock stock and barrel only to have its manufacturing facilities gutted and the innards sent to Mexico and China? Where were you back then?

It is too late now. The market for GM cars is gone. Americans are, for the most part, too poor to buy their products. Sorry. But you should have been screaming a lot louder way back in the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton eras. That's when the UAW jobs were lost. You just didn't notice it back then.

The UAW was 'there' but not there enough ....

I was UAW, on the aerospace side, for over 24 years .... They worked on our behalf, though not always as effectively as we might have wished ....

Yet, as much as the UAW went to bat for auto and aerospace workers; they did fail to reach out and stop the bleeding of the rest of the US manufacturing base ....

I can guarantee this: Most ALL union workers can afford to buy GM cars .... We cannot say the same for NONunion workers .... We cannot say the same of workers who assumed those jobs once they left the US ...

And this is the primary breakdown of conservative economic philosophy: Buy denying US workers decent jobs at decent pay levels, they have denied themselves sales volume and profits ....

Workers prime the pump of capitalism .... without workers making money to buy goods: Capitalism falls on it's face and dies ....

Damn I hope I can hang on in this wild ride ....

And, really, isn't that what our great nation is all about?

to a payback to the Treasury, unlike Wall Street, from what I have heard. But, think what you like.

If GM/Ford/Chrysler go down, don't say I didn't warn you. It WILL be a bloodbath.

:hi: :hug:

...of auto industry geniuses on DU these days. :hug:

under the line, selling cars to people as dishonest and disbelieving as they are, thinking they can fix their new imported iron with a screwdriver and some 200 mph tape when it quits on the interstate.

When gas was 25 cents a gallon and people told us all that we'd run out of oil by the year 2000. And talking cars and personal communication devices were stuff of the Jetsons.



:loveya:

get jobs that pay enough to allow them to buy American cars, the companies will not be able to repay the loans. Giving the money to the car companies is too great a risk. Welcome to the ranks of the un- or underemployed. You are in good company. Lots of highly qualified, hardworking people are already just barely surviving. And it will get worse, much worse.

I empathize with everyone who is suffering in this economy - not just the automakers or my state personally. However, they are what I know best, so I participate in threads about things that affect them. I'm not worrying for myself personally, if that is what you meant by your last shot. I am retraining in another industry, and have no regrets with the time I spent inside auto. It taught me a lot. I also fully understand the depth of the problems facing the entire economy as well, so your lecture about me and my motives is somewhat condescending.

All I am saying - and many experts are saying - is that people have no idea how logistically deep these companies run throughout the U.S. landscape. So, your "too great a risk" may be short-sighted. IMHO, it may be "too great not to risk." The stronger of the companies will continue in business in diminished capacity, even in bankruptcy. A federal loan may get them through until a modest recovery (hopefully), when they may be able to re-hire and maintain good manufacturing jobs. I think that is a worthy goal and will continue to say so.

Thanks for the dialogue.

not found another such job since although I continue to work. I'm just pointing out that the UAW was silent while others lost their jobs. Does the UAW understand the concept of solidarity, or is it just concerned about its own members? UAWers are among the last to lose their jobs. Suddenly, for UAWs' members, it's the end of the world. Well, many of us reached that end some time ago. Welcome to our ranks. Don't expect those of us who have been dealing with our disappointments and financial straits for some years to have all that much sympathy with your plight.

Based on that, I am afraid that we have little common ground with which to discuss this reasonably.

FYI, I am not UAW. I was salaried in the industry, and was alarmed at the losses in all manufacturing; I am not sure what anyone could have done to stop corporate outsourcing, to be honest. I do remember many articles by unions, including the UAW, raising awareness about the problem over the past couple of decades. As I am sure you are aware, the general population were not interested, as long as goods were cheap and plentiful. I find it highly interesting that you single the UAW out for the blame, though.

I really think you should stop focusing on my actions and what this issue means to me (or does not). You know nothing about me. Further, i do not require - nor have I asked for - your sympathy. If you have an argument about the industry as a whole, state it, but do not use me or my situation as your focus. It is inappropriate.

the jobs over others were downsized, while others were callously fired. I'm pointing out that it is now too late for UAWers or auto industry employees to get any help from the rest of us. We don't have the money to help you out. It's not just GM that is bankrupt. It's the whole country. Many, many DUers are now earning far less than they did when Bush was first elected. The jobs of many DUers and other Americans have been lost. Now it's UAWs turn. It's too late. America does not have the money to help UAW. You should have been screaming when other people lost their jobs. That was the time to take action. It's just too late for UAW, too late for GM.

