I was pleased to read that the proposed $14bn bail out of the Detroit 3 has been voted down thanks to the GOP Senators showing some backbone – just for once. Naturally, if you read this BBC report, the Republicans are positioned as the bad guys, refusing to play along with the kindly Democrats and the tamed White House, with the poor trade union guys cast as the innocents in this soap opera. In fact it is the UAW which has a central portion of blame to take for the demise of GM and co but you would never guess this from the way the BBC writes up the item. The concept of letting inefficient business swing in the breeze seems incomprehensible to the BBC and its acolytes but from where I stand the GOP is quite right NOT to bail out the auto-barons and their Union henchmen.
DRIVING DOWN THE DREAM
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Im sort of caught in two minds on this. On the one hand its a lot of money to p1ss away but then again on the other hand the social impact of all those jobs being lost is probably a lot higher than the $14billion requested for.
And lets be honest here, we ARE in a very very bad situation, with no thanks to morons like The Light Worker ™ and Brown for their lack of financial risk management (ie. voting against regulating Fanny/Freddy and not regulating the financial services!).
But yeah, its great to see the GOP shooting this down like the Dems shooting down the war effort in Iraq!
I guess it must be true, what goes round comes round aye 🙂
Mailman
I was under the impression that Democrats controlled both Houses, so wondered how the Republicans could block this.
However, reading the story, it does eventually say that some Democrats would also vote against it – but only around the eleventh paragraph. By which time casual readers have probably given up. So it’s not just the nasty Republicans.
Like Mailman, I am in two minds about this given the social impact. But if some of the reports I read of union practices are true, it’s a wonder the car firms didn’t fold long ago in a global marketplace.
This will sound very familiar to anyone over 40.
$14 billion for the ailing motor industry is $14 that cannot be spent elsewhere. Maybe giving some relief to more productive, smaller businesses would be of greater benefit in the long term.
The UAW was a big contributer to the Democreep coffers and the UAW has been the main reason why the native auto industry is in such a mess, like the British car industry before it, the union barons have held back the industry for years, advancements in technology and working practices were fought against by union vested interests and mafia like actions.
Its a wonder that the industry has lasted this long, as usual the media is painting the ‘nasty bosses’ and the ‘nasty republicans’ as being to blame but the fact is that as with the British car industry the union barons and their democreep socialist chums are to blame!
The BBC will always lay the blame on its ideological enemies and will always lie and cheat to protect its ideological allies.
Everything is produced by propaganda experts at the BBC, every little detail is pored over to push the leftist/socialist message, they have learned the evil propaganda skill from the USSR and they push it like their lives depend on it!
The BBC is a truly evil propaganda mouthpiece for a truly evil ideology, they are masters of their poisonous black art as were there USSR/Nazi teachers before them!
The BBC is normally attacking fat Americans for driving everywhere. You’d think the BBC would be delighted that millions of evil car working scum will lose their jobs.
“The concept of letting inefficient business swing in the breeze seems incomprehensible to the BBC”
The concept of hundreds of thousands of people out of work and dying on the breadline seems incomprehensible to you, it would seem.
Reform is long overdue at the big three, their leaders have made huge strategic business mistakes, but if in doubt let’s just blame it on the unions, eh?
derw,
The unions ARE to blame, just as they happily and knowingly destroyed our shipping/industrial/manufacturing sectors with their poisonous socialist ideology the US unions are responsible for destroying the native US auto industry, why people like you are blind to the power and political ideology of the unions is beyond me but the truth is that the unions have long been hotbeds of socialist/Marxist inspired agitators hell bent on destroying the capitalism
that gave them employment in the first place.
The socialist agitators in the NUM for example destroyed a whole mining industry trying to bring down elected governments to further their grubby revolutionary aims and yet they still have the brass neck to blame Thatcher and the ‘scabs’ who only asked for a democratic vote.
Yes Oh yes the unions have a lot to answer for.
I’ve never liked unions much, in fact I would avoid joining one if ever offered the chance, but the unions in question weren’t responsible for destroying UK mining, still less the US auto industry.
You have to look at much more important reasons like worldwide demand and decisions taken at corporate level (e.g. to produce gas guzzlers nobody wants any more; obscene management expenses) and little in the way of forward planning investment. As for the mines, I think the miners were a lot more concerned about their entire communities being destroyed overnight rather than radically overthrowing the government (how exactly?), despite their mindless, meaningless rhetoric . The strategic move away from mining may have been correct in the longer-term, but didn’t I hear too recently that mines are being reopened now back the UK because… shock horror.. they are profitable again?
And wouldn’t it be better now if the UK actually had some industrial/manufacturing base to fall back on (and export given the weak pound!!) rather than relying on the services sector which arguably is in an even more parlous state?
There are many sides to every argument and things need to be compared and balanced.
