Very nice work. Excellent.

Union men used to die on the street or in the yard as victims of injustice. Now you see that the war has been taken to a different place in these hard times, and there you have prevailed.

On this board, at least, the good and honest working man still has his dignity, and is not yet again a slave to the company. Unfree toilers everywhere would thank you, if they had any voice.

Take great care.

The Big 3's Failures Have NOTHING to do with labor costs...

. NO!

The problems have been--and continue to be--with the "Captains of Industry" running them.

For 40 years, they have been running the companies all-reactively. Little or no innovation to meet the new challenges in transportation; only newness a

"at the edges."

]They continued to build masive cars weighing thousands of pounds more than necessary, containing engines over-adequate to run these behemoths, The natural result has been a giant waste of irreplaceable natural rersources which will too soon run out, "justifying car" buyers' expenditure of too much $$ for each such outofdate car coming off the assembly line AND making a nasty assured global warming,to boot.

And YOU blame the workers?? BS!

-- artfulme

No, you don't get it. The cars you seem to despise are the ones that kept the Detroit Three in business. People wanted them, and bought them, and paid prices that were profitable for Detroit. Lexus and Mercedes built the same kinds of SUV's. Toyota and Honda want to get in on the same light truck market.

You seem to think that things like CAFE were the culmination of Democrats in Congress knowing more about the car business than the engineers in Detroit. That's complete nonsense. The Democrats wanted to take a stand for "clean air" and "less foreign oil." But they didn't have the guts or the intellectual honesty to place large taxes on oil, as was done in Japan or Europe. Instead, they came up with "CAFE," a scheme that Detroit executives and the UAW both new was bad. John Dingell (D-MI) was the UAW's man in Congress, and while his liberal voting record is flawless (he has introduced a bill to establish a single-payer national healthcare system in each of the last 20 or so Congresses), even he opposed much of the advancement of CAFE standards. When the Detroit automakers determined that the only way they could make the CAFE goals was with an increased mix of higher-mileage small cars (low profit vehicles), they had to go outside of the UAW to do it, with imported products, but the two-fleet rule additions to CAFE made it impossible for Detroit to do that. CAFE, as it turned out, had nothing to do with clean air of oil imports, but everything to do with Democratic Party paybacks to the UAW on the one hand, and the Sierra Club on the other hand.

Throughout, the car companies have not been regarded as businesses that needed to make products in demand, to be sold at profitable prices. No, for the Democrats, the automakers were a life-support system for the UAW, and a laboratory operating for the benefit of the "environmentalists." No wonder they had trouble being profitable in North America. And the same "suits" who all of you criticize for their stupidity and bad management of the American auto industry? They ran Ford of Europe profitably. Just as GM ran Opel in Europe profitably.

To those of you who thing that Detroit just needed, and needs, to quit building cars like SUV's, Cadillacs and light trucks; You. Are. Nuts. Those cars contribute to company profits. Americans want to buy those cars.

this southern Repub crowd is the apparently nationalistic "buy America First" crowd. Guess not when it comes to unions and other forms of "commie" organization!

Let's face it, they're just fascists, in the good old fashioned sense of the term. They'd send us to concentration camps if they could.

When Saturn moved in back in the early 90's they promised Tennesseans jobs. They delivered, Tennesseans GOT jobs... in Luby's Cafeteria onsite. GM forcibly relocated their laid off Michiganders into two small communities and effectively screwed Tennessee. It took some ten years before they finally began to hire Tennesseans to actually work in that plant.

Hate it for the Unions but the Big 3 made their bed.

Fuck em.

You are wrong on so many counts that i can't quote them all.

First of all GOP did not get religion or did not stoop to serve the common man.

Its logic is pure and simple: The Big 3 make up most of the unionized workers remaining.

By forcing the UAW to accept permanent wage and other reductions they force the workers to become poorer. If the UAW refuses they let the Big 3 become bankrupt thus allowing them to be sold to Hedge funds or countries like Dubai or China which will force UAW to accept still lower wage and other work conditions.

Either way the GOP stands to benefit, since their base supporters: the ultra rich stand to benefit.

Plus you can add Cheney to it too, if labor troubles break out, since Cheney owns prison companies who stand to gain from any domestic violence.

If banks could be bailed out without any preconditions, why not auto companies?

And please don't blame the auto companies: they respond to market pressure.

The SUV and Hummers were not exactly Edsels. They were bought by millions of americans and made profits for GM and FORD.

After all you and me cheered when SUVs made profits for shareholders.

But when oil prices suddenly spiral up, we expect to retool everything in 3 days!

That's not possible.

That is why Japan could not build SUVs at that time. Because they didn't have necessary production facilities. Don;t you think they would have loved to make some profit off the SUV? They could not because they were not ready.

By the time they were ready, the market had changed.

Check on their balance sheets for massive investments during that time in factory tools.

And stop praising the GOP. They are bunch of scoundrels who are so corrupt that they would see soldiers being sold as mercenaries if that was legal and they would sell NASA to a Hedge fund if it was profitable.

GOP has always fought against America, and they will continue to fight against American ideals of hard work and decent wages, because it goes against their policy of exploitation and getting richer.