I have never used Ignore before. But your pathological need to make your argument about me personally (instead of a discussion on facts) wins you the prize.

At this point, they're such a risk that nobody will lend them money in the private sector-what does this tell us? Their balance sheet shows nothing but losses with no hope of a profit being turned anytime soon, so how will they repay that note?


Would you borrow them money out of your personal finances? That is what they are asking every taxpaying American to do, open their wallets and borrow them some money.


If you won't borrow to them out of your own pocket, how can you ask that the government borrow them your money?

Did you think the same of the bank/stock market bailouts? Please, do tell. I'm intrigued by your knowledge. Expand, expound; thrill us with your knowledge.

:rofl:

I don't believe it's the government's place to interfere with cash infusions into those companies who have made poor business decisions that have put them in a bad spot.

I think these companies would be much better off in the long haul by finding their own way out of the messes they have created.

Unfortunately, that is not the case here, and I think the results of not acting will be far worse than people realize. Hence my posts. Nice talking with you.

Keep cranking out more cars that nobody is buying already-isn't that a great idea?

Increase the inventory even more!


Supply and demand, folks, supply and demand. The market is flooded.

(3 months is ideal 4 turns a year industry wide is ideal, but not at 10,000,000 cars and trucks annual sales) small cars are out of stock, trucks and SUVs, which were dead in the water, are back in demand. Why oh great Bramaged one you may ask? Because gas is $2.00 or less per gallon across the US and people realized the 'gas crisis' was manufactured.

Anything else? Or can I get some sleep now and stop defending my company from those of you who know little or nothing about it except what you assume.

From prior years, when stuff was actually selling, or from current sales figures, like just last week, my brother bought a bare bones truck that listed at 20k for 12,100 OTD after all the incentives, cash back, loyalty crap, etc.

Sounds like some great marketing and sales ideas that we need to support, huh?


Oh, and if sales are so brisk, then the coffers should be quite flush with cash, right?

If GM is selling cars left and right, then there should be no fear of losing jobs-those jobs will be there forever, why would a company do away with a job when that job produces a product that's in such high demand?

Face it, sales suck, profits are in the toilet, and GM needs to do some serious revamping and restructuring of their business philosophy. Jobs are going to cease to exist, redundancies will be eliminated, and product lines will be voided.

You can get all the bailout money in the world, but until there are real changes in how the company is run, nothing will get better. Kinda like a drug addict-without treatment, the problem continues.

that can see the writing on the wall-selling products for less than it costs to produce them is not a wise business plan.

How can we (the taxpayers) endorse this business philosophy by enabling them to continue without making changes?

The reality is that you have to have steady demand to justify steady supply, steady production. To have a steady demand for cars, you have to have consumers who can afford to buy the cars. Those consumers just don't exist in this country in large enough numbers to keep the car companies afloat and the UAWers working.

Another crass assumption based in prejudice against Union members. You have no idea who I am, what I do or have doe, what responsibilities I have, and if I have ever owned or managed successful multi-million dollar volume businesses (I have).

A shakeout is necessary in the industry, that is inevitable, but it shouldn't be on the backs of American blue collar workers. DU as a whole just doesn't get it. Obviously neither do you.

We will have $2 gas forever and there is no need to change
the nation's consciousness.

Energy is going to go up in price, that's a fact that cannot be denied.

that they promote?

Good Grief.

If you look at the long-term rolling average, it is simply undeniable that gas will continue to grow more and more expensive as major economies like China and India continue to increase demand for gasoline, and there is only so much oil the planet currently has.

and stay there for a lot longer than it took to run up to $4+ per gallon again.

Unless we have a World War. :scared:

Low gas prices shouldn't slow efforts to get the US away from oil dependence or from entertaining the construction of the first dedicated bullet-train tracks.

and they talked about marketing. That we don't see ads for GM or Ford these days on TV.

And then someone said that we no longer have the attitude of "must have car" like the SUV. And I thought "must have?" We've always purchased cars that would take us from point A to point B in a safe and reliable manner and that were affordable and that would last at least 10 years.

