In Washington, Automakers Plead for Aid

In Washington, Automakers Plead for Aid

www.nytimes.com

DETROIT — Executives of Detroit’s Big Three automakers traveled to Washington on Thursday to press their case for more financial aid from the federal government because of the bleak prospects for their industry.

And those prospects are likely to dim further on Friday, when General Motors and Ford are expected to report deeper job and production cuts, along with huge third-quarter losses. Analysts expect each to report losses of more than $2 billion, excluding special charges or write-downs.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Full steam ahead to complete Socialism!! Woo Woo! I am getting absolutely sick of our fascist government.

With the impending economic fall out I would expect to see a lot of industries state run. Soon we will be buying cars from the United States Federal Government with our fancy new 'one-world currency' that I am sure will be loading with all the latest high-tech big brother gear 'for your protection' from your self and the terrorists! Oh well at least we won't need keys anymore as I am sure our cars will unlock using our implanted RFID chips.

Couldn't fit it into the snippet but get this also...

"The meeting in Washington, with Capitol Hill’s top Democrats — the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid — centered on a request by G.M., the Ford Motor Company and Chrysler for up to $25 billion in loans to help the companies as they burn through their cash cushions during the worst sales market in 15 years.

The loan request is in addition to $25 billion in low-interest loans to be available from the Energy Department to assist automakers in developing more fuel-efficient vehicles."

They need 25 BILLION DOLLARS in addition to the already available 25 BILLION DOLLARS?? How is it that these people that run these companies can screw up so bad they need 50 billion dollars and still not get fired???

I need to go to Harvard School of Business. Lessons 1: The more you steal, the more people you screw over, and the more you just generally suck; the more money you make for yourself!



www.nytimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 6-11-2008 by Anonymous Avatar]

Me and my brother were having a conversation about this the other night. What I think is funny is that you see these commercials offering cash back incentives for people to buy their vehicles but no one is buying them. If they were smart they would take the money that they would give as incentives and use it to modify the vehicle to run an natural gas/propane and set them up with a home filling setup.

Think about it, they could easily set them up to run on flexfuel (ethanol or gasoline or a mixture of the two) and have the option of propane or natural gas. I live in Atlanta and here recently we had a gas shortage that had people waiting hours at times to fill up on expensive gas. If they had the option they could have hooked up their natural gas compressor and probably got their fuel cheaper (at the time) without waiting in line. Natural gas conversions are not that expensive nor that complex.

Give consumers more options and it will make the deal sweeter. Just a thought.

Well, I have less of a problem with this bailout than other bailouts of late. I'd have much rather the trillion pissed away to bankers gone to Detroiit. However once again we are rewarding an industry that made a quick buck had no plans for the future and is now reaching in our back pocket to pay for their mistakes.

After a decade of malaise and failure to compete with the Japanes automakers in quality Detroit finally started making decent cars again 15 or so years ago. Instead of looking toward the future, they relied on a business model that required cheap gas to be available forever. Instead of using the profits made during the SUV craze to plan and develop products that would be viable in an environment where petro is much more expensive, they just made gas guzzlers and enriched the top of the corporate structure.

That being said, I still feel that some help to the auto industry is in order due to its real benefit to the economy, national defense, and real wealth of the country. It is one of the few industries truly vital to national defense and recovery fromt he coming Depression.

Those poor companies. I am just crying buckets. If they hadn't shipped off all their jobs, I doubt they'd be in this position.

The problem with the auto industry and even the airline industry and many other industries are the unions. Many people, for some mind boggling reason, love unions. I used to live in southern Illinois and the two main things people did for a living were farming and coal mining. Farmers can barely make a dime unless they have hundreds of acres of land and have a great growing season. Coal miners in S. Illinois were doing pretty good till the early 90's and then the government pass strict environmental laws mostly towards high sulfur coal which is what all of S. IL. has under its soil. The coal companies were talking about installing scrubbers to clean the coal but the union jumped in when the company tried to lay a few people off to pay for them and stop the purchases. In the end almost all coal production completely stopped and 100k coal miners lost their job in a area that already had 20%+ unemployment. Twenty years later you can still see people putting up "Support the UMWA" union signs and when I see them I can only think about all those people that lost their jobs because of what their union did.

Unions were great when children were getting chopped up in machinery and people were earning 5 cents a day and worked 15 hours a day, but today they are almost completely useless and obsolete.

Kill unions and save America. They cause everything made in the U.S.A. to be way overpriced and have caused more jobs to be shipped overseas that any other factor.

[edit on 7/11/08 by Pfeil]

Originally posted by Pfeil
Unions were great when children were getting chopped up in machinery and people were earning 5 cents a day and worked 15 hours a day, but today they are almost completely useless and obsolete.
[edit on 7/11/08 by Pfeil]

Holy geez, I could not agree with you more!

I'm currently working a temporary assignment in a company which has a Union. Being a contractor, I'm not part of the union, but as an outsider looking in, the crap the union and the company throw back and forth borderlines on complete insanity!