A $14bn bail-out and because of the unions eh David?
You’re not living in the real world.
derw: The unions under that c**t Scargill hastened the end of the mines. Union leaders never have the interest of the workers in mind.
Did Arthur Scargill lose his job and house when the pits lcosed? Er no, he had a nice cosy job for life along with a big pension, unlike the thousands that followed him off a cliff.
The auto companies can go into Chapter 11, a form of bankruptcy where the work continues while the company renegotiates its debts and also its contracts, particularly those with the uaw.
No need for outside involvement and (most importantly) no need for taxpayer money.
No mention is made of the fact that both Honda and Toyota operate factories in Kentucky and Alabama, both high unemployment areas, producing cars that Americans want to buy, cheaply and efficiently, giving their workers all their benefits but with no-strike agreements as well as the freedom not to join the union. As far as I know, these companies are not part of the bailout package. To quote our Great Leader, this has more to do with internal politics (i.e. the politics of the Democratic Party) than it has to do with reviving the economy.
The steel and coal industries were once a large part of the US economy but lost out to more efficient foreign competition or social change. West Virginia used to be the Durham of the USA, both socially and politically, dominated by John L. Lewis’ Mineworkers’ Union. However since the collapse of the coal industry WV has proved to be a haven for IT firms seeking a cheaper base than New York and in the last 3 Presidential elections has supported the Republican nominee (including McCain in preference to the Chosen One).
Its good news that the car makers didn’t get a hand out – although, one of the reasons they needed it is because of their pension liabilities – which the unions lobbied to have.
As for the BBC angle – do you really think they are going to highlight any reason why a company should go bust, and people should lose their jobs?
When Rover went bust in the UK, and 7000 lost their jobs, 90% found employment again – even though many complained that they were being paid less. The grubby truth is they were being paid too much in the first place – and that is what the problem is for the US car makers now!
derw at 12:25 pm: You need to say which miners you are talking about – Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, S Wales etc.
The miners were not united in their ‘struggle’ and, as I recall, the moderate Nottinghamshire miners were not happy with Scargill’s militant approach.
I was living in S Yorkshire at the time and clearly recall the viciousness of the dispute – including the taxi driver who died when a lump of concrete was dropped on his car. That sort of thing has been conveniently forgotten.
Allan D: The Americans should learn from us. Pissing billions away on shite home based car makers gets you no where.
The worlers just assume that once bailed out, the Government will keep pouring money in no matter how lazy they are or how shit the cars are.
Someone should email George Bush the history of British Leyland.
You only have to watch Top Gear to hear Clarkson and co tell you how shit most American cars are.
derw,
I think you really should do some research on the ‘miners strike’, the NUM executive wanted to “do a Heath” on Thatcher for purely political hatred and to further the anti capitalist ideological struggle, there was no other reason because their so called demands were going to arbitration and they could have got what they wanted in terms of actual on the table promises BUT they didnt want agreement, they wanted to relive the ‘Joe Gormly days’ of destroying Tory regimes, the NUM agitators used every provocation they could think of to destroy negotiations with the NCB when that failed they came up with the bright idea of calling out their ‘troops’ BUT they failed to call for a vote knowing they could lose so they tried the old Marxist trick of demonizing those who only wanted to give the NCB/HMG/NUM deal a fair shake.
It was the Nottingham lads who smashed the illegal strike called for reasons of pure political hatred, the NUM is directly and fully responsible for the total destruction of the UK coal industry, they tried to destroy a legitimate elected government, they failed, the NUM knew full well the consequences of their actions and the destruction it would bring but they did it anyway.
The past is gone but the truth will always remain.
As the Notts lads said at the time, I dont get a vote? you dont get my support!
Everybody and everything depends completely on the banking system (not just its employees) so it was necessary to stabilise it in the public interest.
Not everyone depends on the US automotive industry (apart from its employees) Cars can and are made everywhere and if people have chosen not to buy Ford or GM, but a Hyundai or Daihatsu then that is their right in a free market and good luck to their manufacturers. There is no overriding public interest in bailing out failing carmakers.
“The concept of letting inefficient business swing in the breeze seems incomprehensible to the BBC”
Well, naturally…
Is everyone forgetting that real human lives are going to be badly affected?
I’m not a fan of American foreign policy, but I don’t want to see anyone unemployed.
I’ve yet to see the BBC mention the poll showing the US public 61% “against” to 39% “for” the bailout.
I don’t want to be rude (honest!) but some of the above comments are short-sighted. GM alone have lost $37bn in the past 12 months! The average GM employee is on $75 per hour. Why should taxpayers earning $7.50ph pay for those earning ten times as much to keep their jobs?!
ae1: Are you suggesting people should buy shit cars just to save jobs? That’s what happened in Communist Russia and Eastern Europe.