On the other hand, since the whole global economy is tanking because the American consumer no longer spend money on useless items, or no longer replaces existing stuff with new ones every few years, perhaps we need to encourage those fools to continue to consume. Service, after all, is 70% of our GDP.

And, welcome to DU.

:toast:

Then we'll be in the same situation again somewhere down the road with them asking for the money.

Personally, I'd nationalize all three.

Then, I'd have the government buy out completely Chrysler, GM, and Ford. 100 percent nationalization of all shares at current share price. The government will reorganize these companies internally and have the existing leadership removed entirely. Workers will assume control of these three companies, and the three will fully reorganized into labor co-ops. Each worker gets one vote in his or her respective company.

Once the decision-making structures are in place, the government will privatize each of the companies by turning ownership over to the workers.

Until GM decides to contract, and that takes a couple of years if it does occur, they need two billion dollars a month under the current sales climate to keep the doors open, or IF the banks tomorrow, began offering auto loans to people with credit scores under 700, the crisis would be alleviated, but they have become stupid in their struggle to make us, everyday people, pay for their greed and dishonesty.

People so often think this is such a simple deal, but one perfect example; Toyota, for the FIRST time in their history, is offering zero percent financing (their "saved by zero" commercial is offensive, ask me why, IF you are not a student of WWII and can't figure it out, even though they didn't make any zeros)which is being financed by the Japanese government/banks, because their profit predictions for the year have been slashed 70% to 5 billion US dollars. WHY you may ask the Bramaged one? Because their trucks and SUvs aren't selling. And those are the vehicles they make profit on, just like GM.

If you don't believe me, you can easily find out what I know spending a few hours with our pal Google.

Yeah, GM and Standard Oil supported the Nazis

Which is documented.

Got anything else?

I really thought you saw the light.

Most UAW workers I know don't.

I don't know (or really care) what you do for a living, but you, as are so many members here, are not sympathetic to the plight of labor, Unions, and the automotive industry as a whole. What is the point if all you want to do is cut us to shit every time the letters GM are posted on the forums. Go bother someone else, I'm tired and bored.

Good night.

There is a lot of contempt for GM leadership, but I find it hard to see a DUer who would lay the blame at the doorstep of the UAW. The GM leadership are a bunch of goddamn morons, and if workers had run the company, they would've been sacked a long time ago. That's why I favor turning these corporations into labor co-ops.

:hi:

(tap tap tap tap tap)

If we wanted to buy out all shares of GM, right now, current market price would put the price at about 1.65 billion dollars for every outstanding share. Outstanding debts of GM total somewhere about 60 billion.

So, to turn over ownership to the workers and sack the current leadership would roughly require a paltry 61.65 billion dollars, cheap compared to the 700 billion thrown at the banks.

with their shares at impossible to believe lows, and they wanted ownership of the company, using the pension fund as collateral, we could have taken over any of them. But surprisingly, those that hold the largest number of shares aren't divesting themselves of any of these stocks. Because the auto companies are CORE businesses to the economy of this country and many, many others. And as the auto companies go, so goes the economy. Something so many here think is a joke.

But mot me or any other Union member or GM employee.

Good night.

I just am so fucking fed up with the bullshit rationalizations put out by GM leadership that I want to drag them out of their ivory tower and beat the life out of them. They are the ones who fucked over Detroit. They are the ones who fucked over the UAW. Fuck them.

For some reason 'you still don't get it, I think Lutz will be proud of you
and the other CEOs of GM for your defense of them.

You defend the management 10 times more than you do workers
everyone sees that with your posts, no matter if you try to wear
the union label on your posts.

Man, now you are a global warmer denier.

Is socialism the answer?

Gov't should buy all 3? What if I don't want to sell my shares-then what are they going to do?


To believe that the gov't can actually run a private sector company and produce a good or service that is quality, under budget, and on time is pure ignorance of their track record.

Amtrak. Any questions?

How much taxpayer money have we thrown into that bottomless toilet? How's it doing this year? Another record loss year! Great idea, we can make the automakers climb on our backs too!


F it, I'm just going to quit paying taxes and join the fray of freeloaders and mooches on the goobermint teat-this working for a living trying to better my lot in life through hard work, smarts and thinking is so silly-I'm just going to suckle like a piglet on the teat of others labors.

