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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Southern GOP senators, who represent states that receive more US tax money than they contribute, are whining about using tax money to bail out the auto industry? The Germans would call it Uber-Hypokrisie.
That simply pays off cronies and nationalizes whatever pays off the most people no matter how poorly it's run.
Nearly all the foreign automakers receive funding from their respective governments to stay competitive. Smart moves by them it looks like.
All of the foreign auto plants in the South received hundreds of millons if not billions to bring their factories to the South. Just a fact.
All the Southern states receive more tax money back from the federal govt. than they pay in. I wonder where that comes from?
The powers behind the curtain are winning, the middle class is warring on the middle class. The real problems started in board rooms, country clubs, 2 martini lunches, private jets flying over the people so that they can be ignored, the people who control our country don't see us as people, just puppets to be manipulated. When the money lenders and parasites on the backside of America can isolate themselves from contact with us ordinary people, we don't exist, we are a caricature in a comic, or at very best an annoying necessity.
Positive suggestions are few while BS seems to rule. The pompous asses we elect do not have our good will at heart only their own gain in all too many cases.
Oh and there is no God of Globalization, it is just a term used to gut the world.
The Free Market Easter Bunny doesn't lay golden eggs.
The Trickle Down Santa has only delivered deceit and misery.
People, all of us need to count for what we are, human beings. This is left out all too often.
Remember in the words of Red Green, we are all in this together and I'm pullin for ya.
My Dad was in and out of unions during his labor-intensive work life. My late father-in-law was a union activist for 45 years. My ex-wife is a virtual socialist, as is my mom, who in her 80's remembers her father as a pure Russian socialist transplanted to the Bronx. I alone worked the other side of the fence, in a 30-year corporate management career, but my semi-retired native New York heart is still with the working man. Nevertheless, I have to state emphatically that the UAW has got to blink in this standoff, for the sake of their membership and the concentric rings of many hundreds of thousands of workers in feeder businesses dependent on the Big Three.
Anyone inside that union, or for that matter any private sector union still functioning in America, who believes they can return to their mid-2oth century heyday is either suffering from age-related senile dementia or the simple fear-tinged inability to adapt to a changed economic world. The math is on the blackboard. It's apparent the pro-business, anti-labor wing of the GOP is hardening in the South, where "right-to-work" is almost a religion and foreign-owned but American-staffed car companies are already operating in a big way, subsidized by state tax incentives to locate in several southern states.
Corker and his ilk are playing ruthless hardball national politics, and the UAW will emulate the Bush administration in its worst policy wrongheadedness if the union sticks to the self-destructive notion that it doesn't have to compromise on certain issues of overall compensation, in order to save as many jobs as possible in a downsized, "leaner and meaner" industry. The seminal destruction of PATCO by Reagan almost 30 years ago should be a realistic benchmark for their negotiations; they simply no longer possess the political power or influence to buck rational but prudent concessions on certain contract features that render Detroit intrinsically non-competitive with the Japanese, Koreans and Germans operating in the U.S.
In the greand traditions of the American bargaining table, they may wait until the 11th hour to publicly acknowledge this reality and make those concessions, but make them the UAW must, because the alternative is almost incomprehensible...a manufacturing nuclear winter throughout the midwest. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that the current cabal of incompetent and visionless executive bozos that brought the Big Three to their knees walk the plank well ahead of the UAW's sacrifice; if that isn't economic justice in spades, nothing can be.
But the union has to bend, or it WILL break under the weight of it's own hubris and delusional sense of entitlement, in a globalized auto industry and economy that will never return to the Post-WWII bubble.
If Czechoslovakia could peacefully split into two new nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, then why can't the United States do so, too? From my perspective, the South is a backwards and regressive weight around the rest of the country. Their politicians in Congress hold back progress, and worse.
Let's cut the South loose. Let it go its own way (backwards). Fling open our doors to political refugees who do not want to remain in a theocratic authoritarian backwater. The rest of the nation will rocket ahead, and the South...will get what it deserves.
Violators will be beheaded in the town square.
The US South is backward, regressive and certainly not 1st world. The greatest thing that could happen to the US is if the South secede from the union. tragically, it will never happen. The South is incapable of being self reliant and is a welfare recipient of the productive and progressive Blue USA. They are not about to commit suicide and abandon the cow that has been providing them with free milk for so many generations.
... risked plunging our economy into a depression (if it's not there already) ...
Not yet, but it doesn't seem possible to avoid, even with an auto bailout, which could only mitigate the damage now and not prevent it. BEA statistics clearly show that the US unemployment rate is increasing faster now than it did at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Those who are fascinated by slow-motion train wrecks can google up the raw numbers with the keywords "BEA unemployment". One of my paying clients would be disappointed if I were to just give it away.
The collapse of the US auto industry would certainly accelerate that trend and make it impossible to reverse for years to come. Judging from the behavior of the DJIA on Friday, investors seem confident that Bush will allow TARP funds to bail out the US auto industry. But Bush is already waffling on a possible bailout of the US auto industry using TARP funds:
White House: No immediate deal on auto loans
http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2008/12/14/D952HC581_meltdown_autos/index.html
Overseas bourses are already expecting a TARP bailout to fail.
A bailout deal wouldn't help anyway if the credit freeze, the cause of the crisis, continues to impede vehicle sales - and the weakening economy is feeding that freeze. It's one of a series of negative feedback loops going on between the real economy and the financial economy that is causing a downward spiral that's gone global. That's one of the disadvantages of globalization: if the world's leading economy goes down it takes the rest of them with it.
Even the US agricultural industry is having severe problems getting loans, threatening the upcoming planting season. I'd seriously recommend that Americans start planting potatoes in their back yards. They're easy to grow from store potatoes, and not only would you be able to survive on them, but they can also be used to make the vodka you're going to need for consolation, in the tradition of Russian serfs.
So far nobody has had had anything hopeful to post which would counter this analysis, and that should tell you something. As usual, it actually gets worse the more you look at it.
I wish you folks a lot of luck.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