You might like to watch Top Gear from last week with their excellent article on Communist cars. We were represented by the Morris Marina. A vehicle that in my view the workers who produced it should have been executed in public for making.
gordon-bennett has it right @1:23. The BBC, just like the rest of the ignorant, emotion-based, Leftoid media, has lied to you all about this.
Millions of people will not be unemployed tomorrow. So the whole “Ooh, thinking of that social impact makes me feel bad” is an emotional reaction based on a false premise.
In many cases, Chapter11 bankruptcy allows the company to restructure and survive, ultimately saving some of those jobs. That’s what will mostly happen here. The dealerships need serious restructuring as well, and will only deal with reality if they’re forced into it.
But there’s something much more important that’s left out of all this. GM was in trouble two years ago, before any of this current economic situation. They were already done in by the unions and their own crappy business decisions. GM and Ford have been floundering for quite some time now. This is nothing new.
So, all of you who are troubled by the idea of the auto-makers going bankrupt if they can’t sort themselves out should be asking yourselves: Would you have been so ready to throw good money after bad two years ago? Would you have believed then that the automakers deserved a bailout back when nobody else was getting one?
Their problems could have – and should have – been solved long ago. Their situation is not at all connected to the current financial crisis, so why do they deserve a piece of that pie? There is no good reason why the same people who screwed it up should be given all that money to maintain their status quo. That will just postpone the inevitable. And then where will we be?
Bankruptcy and restructuring is the better solution for everyone.
The bank bailout was not done to stabilise the economy. There has been no benefit to the taxpayer, the banks are behaving like welfare spongers. Bush has failed to utter a word of condemnation towards banks Anti-American behaviour.
Treausry Secretary Paulson deliberately allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse to benefit his former employer Goldman Sachs, which now has a monopoly.
Its very clear that Goldman Sachs is being given an unfair advantage in the banking sector.
Maybe Ford, GM, and Chrysler should change their names to Goldman Sachs.
Paulson and Bernanke should both be sacked. The former should be investigated by the FBI.
The American economy can be saved by abolishing the “Federal” Reserve.
Zevilyn: “The bank bailout was not done to stabilise the economy”
Every single major country in the developed world has take such steps. I’m not saying bankers aren’t shite and shouldn’t pay with their lives, but that every single one of us – you included – depends on their ability to honour a cheque, make a payment, receive your pension or salary, pay your food bill, send your taxes, whatever.
Every economic organisation goes tits up if there is a major run on a major bank or the whole system. Now get back to the guillotine.
If no subsidies are to be given to the car industry then subsidies should also be removed from farming. American farmers receive enormous subsidies which distort the world market in many products. New Zealand a few years ago abolished all agricultural subsidies and still has a thriving agricutural sector now producing food that people want to buy. Perhaps the Saviour of the World, aka Gordon Brown, would like to emulate New Zealand and remove all subsidies from the hereditary British peasants.
Well said Cassandra for saying it like it is
—–quote–
they have learned the evil propaganda skill from the USSR and they push it like their lives depend on it!
The BBC is a truly evil propaganda mouthpiece for a truly evil ideology, they are masters of their poisonous black art as were there USSR/Nazi teachers before them!
—-quote–
Hence no programmes since the seventies about what the Soviet Union was really like and what it did, on the BBC. Plenty of programmes about S Africa etc
On Foxnews/radio.com they were talking about the way the car bosses travelled to Congress to ask for their bailout and they all arrived in private company jets – separate jets.
There was an outcry and the next meeting they had to use ordinary planes
talking of shite cars like Martin said above, there must be some real Skoda experts in Russia after 50 years of servicing the same car. They must really know those cars inside out.
Moonbat nibbler has my view of the whole thing. UAW workers ARE getting an average of $75 an hour. I’m an IT professional with 40 years of experience, currently in management, and that’s almost 3 times what I make. That is an utterly preposterous wage in the US, even in an expensive area like Michigan. In fact, it was the UAW wage structure that did so much to drove up the cost of living in the area. Local markets adjust to what the locals can pay for.
The CEOs of those three companies have allowed the unions to get away with those preposterous contracts all these years– they actually have a deal where they’re paying people full salary to NOT work!– and I resent MY hard-earned money going to subsidize their fat paychecks!
And David Preiser is right. Chapter 11 will FORCE those companies to restructure their union contracts and their production. The way Congress is trying to structure the bailout, they would add new problems in trying to produce more small, energy-efficient cars.
At the rates the UAW workers are paid, you can already get a BETTER Toyota for thousands less than what a Chrysler eco-mobile would cost.
Toyota is simply better at making small cars. The “Big 3” are better at making big vehicles.
Bob, son of Bob:talking of shite cars like Martin said above, there must be some real Skoda experts in Russia after 50 years of servicing the same car. They must really know those cars inside out.
That might be amusing – if there were some factual basis for what you were rambling on about.