Socialism can work. The largest co-op in the world is the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, numbering around 70,000 workers. They haven't applied for bankruptcy and are very successful, certainly better than GM in terms of not driving themselves into the ground.

Bailing out these banks was not socialism. That is what we call corporatism. 60 years ago, the survivors of the last world war called it fascism.

When I say nationalization, I mean you get compensated at fair market value for the shares you own. If you don't like it, well, we agree to disagree. The shares would be taken from you anyway. However, you would be compensated fairly for the shares as opposed to the government simply taking it and not giving you a bag of money for it.

The goal of such an idea is to remove an incompetent leadership by replacing them with workers.

to think that the government taking privately held investments (which I bought low and intend to hang onto for the long haul) is allowable in a free market nation.

You have neglected one thing about the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation-they were not founded by, funded by nor controlled by the goobermint. They have always been a privately run company.

What about those who purchased their shares at higher prices, and have held them on the assumption that the market will swing back up? Will the buy plan pay them for their purchase price, or todays toilet paper price? That'll do alot of good for the 401k's of the small man.

Sounds like some of the similar ideas proported by some developers and gov't officials who think it's OK to condemn and seize under emminent domain the property of one person and transfer it to another because they believe that it could be put to better use.

If Amtrack is so great, why have they yet to post a profitable fiscal year since their inception in 1971? They're at the point now where they are requiring an cash infusion of $1 Billion per year. If you can, please show me a gov't run entity that is profitable?

When the government (the collective body that represents the people) purchases ownership in a private business, that is socialism.

Corporatism is when a group of individual corporations in the same field (say steel making) join together to exert control upon the entire segment of the economy as a group.

Either way, it's a step in the wrong direction for a nation that was founded upon the ideas that a person can be free from unwarranted government intrusion into their business and private affairs.

You neglect the fact that I singled out the Northeast corridor instead of the entire country. The simple fact of the matter is the only profitable corridor right now is the Northeast, given that most of the country is too spread out and rural to support any train network. The law was written that says Amtrak MUST service all corridors of the country. This means that non-profitable areas must also be serviced, pushing them into the red.

Is it an argument to destroy Amtrak? Yes, assuming you don't want to get off of cars as the mode of transport, but personally, I'd like to create new jobs by building a network of bullet trains that are safe and efficient and fast, a side-effect being that it would also help to wean the US off its dependence on oil.

While it is true that the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation was founded outside the purview of the government, it is not evidence that labor co-ops in general are failed forms of socialism. In fact, they are a prime example of socialism.

There's a lot of pork in the government that could be cut, one of the most egregious being the Farm Subsidies Program, which has now become just a form of welfare for corporations thanks to abuse.

I hate to break the news to you, but 401ks were devastated long before I even came up with the idea. You can blame the private banks for wrecking your retirement, not me.

And if you believe in the notion of the free market, I got some bad news for you: The market never was free.

The second the banks got the government to bail them out should've been the revelation that the markets can be distorted or rigged to favor private interests.

In a truly free market, those banks would've been allowed to fail with no hand out, but we don't live in such a world.

AND the company I love has to make some hard decisions regarding what divisions are it's core and what are dinosaurs in the 21st Century. Some jobs may eventually be lost, but a smaller, focused company would be the most powerful one in America. And if the man running ti were replaced with someone with insight and without ties to the past, many would cheer.

"It's also about thousands of car dealerships, which are anchor businesses in cities and towns across America," he said. "It's about thousands of small and medium-sized businesses -- employing millions of workers -- who supply parts, logistics, research, engineering and other services to Chrysler, Ford and GM.

"If a major domestic auto company were to fail, a significant number of supplier companies would also be in jeopardy. This would quickly affect all companies that produce autos in the U.S. -- including Toyota, Honda and Nissan -- because many of these firms buy parts and services from the same group of suppliers." Ron Gettelfinger, President, UAW

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any bail-out. The companies may just have to go into bankruptcy. Too bad. It's kind of inevitable. The managers did not read the handwriting on the wall. Hey, we lose old skin all the time. In fact, our cells are replaced/renewed over time. That's life.

in this case, this is not a bailout. Either way, if people do not purchase or lease cars, that loan will be quickly consumed.

I think that providing the banks with cash so that they would make loans should cover such purchases.