fine. (though actually from what i've seen annual at the north american international auto show, i still believe it to be the best option.)
i'm not advocating for hydrogen; i'm saying that there needs to be a unified approach to the problem through public-private partnership, not simply through mandates and regulation.
totally agree, beta (from previous page): the muscle cars were fun, and that scene from bullit is classic, but they were purely about brute force and 20 cent/gallon gasoline. now, for some real engineering and true style, i would take a ferrari testarossa over one of those muscle jobs any day.
it was edison's invention of the telephone that allowed henry ford to start up the first successful pizza pie delivery business. just another case of american ingenuity!
i wanna figure out how to drop a french-fry-oil burner in an el camino, personally. if gm could sell me a package for that, i'd be all for this cash infusion.
do you know what ever happened to the other trolleys that detroit put away before the superbowl? they were supposed to be sold off to mexico city as well i believe, but there was a rumor detroit still had them.
those are all old posts though. what did they do with all of the cars? i think the subject is marginally relevant to the discussion, since in detroit we are talking about the removal of a streetcar system that was added decades after the original one was removed. i always thought they should stick them all in the henry ford museum for a couple decades until they could be integrated with a broader transit system. i suppose they were probably sold.
the only trolley looking cars i see are gas vehicles..
i'm sure some of the trolleys are hidden in some abandoned building somewhere. but i know that mexico city more than likely has most if not all of them....
I usually ignore or quickly read and delete the e-mail jokes that i get (usually from the same two people), but I just got this and it fits this thread:
"A Japanese company (let's say Toyota) and an American company (let's say
GM) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.
On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.
The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action.Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had 7 people steering and 2 people rowing. Feeling a deeper study was in order, the American company's management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat while not enough people were rowing.
Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 2 area steering superintendents, and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager. They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 2 people rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the 'Rowing Team Quality First Program,' with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rowers. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices, and performance bonuses. The rowers' pension program was trimmed to 'equal the competition' and some of the resultant savings were channeled into year-end bonuses for Senior Executives.
The next year the Japanese won by two miles.
Humiliated, the American company's management laid-off one rower, halted development of a new canoe, sold all the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was again distributed to the Senior Executives as year-end bonuses. The next year, try as he might, the lone designated rower was unable to even finish the race (having no paddles), so he was laid off for unacceptable performance, all canoe equipment was sold, and the next year's racing team was outsourced to India.
The failure of any company will not affect national demand. Successful companies will swoop in and pick up the failed company's market share. GUARANTEED. People will still need cars. Manufacturing jobs may be relocated, but not lost, unless lost overseas, which is where a large amount of these "American" companies' parts are made anyway! As for the failing company specifically, their problem is not the failing economy. Their problem is their DWINDLING MARKET SHARE. No amount of money thrown at them is going to increase their market share. I fail to see how free money in any way guarantees their future success considering their short-sighted designs and proactive/recycled rather than reactive/ingenuitive marketing schemes.
Outside of defense spending, HELL NO to bailouts of GM, Ford, and Chrysler civilian products.
the problem is in the unions contracts. example being.. an employee gets fired, still receives full pay after 5 years without working (heard over thanksgiving, someone knows someone who..). the only way out of these obligations, and restructure, is to have one of the 3 file bankruptcy. at that point they need to sell all assets, which the other two can buy up. there's too much pride, and clearly too many people handing out handfuls of money in government
anti-unionist conservatives and liberal greenies make strange bedfellows. good night you love birds. sweet dreams of a gutted middle class manufacturing sector.
the middle class has already been gutted by the band-aids applied to the big three for the past 30 years. it's time to move forward in a constructive manner. right now the big three are like nice old buildings that have suffered arterial sclerosis as there interiors have been filled with cheap carpet & drop ceilings. the failure of these companies would allow the salvation of those bones & a brighter future for all involved.
besides, the real tragedy of the collapse of the big three is the motor city bowl which by might in serious jeopardy with the loss of it's three co-sponsors
puddles, you care to explain what these so-called band-aids were? if you are referring to the chrysler "bailout" (once again it was a loan) of 1979, it was paid back in full with a $350 million profit to the u.s. treasury and lead to drastically increased fuel efficiency throughout the chrysler line-up. i think most of you would prefer to throw out the baby with the bath water.
