(10:00PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
This morning in Docudharma Times, Mishima noted that polls indicate —
That Americans believe that the big 3 shouldn’t be bailed out. Do they understand the residual effects it will have upon the economy if they are allowed to fail? It doesn’t appear so.
The “reasons” why many Americans do not support the bailout are mixed. I think these are the main “reasons” that I’ve heard:
-
Anger over the Wall Street bailout
-
Anger over Detroit vehicle selection (electric car versus SUV)
-
Anger over rich automaker executives
-
Anger over “overpaid” union workers
So, what’s behind this anger?
Right now the automakers are a casualty of the Wall Street bailout. The robber barons are in charge of the Wall Street bailout. They systematically created the crisis and I think they are rewarding their friends. Personally, I oppose the Wall Street bailout and still do. But, being angry at Wall Street so, in turn, punish Detroit is like invading Iraq to go after bin Laden. Peoples’ wrath is being misdirected.
Yes, Detroit is behind the curve on more fuel-efficient cars, but that is, in part, the blame of Congress who listened to automaker lobbyists and American consumers who kept buying the SUVs. If the Big Three’s vehicles were not best sellers until the high gas prices of last summer, then I think they would have built different vehicles. Americans voted with their dollars.
Yes, the automaker executives are pampered and over-compensated. However, the terms of the bailout could remove executives, restrict their compensation, or nationalize their companies. Of the Big Three, Ford is in the best position and its comparatively new CEO has been moving the company in the right direction, albeit slowly.
Finally, union workers are not overpaid. After decades of union busting and bashing, Americans are poorly informed and/or jealous about union workers. Unions are sometimes blamed for American corporations closing factories in the U.S. and moving jobs outside the country. Unions have been depicted as corrupt and protecting lazy, inefficient workers. Laws have been passed to neuter unions and prevent organizing workers. I suspect by now that most Americans have been totally brainwashed by conservative anti-union rhetoric.
Personally, I think GM should be nationalized and its executive management dismissed. Chrysler should not get loans until it opens its books to public scrutiny. If it is bad enough shape, then I think it too should be nationalized. Ford should be given the emergency line of credit it says it needs.
Secondly, I think universal single-payer healthcare is one of the better ways to help Detroit compete. That, and building the European models and selling them in the U.S. Until the U.S. factories can be re-equipped, then increase production in Europe and import the models to the U.S.
So do Americans know what will happen to the U.S. economy if the automakers are allowed to go bankrupt? No most people, myself likely included, do not know for certain. Anger clouds judgment.
Ultimately, does the U.S. wish to pay for the automaker employees by keeping them on the job and preserving some semblance of U.S. manufacturing, or does the U.S. wish to pay for the workers unemployment?
Either way, there is going to be a bailout. It just depends on what America will get out of it. Something or nothing?
Anyway. This is my take. What’s yours?
18 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
The past 8 years have left a lot of people, myself included, very angry. Unfortunately, for the most part that anger is misplaced and misdirected. Meanwhile the perpetrators slink off silently into their private fortresses.
What the outcome of pay me now vs. pay me later will be is nothing I can forsee, though. I oppose just giving money away if there is not a good plan in place to use that money (see: Financial Institutions Bailout – Where is the money they already gave away?)
I really oppose NOT stepping in where the government can be of use in saving Americans jobs and in turn American families.
If I had to make an uneducated guess, and that is the only kind I can make here, I would say pay me now and keep their feet to the fire to be sure they are doing everything they can with that money to save the industry, which is saving American families.
Oh, and get the hell off of the backs of the “Unions.” They bargained in good faith with the automakers FOR the workers who are doing their jobs to take money home to their families.
I hope that all made sense.
far more substantial than a cut in the union workers’ labor costs. From the UAW web site:
What is the Republican senate caucus doing about the 90+ percent of car costs other than labor?
ideology has deeply corroded the public psyche, and it has been doing so for an entire generation, ever since the Reagan Administration crushed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers.
George F. Will candidly made the corporatist argument in the Washington Post on January 4th, 2007 in an op-ed piece entitled: “The Right Minimum Wage.” Here is the money quote:
I wonder whether Will could spot the irony here: as a key part of their union-busting, labor-crushing agenda, the corporatists and their media apologists like Will seem to display no such reluctance to involve government in decreeing an appropriate level for wages–as long as the goal is to reduce workers’ paychecks to approach Will’s corporatist-desired, labor-as-a-commodity price of $0.
Our country has already tried that approach for a couple of centuries. It was called slavery.
Suddenly one understands why the Republican Party has transformed itself into a regional party based in the Old Confederacy, with some white evangelical coalition partners in the rural Western Plains.
Oh, and BTW, as the cost of labor approaches zero, who will have the income to purchase the goods and services offered by whatever remaining corporate entities have not collapsed as a result of their narcissistic short-sightedness in maximizing shareholder profits (and, even more, management compensation) while reducing aggregate market demand?
Globo-corp has conclude that highly oppressed people produce the max profits. So in order to keep jet fuel in the fleet so they can go to Davos Switzerland Joe Six Pack autoworker gets the shaft. The shaft of globalization grease, this time without the grease, bend over Joe.
http://www.johntitor.com
This guy says stock up on bicycle tires.
has been spearheaded by dickheads like Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) that are worried that Executives at large Corporations like AIG might not be paid their very well deserved bonuses for driving their companies into the ground at the American taxpayers expense, if the UAW workers continue to make a living wage for their families.
.
I had to take a break from Orange: between Japan-bashing (the mid/late ’80s all over again) and “everyone in the South is a depraved, racist, redneck, inbred, moron” drek, I had to take a break.
Virtually no anger at the Detroit Execs who drove (heh) these companies off the effing cliff. Shelby’s a tool, but he was RIGHT when he called for the Detroit Execs to get fired as part of the deal (symbolic, yes – but a damn righteous symbol) and he was WRONG when he refused to get behind this latest, compromise, House-passed package: imperfect, but, shit, what is?
Mu . . .
Unions get benefits for their workers by collective bargaining. It started with eight hour days and a forty hour workweek. There were no health benefits before unions. There were no retirement or pensions plans. Vacation plans? right. Paid holidays? Right. Extra pay for overtime? Right. Worker health and safety? Grievance rights against mismanagement?
The Republican senators represent states that have given significant tax breaks to non-US manufacturers to move in and set up non-union right-to-work (no collective bargaining) shops. These auto-makers have nice, docile mostly white employees. That’s why they located in not just the states but the counties that had the best demographics for them.
I’d love to see a county map for the US showing where the foreign auto-makers settled in, the right-to-work regulations, the percentage of union members, political registration, how they voted in 2008 and the racial breakdown.
Just a guess – you’ll find low-information white Republicans correspond very highly with foreign car plant locations.
Shelby et al are willing to let the entire world economy collapse if it will bring an end to collective bargaining.