The Union want's control over Human Resources.
The company is trying to undermine the union by hiring contractors, and what they call "temps". I being a contractor have no quarrel if the business goes under, I'm just there to implement a few things and be on my way, but these poor "temps" are being treated like garbage.
Basically, all the shortcomings of the union because of their collective laziness is laid on the "temps". These temps are paid a dirt wage, and expected to pick up an inhuman amount of slack.

They usually last a couple of days before they give up and leave.

Basically, all the garbage people had to deal with before unions, the "temps" are having to deal with because the unions are collectively lazy.

I have no idea how the company survives at all, let alone can afford the implementations I'm installing for them.

The level of insanity and complete counter-productivity in this place is incredible... I really cannot come up with the words to describe just how backwards this place is.


I prefer not dealing with unions. I've always found myself to be someone who can negotiate terms for myself... I don't need a union to screw my plans up for me, I don't need a union to take "union dues" from me, and I most certainly wouldn't want to show up for work one day only to be told "guess what, we're on strike" and have the company go bankrupt because of that strike.

... absolute insanity.

And to top it off, up here in Canada, the government acts as a union for you. There are disciplinary measures the government uses for wrongful dismissal, illegally dangerous work, and harassment.

There is literally NO USE for a union up here... other than to weigh the company down and destroy it's productivity.


And yes, we're experiencing the same problems in the automotive industry. Right after I moved to the GTA area, over 2,500 technicians lost their jobs in the auto industry... and there I was, new to the area, realizing that I've got over 2,500 skilled people to compete with now... wonderful, just freaking fantastic.

[edit on 7-11-2008 by johnsky]

Whilst I agree that there is always a need for a workers body to oversee management, and make sure the workers are not exploited, the unions are there to look after one thing only, and that is the union execs.
When the union execs call a strike, the workers usually end up losing a lot in pay, NOT the union execs who caused the strike in the first place. The conditions many unions place on management are so ridiculous you'd laugh if it were not so serious.
For a very long time, with declining sales and cutbacks in production, the unions have not allowed redundancies. The result is that union members have been literally turning up for work, on full pay, with nothing to do. Most other places the staff get laid off, it's sad but that's reality.

Taxpayer money SHOULD NOT be used to bail out private corporations...ever!

Of course, a lot of manufacturing jobs in the west have been outsourced abroad to massively reduce labour costs, health and safety liabilities and pay for the execs lavish tastes. This covers the whole manufacturing base so when people in manufacturing lose their jobs then what else is there? Even the service industries have all outsourced abroad. It makes me angry to see the government talk about re-training schemes to bring people back to employment but what are they going to train them to do that will get them a job again?

OOOOH! It makes me mad

That's my morning rant over... need breakfast and lots of coffee.

I got mixed feelings with them asking for aid.

Could you imagine the car giants laughing at us, while we were all paying big dollars for their cars in the good times? More to the point, what about the premium priced spare-part industry that we MUST have because their cars were designed to break down every 10,000kms?

I never felt sorry for them making billions of dollars profit.

They should have diversified and started to wean themselves, and us, off petrol. How many hundreds of efficient designs are there that can power cars with hydrogen, solar, etc? No... the greedy auto-industry still kept on milking us with basically the same design over the past 40 years.

However, I don't suspect that it is totally their fault. I'm sure that the higher powers told the auto industry what they were allowed to release and what needed to stay suppressed.

I worked as a contractor for one of the big three, and I agree with the above statements that the unions are one of their biggest downfalls. The never ending pensions paid out to retirees, union personnel who get big money to sleep and play cards all day, enough time off per employee (even us contractors) that my contract company had to find me extra work during their downtimes, you name it. However, it does not stop there, the waste which I observed while there was enough to make Walmart (who dump good product into landfills) blush.

The Auto Manufacturers are in trouble because the abuses in their own companies made it impossible for them to create a competitive product for a reasonable price. Giving them more money to waste is not the answer, the answer is to let nature take its course, and allow new and successful companies spring up in the void left by their demise. Companies who can run a successful business without the outrageous levels of employee benefits and waste sucking them dry.

This bailout upsets me much worse than the Wallstreet one ever did.
My $.02...

The thing I truely dont undertand is why these automakers, even with the negatives of manufacturing in the US still cant make it. Its like Ford a few years ago, they asked for 18 billion dollars to bail them out. They got it and they are still failing. The government asked them to switch to fuel efficient car production and they refused saying "they couldnt afford to." I dont know, I dont have any kind of financial education or business experience, but it seems to me that even I could build a profitable auto factory with 18 billion dollars.

These bailouts they want are just to pay the employees, not to setup new production lines. Its like Dodge's new Challenger, the days of the muscle car's died long ago but the American auto industry just wont accept it. I heard not to long ago that the Hummer was finally killed, they kept making them even through the really high prices of gas and sales shifted to foreign fuel efficient and hybrid cars.


I dont know, I would gladly approve a bailout with strict conditions, but if they arent going to change then they need to fail no matter what the consequences are.