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Choke this good country's people enough, it fails.
And ask yourself: why has no one asked Citi if they flew a private jet to DC. It is a total game...and the proles lose.
But no need to for the little guys and girls who can't even make Christmas something for their kids.
I wonder how much the Dodge brand would be worth. That's a major global brand.
Fuck.
The only thing that the current economic disaster has done is accelerate their demise.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopic...
Mortgage help plan brings interest payments relief for people facing repossession
Home owners facing repossession will be able to defer part of their mortgage interest payments for up to two years, under plans unveiled by Gordon Brown.
By Myra Butterworth, Personal Finance Correspondent
Last Updated: 5:59PM GMT 03 Dec 2008
The new Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme plan is designed to help borrowers who are at risk of being evicted from their homes because they are unable to keep up with their mortgage repayments. Eight major lenders, accounting for 70% of the market, have already agreed to be part of the scheme, including major players such as Halifax Bank of Scotland, Abbey and Nationwide.
By simple inference, it would seem that any plan to return the company to profitability would involve manufacturing less-durable junk.
That made me wonder about our economic system that relies on product failure and obsolescence and inexhaustible resources for its survival. That producing and selling glitzy garbage is more profitable than producing carefully-made durable products.
Hell of a way to run a world--and one that eventually will have to change.
The US government will but, right now, at MSRP every single car that you have that gets over 35MPG.
Then replace every car in the US Government fleet based on miles driven / mpg so that the ones with the greatest miles and worst MPG get replaced first.
1) the taxpayer gets something for their money
2) the car companies get cash influx
3) We replace cars that have the worst mpg and are the greatest pollutors from the federal fleet.
No handouts. Just a way to entice them to build what we will buy and want them to build.
The companies and UAW have said they'll tighten their belts, they'll develop green technology and, best of all, the government will get an ownership stake in any company it helps.
First the banks, now the auto companies are almost begging to be semi-nationalized.
Not a threat more like a promise!
over town.
only a nickel and you put a gun to my head.
Give me an old Toyota or Datsun any day!
US auto makers have had decades to get ready for what is happening now and if they couldn't see what was coming they deserve NO LOAN, NO NOTHING.
Fail because you did a crappy job. That is the American way.
Sure it won't happen overnight, but neither will turning around the failed auto industry.
And they have failed. Spectacularly.
But white collar people are treated completely different.y. Milken and Keating each destroyed businesses worth ten billion dollars, embezzling uncounted millions. One of them served 4 years and the other 18 months and got an apology. Ken Lay destroyed Enron and while he was prosecuted, it was only after delaying for years and years. Then he was allowed to scoot on the sentence, something about sympathy for his poor, poor, long suffering family who got to keep all the money he stole. Currently, the CEOs of the Wall Street banking and finance corporations aren't even prosecuted for crimes though they've each destroyed companies worth several times ten billion dollars. Each of them is now being awarded with tens of billions of dollars gifts with no strings attached. AIG has alaready burned through their first bailout and asks for another $30 billion. Citigroup was held up as an example of a company with a clean record and was given billions in financial assistance to buy out a rival company. Now we learn that Citigroup also has it's hands out for a $30 billion bailout.
The mistake the guys in the great train robbery made was that they were pikers. Instead of robbing a train of $10 million they should have held up Wall Street for say a hundred billion and they probably would have been acclaimed heroes, probably even elected to the White House as the president and cabinet.
It goes well beyond just the big three. The 2nd and 3rd tier suppliers who are the core of the metro-Detroit economy will fail. The number of retirees who will no longer have a pension or medical care to live on will only be a drain on state and federal resources when they do get sick and will have to be taken care of.
Not to mention, the fact that these automotive companies are suffering now primarily because of the credit-crisis caused in large part by Wall St.
Why don't you go take a drive around metro Detroit, and talk to the people in the small towns, and the restaurant owners, and store owners, and then through the factory towns in Ohio, and Indiana... before you spew this anger towards the industry. Its gotten a little pathetic and judgmental.
(How do you like capitalism now?)
The American car industry takes a giant leap and is restructured to make something completely different. A few years ago I remember reading about a novel concept of personal transportation that combined a single family electric car with an electric train. The electric car would be used for short urban travel and for longer distances would link up with other electric cars to form a train. When joined together as a train the electric cars would be able to recharge and arrive at their long distance destinations fully charged.
I can't help but wonder what this system would be like with full automation. Imagine, you would log on to your computer (or smart phone) in the morning and request a car to be sent to your home (or you could have it automatically scheduled). The car would take you to work or further. Being fully automated traffic would be a breeze, no stoplights. Far less traffic if no one owned a car, just public vehicles that would be used by everyone.
I've considered why I (and many others) don't take the bus or some other public transportation. The reason is that we like our privacy and freedom that a car provides. An electric car/train system might be the way to persuade us Americans to adopt public transportation by giving us the best of both worlds.
If you are interested, here's a website that provides more information about this idea.
http://electriccartrain.com/QandA.html
Perhaps the problem is not just with Detroit. It might be with the way that we view transportation.
The best example of this situation was the 1986 Ford Taurus; Detroit had a family-sized car that matched the competition in driving dynamics and it became the best seller in the country. That is, until they pissed it all away with shoddy build quality, detonating transmissions and failing to invest in keeping the product updated and competitive to the point where they could only sell a trickle to rental fleets while the Camry and Accord ran away with the market.
But the Big 3 continue to produce corner-cutting, shoddy under-engineered products and sell them through sleazebag dealers offering crappy warranty support when things start to break. The last one is especially important though I don't see it reported much - I know lots of people who got the cold shoulder from Detroit makers on warranty repairs and vowed never to darken their doors again. If your product breaks more often than the competition, the very least you can do is be responsive to fixing things during the warranty period instead of trying to save pennies by burning your customers.
Detroit seems to foster a management culture of stupid greedy assholery, and I don't think you'll ever improve their provincial head-in-the-sand mindset without firing 90% of the upper and middle management who focus on financial games and hucksterish marketing of crap, and replacing them with people who actually want to engineer good cars. Honda is successful because their management is dominated by engineers who insist upon their products having integrity and quality. In Detriot there's too much temptation for financial guys who don't give a shit about the product to produce cheap crap and advertise it relentlessly to rope in the suckers, make the fast short-term buck and get their bonus before the long-term deterioration in product reputation comes home to roost. You can't viably run an industrial manufacturing operation with long product cycles when all you focus on is pumping up this quarter's financials - but those are the guys who get promoted and perpetuate the same ignorant short-sighted culture.