But the US has become the Mexico of the First World, and the GOP (and many Democrats) are working hard to hasten that role. We're the place with the cheap labor, the non-union labor, the place without national healthcare, where higher education is increasingly only available to the richest few -- banana republicanism, basically. That's why this latest fight is so important to the GOP stewards of this old new world order -- this rollback of our economic culture is fundamental to their agenda.

Republicans to Workers... 'Fuck You'

I wonder how the Honorable Senator from Honda will sleep tonight.

A couple quick points in response.

First, I mentioned that the immigrant experience was somewhat different than presented in The Jungle. The town of Gary is a good example. Once called the "magic city," it was a wonder in its time -- built on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan by the newly formed U.S. Steel Company, its workers had state of the art schools and housing by 1900 standards. Some of those workers came from the Silesian region of Poland, then one of the poorest parts of the world. Today, a bit of the idealistic architecture from that era survives in the form of beach and bath buildings in Marquette Park, on the lakeshore. And, some books, including a large tome on the immigrant experience in Indiana (published by the state historical society) and the Images of America series touch on this era. Again, much different than the urban nightmare presented in the Jungle novel.

I also mentioned it is difficult to imagine those past times, and you objected. I was thinking principally of rural agriculture. In the north, the ag methods of just 50 years ago have vanished, and in the south, of course, the mechanized cotton picker did much to end the era of large rural populations comprised of agricultural workers. The world of Treemonisha, found in Joplin's music, is indeed hard to picture, at least for me.

What planet are YOU from. A couple of hundred thousand UAW line guys out of work isn't going to change how my company already treats people like shit. It won't make the least difference at all.

Don't be so smug. No one has snubbed their noses more at the American people than those Wall Street theives!

After you destroy unions, let's see what happens to all other workers' rights from middle management down! We'll see a greater widening of the gap between the haves and have nots!

And let's see how much those foreign companies/automakers contribute to America -- its charities, its disasters, and its communities (many of those dissasters occurring in the South and for which American automakers contributed millions of dollars -- compare what was given by foreign car companies). And let's hope we don't need to use those foreign automaker factories in an emergency -- like another WW II -- if our countries politics don't parallel theirs, we may be up the creek!

That you can be pragmatic, even if it requires pretty intense pressure. I agree with you that it would be unwise for the USG to allow the auto companies to fail.

On the other hand, I consider the current situation largely your fault, you and the rest of your regulation crazed cohorts. Why do I say that? One line: you're pissed off at the car companies for opposing CAFE. Let me explain something you clearly don't understand. Democracy isn't about being right; it's about what we all agree to. The American people didn't support CAFE. It may have passed the Congress and there was a lot of furor at the time to create CAFE but what did the American people do? As soon as Detroit began to exploit the necessary loophole in CAFE for trucks (hint: trucks aren't for moving people; they're for moving large heavy objects. I own a 3/4 ton Chevy van that gets about 17 mpg and mostly sits around waiting for the next time I need a truck.) the American people started buying the vehicles based on trucks like hotcakes. The SUV is a direct lineal descendant of CAFE; they really didn't exist before. So people are now driving around in vehicles capable of hauling 10 squares of roofing shingles and 4 rolls of roofing felt along with various other bits with a total weight of 16-1700 pounds. You aren't going to move that in a Mazda 6. My van moved that handily but I don't drive my family around in the van.

The role of any company, including the big 3, is to produce products that their customers want to buy. They were largely doing that. Oh, you can argue that they would have more market share if they'd ______ (fill in the blank - built more fuel efficient cars, cheaper cars, better quality cars, etc, etc, etc) but, in fact, they were making money building roomy, powerful vehicles that the public wanted. Then gas spiked at over $4 a gallon. And wonder of wonders! People started seeing these gas hogs as suboptimal. And therein lies the clue as to what should have been done instead of undemocratic and authoritarian regulation attempting to impose somebody else's vision on everybody - tax gas.

Not everybody is as cheap as I am. Back in 1972 when the price of gas was in the 40 - 50 cent range, I took a 1966 Volkswagen fastback which normally had an mpg range right around 25 and, with some special modifications and tweaking, got 48 mpg out of it. I was pleased. If the government set a target price for gas in, lets say, the $3.00 to $3.25 a gallon range and adjusted the actual tax based on the untaxed wholesale price of gas to achieve that range, I have a sneaking suspicion that even the profligate of the population would want fuel efficient vehicles. And Detroit would produce them. They would do so because they wanted to so that they could sell cars, not because some asshole in Washington told them to. There's a big difference there. There would be multiple benefits, not the least of which would be a stable price for gas that consumers could count on. And, it would work and work a lot better than Communist style diktats coming from Washington. Command economy style economics didn't work for Russia and it won't work well here either.