Skoda is not a Russian car maker and never has been, its Czech though now owned by VW. Of all communist car makers its products were probably the most marketable in the west. They never made the same model for 50 years.
You are of course are referring to Lada, which is a Russian brand and again they havnt made the same model for 50 years either. The one you are thinking of was based on a 1960s/70s FIAT.
Better not to read this, it might deflate your puerile humour.
I’ve always thought the great strength of the US was the system stood by the necessary business of seperating out winners from losers. They used to call it “economic hygeiene”. People are not necessarily going to become permanently unemployed – those who can will pick themselves up and start over making something that people want, which is not Ford and GM cars, otherwise they wouldn’t be down the toilet. It is good and healthy to periodically adjust, if sometimes personally painful. Adapt and survive – the opposite of socialism – preserve the unfit unwanted and the losers, to the point when there are enough of them with a vote to keep you in a job forever.
And now for the latest round of BBC lying about the automaker bailout attempt:
White House considers auto rescue
I happen to be against bailing out the GM, Ford, and Chrysler, because it wouldn’t be an actual bailout. That term implies rescuing something so that it can survive. In this case, it’s more of a postponement of the inevitable, as these companies – especially GM – were failing two years ago for reasons unrelated to the current economic scene. Which leads me to the first BBC lie.
The Republicans – and most of the population – have been against the bailout because in its current form it would be throwing good money after bad. The UAW would not restructure, and the people who had already run the industry into the ground would mostly remain in charge of pissing more money down the tubes. There are other details, but essentially the opponents in the Senate felt that it wasn’t good enough. Instead, the BBC decides to lie about the whole thing, and props up so many emotional tricks that I’m surprised they didn’t have a small puppy with enormous eyes mooning at the camera with a caption reading, “The Republicans want to make my owner unemployed so he can’t feed me.”
In other words, the BBC is lying about why the Republicans were against the bailout – it was about the current form, not the concept. The second lie is the continued pretense that the legal option of bankruptcy and restructuring doesn’t exist. The BBC – and others – keep pretending that 3 million people will be unemployed tomorrow, and no cars will ever be made again. Since President-elect Obamessiah is beholden the the unions, and must continue to appear as the Light Worker, he fibs about the bailout, and the BBC dutifully prints it unquestioningly.
The final lie is that the BBC is telling you again that the Republicans defeated the bailout. The truth is that the vote was 52-35. According to arcane Senate rules, this kind of a vote requires 60 votes for cloture (more or less meaning it can’t be filibustered, and will go to a vote, which it will win).
Since 10 Republicans voted for it last night, this means that some Democrats screwed it up. It turns out four Democrats voted against it, and four Dems didn’t even vote: Biden (for obvious reasons), Kennedy, John Kerry, and Ron Wyden from Oregon.
In other words, it wasn’t just nasty Republicans. Three of the biggest Dem names didn’t even show up, and four others voted against it! Most amusingly, once Harry Reid realized all was lost, he abstained as well, as some kind of procedural protest to bring it up for a vote again later.
So the BBC tells three lies all in one report. These are all facts, and my personal opinions are irrelevant.
I believe you. And with this quality of reporting unavailable with all the resources of our national broadcaster, I think we ought to cancel our BBC direct debits and rewrite them in favour of DP(USA)! Thank you.
Congratulations, comrade Lurker, for your comments above.
Like you, I also will always speak out seriously and solemnly when someone makes flippant remarks about the cars of the USSR, as these comments should not be tolerated. I too think Bob, son of Bob’s remarks are puerile and my face is not smiling. It is as solemn as the face of a Lada owner’s in a 1950 Soviet propaganda film.
And well said, Comrade Lurker, about the different models of the Lada. Bob, son of Bob obviously does not know his Lada models like we do.
Has he not heard of the 1973 model changes, when the hub-caps were completely redesigned? Or the 1979 model when the wheel nuts were enlarged to stop the wheels falling off? Anyone who compares a Lada in a 1960s film with a Lada in a modern film can spot these differences quite easily
Yes, Bob, son of Bob, I own a Skoda which I love and I do not find Skoda jokes funny, in fact they are puerile. If you owned, say a Ford, you would get upset if someone made fun of your car, so please don’t make any more puerile jokes about my car or I will report you to the moderator. And research your facts before you make a joke next time! This blog is not the place for inaccurate jokes. How can anyone confuse a car made in one Soviet country with one made in another Soviet country?
Thank goodness there are people like Lurker patrolling the internet to counteract these jokes with some serious facts.
@DP: Thanks for giving us the facts. And thanks for your other postings on this site.
The BBC article really is a juvenile effort – zig-zagging around the story without really telling us anything.
Then the infantile punch-line at the end:
“…because their large gas-guzzling vehicles are no longer what customers want. “
It’s not even good english. Note that this article has been through 12 different versions.