also, puddles, could you explain this platitude? "the failure of these companies would allow the salvation of those bones & a brighter future for all involved." i have no idea what that is supposed to mean.
about every two years the uaw & the big three renegotiate & achieve some kind of agreement but they've never really solved they're core problems of legacy costs. the failure of these companies in their present state would allow the axe to fall hard on the retiree & near-retiree crowd that has been dragging these manufacturers down for so long.
this should have happened twenty years but a glut of $10/barrel oil in the nineties & the appeal of easy money via eddie baurer branded suv sales combined with the belief that they were too important to fail allowed the then execs to indulge their greed & defer problems to a future date.
after these companies fail then there will be the opportunity for reconstituting the parts into a profitable enterprise. but the collapse must happen first.
one way or another, this is going to be incredibly painful. personally, i would just assume get on with it already.
jafidler, it seems each thread has to have one writer who takes the unpopular side and you seem to be it here...but your apologetics for the car companies are wobbly at best.
you as much said in an earlier post that the ONLY thing that the big 3 did wrong is not betting on the hybrid/electric boat, as if three huge companies could be in such a fucking mess by one little mistake and everything else just conspired against them.
well the facts are just a little less simple than that. i just read a short article in the recent new yorker that looks at the complexities of the mess and does not conclude that letting the big 3 go under in necessarily the best option. i took special note of this part of the article:
If the automakers’ difficulties can be traced to a single, essential failure, it is their belief that they could avoid change. This is evident in their management structure, their labor contracts, and, most consequentially, their cars. For the past thirty years, the Big Three have been promising one hyper-efficient vehicle after another—the electric car, the “super car,” the hydrogen car—only to produce bigger and bigger gas guzzlers. (It was while the carmakers were supposedly working together, and with a billion dollars of federal money, to create a “new generation of vehicles” that G.M. purchased the rights to the Hummer.) The only compelling argument the companies can make at this late date—if a man strapped with explosives can be said to be making an argument—is that they will not suffer alone.
emilio, i read that article too and thought it was complete horse shit. automakers cater to a market, not a green ideology. ms. kolbert and many on the left do not seem to understand that. now the automakers should have anticipated changes in consumer taste and needs, e.g. finding a car or product line that addresses that market. but we have not seen the end of the large car; the death knell of the large car was sounded in the early eighties and it came back. markets are cyclical and do not respond simply to ideology. sadly, for the big three and thousands of workers that they employ, resistence from the green left and the anti-union right may bring them to their knees.
full of shit? hardly. the article doesn't state that the big 3 didn't cater to a market, just the opposite: they catered to it a little to much. any company must seek profits, but companies that are blinded by the flush times, and are fooled into thinking that they can just sell the same old product without change, forever, are in for a world of hurt...which is what the big 3 are in right now. and the vehicles they sell are not their only problem, not by far.
as you have pointed out before, the foreign companies made and sold trucks and SUVs, but is it possible that they did just a few other things right (not solely "guessing" on the demand for hybrids and electrics) that the big 3 did not do or did poorly?
i don't really care whether we have seen the end of the big car or not, that's not really the point: what i want to know is have we seen the end of poorly run companies that run to the government (read taxpayer) to fix their problems instead of doing it for themselves (like the foreign companies do).
emilio, i'd like examples of what else the foreign automakers have done "right."
if by doing things right you mean locating factories in the anti-union south, sure, they saved some bucks that way. one thing that people don't understand who are not from the midwest is the long and complex history manufacturing has with unions. i find it dumbfounding the complete lack of understanding even by people who associate themselves with the left. (this may have something to do with the new generation of obama liberals who are a very different breed than traditional democrats.) the big three needs to work through its issues with the uaw to craft contracts that allow them to be profitable. the foreign automakers don't have to contend with that.
it seems that the foreign makers have almost universally been the ones to create markets where none existed previously. our home grown makers have almost universally said, let the market dictate the design.
electronics, autos, you name it; the foreign companies have been in the forefront of design and creating consumer demand.
