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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
because in the coming years, when some GOP knuckle-dragger is running for office to prevent the sodomites from contaminating our precious bodily fluids, everybody better remember what the GOP did with one of its last chances to redeem itself.
That said, it seems to me that whether wage cuts for UAW guys is appropriate, depends on how much money they're making. 'Cause I don't know.
I have heard accounts to the effect that they make $80-, $90-, $100,000 a year. I don't know if it's true, or if it's the whole truth. If that is the case, I have to say I am not overly sympathetic. When teachers to to university for 2-4 years and end up making $30k, I don't see why a bunch of high school graduates should make salaries comparable to what a doctor gets. (Especially for making machines that are destroying the global life support system.)
On the other hand, if most auto workers only make $30- or $50k per year, and the $80k guys are rare, then forcing wage cuts is less of a no-brainer.
There isn't a working class--there's two. There's the old-style working class, i.e. people who have to work their asses off for lousy wages, like in the good ol' nineteenth century; and there is the comfortable working class with unions and good working conditions and benefits, who do better than your typical college graduate. Let's not conflate the two.
This is exactly why we need to be rid of the RepTards - permanently. All a bunch of jerks and assholes who care nothing about the country they were elected to defend, protect and manage. Good riddance and as far as I'm concerned we should never elect another Republican to any public office. Let them all wallow in their foul fetid self-created stench.
A hack like Andrew is and can try to make this a partisan issue, but once again, he is wrong. Plenty of republicans have supported this, plenty of democrats have not supported this but the most important thing is that plenty of americans do not support this.
Andrew tries to feebly compare this to the financial bailout, but the problem is that a huge amount of americans were against that as well. This is a case of enough is enough. Not the class warefare that Andy is trying to create as a last ditch effort to guilt everyone into believing his way since he has no persuasive ability. On top of this, many fell for the first bailout as a necessity to save our economy, but what happened . . . well, nothing happened. The downward spiral continued. If ever there was a good time for this, now is the time because it is coming either way. So instead of giving the fatcats at GM the 15 billion that they will then keep and spread around to their cronies and not the worker, lets put an end to it.
And who cares what Sweden is doing? Anyone here? And Sweden has been stealing its citizens money for years. Give us time, we are trying to catch up.
If there is one hilarious point in this entire disturbing debate, it is that even in the midst of Glen's article talking about how so many people are refusing to admit that they even ever voted for Bush, here so many of these hacks are forced to side with Bush in this mess. While you may not have voted for Bush and you may hate him, he has been providing you for years with your steady stream of government spending iniatitives that you love, but don't seem to be providing much stability for us.
They would have been better off calling the UAW's bluff and letting them strike forever, years ago. Now they're stuck with each other. May they all drown in boiling lava in hell.
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.
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