explain to me how is that uaw worker has it better than a non-union toyota worker in tennessee or alabama?
i really don't see how it clarifies the understanding of what has happened to the big 3 by flinging accusations of being a leftist at anyone who dares to disagree with you. if you want to see it as a left/right problem, then so be it. and please, don't patronize people by bringing the same old tired "if you're not from here then you don't understand".
i think most informed people, left or right, whether they are from the midwest or not, DO know the history of the car companies and DO understand the onerous baggage that the big 3 have in contending with unions and with the retirement packages that they have to honor. but these are hardly the only aspects of how they have run those companies that has brought them to this situation.
so if you're going to sit there and argue that the foreign car companies are not about to go under solely because they threw a dice one day and it said "hybrids" and they put their factories in the south, and that the big 3 are about to go under for only the reverse of those two things, then i think i'm done here.
I am amused (?) to note that some US automakers are still (!) railing at "them ferrin' countries" (my words) for not buying American cars. Other than some fat cats who think Buicks are cool anywhere in the world, who would want to barge around tiny streets in oversized iron that gets atrocious mileage -- and doesn't even have the steering wheel on the right side ?
I think gas going to $4.00 a gallon....is the underdoing of the big 3 and then some. Take a look at the broader picture....anything produced using oil jumped in price. Just last year all construction related materials which were tied to oil cost went off the board. Steel studs jumping in cost by 25 percent in a nod of a hat along with gypsum board, insulation, concrete, copper...you just name it.
If gas prices had not jumped they would all still be motoring along.
I'm hanging onto my Mercury Grand Marquis...vintage 1984 47,000 miles and my 1996 Jeep Cherokee 158,000 miles and well I think alot of other people who have been impulsive auto buyers are doing the same thing. We will ride out the storm.
If the big 3 take a tumble well so be it. We will have alot of talented people out there who are eager to grab a chunk of the pie and we might just see a number of start up companies who can do a better job at tackling the problems once all the fluff at the top is gone.
“There is one thing the government does owe the auto companies, however: freedom. For example, however the industry shakes out, automakers must be liberated from CAFE fuel economy laws that arbitrarily dictate what kind of cars they must sell, forcing them to sell millions of small cars that have no chance of profitability given consumer preferences. The auto industry must also be liberated from the Wagner Act, which gives unions the coercive negotiating power that railroaded the Big Three into their lavish, unprofitable wage and health plans. If a liberated Big Three can rejuvenate themselves, great; otherwise, a liberated next generation will be able to succeed where they failed.
“Economic freedom is what created the American automotive industry and made it the envy of the world. Economic freedom is the only thing that can bring it back.”
here's a Deleuze quote that i underlined profusely years ago;
"...As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But, in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex form of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services and what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer capitalism for production but for product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus it is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation..."
citi will be broken up soon enough. after all the Ney Yorker insiders lost their money they had to rob the treasury to get back to par. Wall Street needs to be decentralised out of NYC and DC.
gas is under a buck fiddy. to really motivate people to buy into high mileage vehicles gas needs to be up at over four bucks a gallon. of course, right now nobody is buying cars because they are worried that tomorrow they may be filing for unemployment. the car companies should be given a loan and the banks that have been bailed out ought to be poked in the ass to lend money.
Bailout the car companies??
hydrogen is a dead-end.
fine. (though actually from what i've seen annual at the north american international auto show, i still believe it to be the best option.)
i'm not advocating for hydrogen; i'm saying that there needs to be a unified approach to the problem through public-private partnership, not simply through mandates and regulation.
totally agree, beta (from previous page): the muscle cars were fun, and that scene from bullit is classic, but they were purely about brute force and 20 cent/gallon gasoline. now, for some real engineering and true style, i would take a ferrari testarossa over one of those muscle jobs any day.
I heard Tomas Edison and Henry Ford were Friends....and they tossed around ideas regarding the Infrastucture for the gasoline
automobile.
it was edison's invention of the telephone that allowed henry ford to start up the first successful pizza pie delivery business. just another case of american ingenuity!
i wanna figure out how to drop a french-fry-oil burner in an el camino, personally. if gm could sell me a package for that, i'd be all for this cash infusion.
you mean a freedom fry oil burner don't you?
yes i do. of course. sorry.
cyborg
do you know what ever happened to the other trolleys that detroit put away before the superbowl? they were supposed to be sold off to mexico city as well i believe, but there was a rumor detroit still had them.
bossman, here's a link to some info on detroit trolley's that i stumbled across a few years ago. it has a few nice photos too.
those are all old posts though. what did they do with all of the cars? i think the subject is marginally relevant to the discussion, since in detroit we are talking about the removal of a streetcar system that was added decades after the original one was removed. i always thought they should stick them all in the henry ford museum for a couple decades until they could be integrated with a broader transit system. i suppose they were probably sold.
i have no idea what happened to the trolleys...just vaguely remembered finding that link & somehow managed to dig it up.
the only trolley looking cars i see are gas vehicles..
i'm sure some of the trolleys are hidden in some abandoned building somewhere. but i know that mexico city more than likely has most if not all of them....
b
I usually ignore or quickly read and delete the e-mail jokes that i get (usually from the same two people), but I just got this and it fits this thread:
"A Japanese company (let's say Toyota) and an American company (let's say
GM) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.
On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.
The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action.Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had 7 people steering and 2 people rowing. Feeling a deeper study was in order, the American company's management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat while not enough people were rowing.
Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 2 area steering superintendents, and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager. They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 2 people rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the 'Rowing Team Quality First Program,' with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rowers. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices, and performance bonuses. The rowers' pension program was trimmed to 'equal the competition' and some of the resultant savings were channeled into year-end bonuses for Senior Executives.
The next year the Japanese won by two miles.
Humiliated, the American company's management laid-off one rower, halted development of a new canoe, sold all the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was again distributed to the Senior Executives as year-end bonuses. The next year, try as he might, the lone designated rower was unable to even finish the race (having no paddles), so he was laid off for unacceptable performance, all canoe equipment was sold, and the next year's racing team was outsourced to India.
Sadly, the End."
word on the street is that a few international car companies bailed out of the detroit autoshow......
look at europe small diesels 20% bio fuels
it works
The failure of any company will not affect national demand. Successful companies will swoop in and pick up the failed company's market share. GUARANTEED. People will still need cars. Manufacturing jobs may be relocated, but not lost, unless lost overseas, which is where a large amount of these "American" companies' parts are made anyway! As for the failing company specifically, their problem is not the failing economy. Their problem is their DWINDLING MARKET SHARE. No amount of money thrown at them is going to increase their market share. I fail to see how free money in any way guarantees their future success considering their short-sighted designs and proactive/recycled rather than reactive/ingenuitive marketing schemes.
Outside of defense spending, HELL NO to bailouts of GM, Ford, and Chrysler civilian products.
as i have said before
do you support a u.s. company that sends jobs over seas or support an over seas company that brings jobs to you?
the problem is in the unions contracts. example being.. an employee gets fired, still receives full pay after 5 years without working (heard over thanksgiving, someone knows someone who..). the only way out of these obligations, and restructure, is to have one of the 3 file bankruptcy. at that point they need to sell all assets, which the other two can buy up. there's too much pride, and clearly too many people handing out handfuls of money in government
anti-unionist conservatives and liberal greenies make strange bedfellows. good night you love birds. sweet dreams of a gutted middle class manufacturing sector.
the middle class has already been gutted by the band-aids applied to the big three for the past 30 years. it's time to move forward in a constructive manner. right now the big three are like nice old buildings that have suffered arterial sclerosis as there interiors have been filled with cheap carpet & drop ceilings. the failure of these companies would allow the salvation of those bones & a brighter future for all involved.
besides, the real tragedy of the collapse of the big three is the motor city bowl which by might in serious jeopardy with the loss of it's three co-sponsors
puddles, you care to explain what these so-called band-aids were? if you are referring to the chrysler "bailout" (once again it was a loan) of 1979, it was paid back in full with a $350 million profit to the u.s. treasury and lead to drastically increased fuel efficiency throughout the chrysler line-up. i think most of you would prefer to throw out the baby with the bath water.
also, puddles, could you explain this platitude? "the failure of these companies would allow the salvation of those bones & a brighter future for all involved." i have no idea what that is supposed to mean.
about every two years the uaw & the big three renegotiate & achieve some kind of agreement but they've never really solved they're core problems of legacy costs. the failure of these companies in their present state would allow the axe to fall hard on the retiree & near-retiree crowd that has been dragging these manufacturers down for so long.
this should have happened twenty years but a glut of $10/barrel oil in the nineties & the appeal of easy money via eddie baurer branded suv sales combined with the belief that they were too important to fail allowed the then execs to indulge their greed & defer problems to a future date.
after these companies fail then there will be the opportunity for reconstituting the parts into a profitable enterprise. but the collapse must happen first.
one way or another, this is going to be incredibly painful. personally, i would just assume get on with it already.
jafidler, it seems each thread has to have one writer who takes the unpopular side and you seem to be it here...but your apologetics for the car companies are wobbly at best.
you as much said in an earlier post that the ONLY thing that the big 3 did wrong is not betting on the hybrid/electric boat, as if three huge companies could be in such a fucking mess by one little mistake and everything else just conspired against them.
well the facts are just a little less simple than that. i just read a short article in the recent new yorker that looks at the complexities of the mess and does not conclude that letting the big 3 go under in necessarily the best option. i took special note of this part of the article:
If the automakers’ difficulties can be traced to a single, essential failure, it is their belief that they could avoid change. This is evident in their management structure, their labor contracts, and, most consequentially, their cars. For the past thirty years, the Big Three have been promising one hyper-efficient vehicle after another—the electric car, the “super car,” the hydrogen car—only to produce bigger and bigger gas guzzlers. (It was while the carmakers were supposedly working together, and with a billion dollars of federal money, to create a “new generation of vehicles” that G.M. purchased the rights to the Hummer.) The only compelling argument the companies can make at this late date—if a man strapped with explosives can be said to be making an argument—is that they will not suffer alone.
emilio, i read that article too and thought it was complete horse shit. automakers cater to a market, not a green ideology. ms. kolbert and many on the left do not seem to understand that. now the automakers should have anticipated changes in consumer taste and needs, e.g. finding a car or product line that addresses that market. but we have not seen the end of the large car; the death knell of the large car was sounded in the early eighties and it came back. markets are cyclical and do not respond simply to ideology. sadly, for the big three and thousands of workers that they employ, resistence from the green left and the anti-union right may bring them to their knees.
full of shit? hardly. the article doesn't state that the big 3 didn't cater to a market, just the opposite: they catered to it a little to much. any company must seek profits, but companies that are blinded by the flush times, and are fooled into thinking that they can just sell the same old product without change, forever, are in for a world of hurt...which is what the big 3 are in right now. and the vehicles they sell are not their only problem, not by far.
as you have pointed out before, the foreign companies made and sold trucks and SUVs, but is it possible that they did just a few other things right (not solely "guessing" on the demand for hybrids and electrics) that the big 3 did not do or did poorly?
i don't really care whether we have seen the end of the big car or not, that's not really the point: what i want to know is have we seen the end of poorly run companies that run to the government (read taxpayer) to fix their problems instead of doing it for themselves (like the foreign companies do).
emilio, i'd like examples of what else the foreign automakers have done "right."
if by doing things right you mean locating factories in the anti-union south, sure, they saved some bucks that way. one thing that people don't understand who are not from the midwest is the long and complex history manufacturing has with unions. i find it dumbfounding the complete lack of understanding even by people who associate themselves with the left. (this may have something to do with the new generation of obama liberals who are a very different breed than traditional democrats.) the big three needs to work through its issues with the uaw to craft contracts that allow them to be profitable. the foreign automakers don't have to contend with that.
wow, obamacrats are responsible for this too?
it seems that the foreign makers have almost universally been the ones to create markets where none existed previously. our home grown makers have almost universally said, let the market dictate the design.
electronics, autos, you name it; the foreign companies have been in the forefront of design and creating consumer demand.
explain to me how is that uaw worker has it better than a non-union toyota worker in tennessee or alabama?
i really don't see how it clarifies the understanding of what has happened to the big 3 by flinging accusations of being a leftist at anyone who dares to disagree with you. if you want to see it as a left/right problem, then so be it. and please, don't patronize people by bringing the same old tired "if you're not from here then you don't understand".
i think most informed people, left or right, whether they are from the midwest or not, DO know the history of the car companies and DO understand the onerous baggage that the big 3 have in contending with unions and with the retirement packages that they have to honor. but these are hardly the only aspects of how they have run those companies that has brought them to this situation.
so if you're going to sit there and argue that the foreign car companies are not about to go under solely because they threw a dice one day and it said "hybrids" and they put their factories in the south, and that the big 3 are about to go under for only the reverse of those two things, then i think i'm done here.
I am amused (?) to note that some US automakers are still (!) railing at "them ferrin' countries" (my words) for not buying American cars. Other than some fat cats who think Buicks are cool anywhere in the world, who would want to barge around tiny streets in oversized iron that gets atrocious mileage -- and doesn't even have the steering wheel on the right side ?
I think gas going to $4.00 a gallon....is the underdoing of the big 3 and then some. Take a look at the broader picture....anything produced using oil jumped in price. Just last year all construction related materials which were tied to oil cost went off the board. Steel studs jumping in cost by 25 percent in a nod of a hat along with gypsum board, insulation, concrete, copper...you just name it.
If gas prices had not jumped they would all still be motoring along.
I'm hanging onto my Mercury Grand Marquis...vintage 1984 47,000 miles and my 1996 Jeep Cherokee 158,000 miles and well I think alot of other people who have been impulsive auto buyers are doing the same thing. We will ride out the storm.
If the big 3 take a tumble well so be it. We will have alot of talented people out there who are eager to grab a chunk of the pie and we might just see a number of start up companies who can do a better job at tackling the problems once all the fluff at the top is gone.
“There is one thing the government does owe the auto companies, however: freedom. For example, however the industry shakes out, automakers must be liberated from CAFE fuel economy laws that arbitrarily dictate what kind of cars they must sell, forcing them to sell millions of small cars that have no chance of profitability given consumer preferences. The auto industry must also be liberated from the Wagner Act, which gives unions the coercive negotiating power that railroaded the Big Three into their lavish, unprofitable wage and health plans. If a liberated Big Three can rejuvenate themselves, great; otherwise, a liberated next generation will be able to succeed where they failed.
“Economic freedom is what created the American automotive industry and made it the envy of the world. Economic freedom is the only thing that can bring it back.”
the only thing that will save the big.....is
1. get rid of the unions
2. make affordable cars
3. simplify
and get rid of the stupids fucks in the office
its not that hard really......
sell to classes, live with the masses
sell to the masses, live with the classes
but in this situation..... try to sell to the classes and end up in the river
Meanwhile, Citibank has the US taxpayers on the hook for atleast $150 billion so far. That's the damage they did in one weekend!
GM's handout is chump change compared to Citibank, AIG and the others.
I don't agree with the bailout of GM but do you guys know what Citibank got away with two weeks ago?
http://baselinescenario.com/2008/12/01/next-mit-class-on-global-crisis-tuesday-december-2nd/#more-1469
here's a Deleuze quote that i underlined profusely years ago;
"...As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But, in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex form of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services and what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer capitalism for production but for product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus it is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation..."
citi will be broken up soon enough. after all the Ney Yorker insiders lost their money they had to rob the treasury to get back to par. Wall Street needs to be decentralised out of NYC and DC.
$75 USD per hour for automaker... WTF!
gas is under a buck fiddy. to really motivate people to buy into high mileage vehicles gas needs to be up at over four bucks a gallon. of course, right now nobody is buying cars because they are worried that tomorrow they may be filing for unemployment. the car companies should be given a loan and the banks that have been bailed out ought to be poked in the ass to lend money.
imagine making 20 mill a year.....
with that, i would start my own school..... and maybe build my own car and try to produce it......
factory workers can make from 75-100gs a year......
the only facotries that i know that are still moving long are the steel/slag companies in the D.... some of them are owned by the russians, i believe.
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