GM: bankruptcy not an option for industry

Are you sure about that?  Some of the autoworkers say it is such a tough job that is why they need to be paid so much. 

In Pittsburgh, we just escaped having a transit strike.  Their union director said on TV that driving a bus was such a tough job that they needed the high pay and good benefits to keep anyone on the job.  Then people who were nurses, school bus drivers, and other people in tough jobs started calling into the show and saying they did not get paid that much.  I think that helped the union and Port Authority Transit get a contract, because no one who rides the bus makes as much money as the bus driver.

Ford is still looking good.  Mulally has done an outstanding job in less than two years and the numbers prove this.  Ford is not in need of a "bailout" and are not in the financial situation as GM and Chrysler.

Keep buying Ford stock and it will pay off for all of you.

Radical, it's true that Ford is in better financial shape than the other domestics. In 2006 Mulally, to his credit, mortgaged all of Ford's assets, including the Blue Oval logo, to the tune of $28 B. I say "to his credit" because he did it when credit was still available and Ford still had value. Maybe he saw something others had not. GM and Chrysler have stated that they would do the same but the market dried up. Not to mention they are not worth much now. But if things don't improve Ford's fall could be rapid, with no tangible assets remaining. I guess $28B in cash should keep 'em going for a while though. Personally, I hope all 3 survive.

The floor level worker is not the blame, please my other post regarding my arguments as well as facts supporting this.  As Pat Buchanan says:

So may have read the headline Friday, had not President Bush stepped in to save GM, Ford and Chrysler, which Senate Republicans had just voted to send to the knacker's yard.

What are Republicans thinking of, pulling the plug, at Christmas, on GM, risking swift death for the greatest manufacturing company in American history, a strategic asset and pillar of the U.S. economy.

The $14 billion loan to the Big Three that Republican senators filibustered to death is just 2 percent of the $700 billion the Senate voted to bail out Wall Street. Having gone along with bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie, Freddie and CitiGroup, why refuse a reprieve to an industry upon which millions of the best blue-collar jobs in America depend?

In a good year, Americans buy 17 million cars. A more populous EU probably buys as many. Three billion people in India, Southeast Asia and China, four times as many people as there are in the EU and United States, are moving toward the middle class. They, too, will be wanting cars. And millions of them love American cars.

Is the Republican Party so fanatic in its ideology that, rather than sin against a commandment of Milton Friedman, it is willing to see America written forever out of this fantastic market, let millions of jobs vanish and write off the industrial Midwest?

So it would seem. "Companies fail every day, and others take their place," said Sen. Richard Shelby on "Face the Nation."

Presumably, the companies that will "take their place," when GM, Ford and Chrysler die, are German, Japanese or Korean, like the ones lured into Shelby's state of Alabama, with the bait of subsidies free-market Republicans are supposed to abhor.

In 1993, Alabama put together a $258 million package to bring a Mercedes plant in. In 1999, Honda was offered $158 million to build a plant there. In 2002, Alabama won a Hyundai plant by offering a $252 million subsidy.

"We have a number of profitable automakers in America, and they should not be disadvantaged for making wise business decisions while failure is rewarded," says Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

DeMint is referring to "profitable automakers" like BMW, which sited a plant in Spartanburg, after South Carolina offered the Germans a $150 million subsidy and $80 million to expand.

Be it BMW, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi or Hyundai, the South has become a sanctuary for foreign assembly plants, for which Southern states have been paying subsidies.

Fine. But why this "Let-them-eat-cake!" coldness toward U.S. auto companies? General Motors employs more workers than all these foreign plants combined. And, unlike Mitsubishi, General Motors didn't bomb Pearl Harbor.

Do these Southern senators understand why the foreign automakers suddenly up and decided to build plants in the United States?

It was the economic nationalism of Ronald Reagan.

When an icon of American industry, Harley-Davidson, was being run out of business by cutthroat Japanese dumping of big bikes to kill the "Harley Hog," Reagan slapped 50 percent tariffs on their motorcycles and imposed quotas on imported Japanese cars. Message to Tokyo. If you folks want to keep selling cars here, start building them here.

Fear of Reaganism brought those foreign automakers, lickety-split, to America's shores, not any love of Southern cooking.

Do the Republicans not yet understand how they lost the New Majority coalition that gave them three landslides and five victories in six presidential races from 1968 to 1988? Do they not know why the Reagan Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan are going home?

The Republican Party gave their jobs away!

How? By telling U.S. manufacturers they could shut plants here, get rid of their U.S. workers, build factories in Mexico, Asia or China, and ship their products back, free of charge.

Republican globalists gave U.S. manufacturers every incentive to go abroad and take their jobs with them, the jobs of Middle America.

And, for 30 years, that is what U.S. manufacturers have done, have been forced to do, as their competitors closed down and moved their plants abroad in search of low-wage Third World labor.

It's Herbert Hoover time in here, Vice President Cheney is said to have told the Senate Republicans -- as they prepared to march out onto the floor and turn thumbs down on any reprieve for General Motors.

In today's world, America faces nationalistic trade rivals who manipulate currencies, employ nontariff barriers, subsidize their manufacturers, rebate value-added taxes on exports to us and impose value-added taxes on imports from us, all to capture our markets and kill our great companies. And we have a Republican Party blissfully ignorant that we live in a world of us or them. It doesn't even know who "us" is.

We need a new team on the field and a new coach who believes with Vince Lombardi that "winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

To make comments about the majority of people making $15.00 an hour and making it seem like that is the norm and no one else deserves to make more, makes no sense to me.  Basically what a lot of people seem to say is, if you don't accept that pay then the job will be sent to some foreign country for less so take it or leave it and down with those that are doing better.  I don't have all the answers but I do know this is an intelligent country with a great deal of talent.  Laying down and accepting defeat is not the answer.  Giving our country away to foreigners is not the answer.  Buying foregin products where we are the laborers but the return investment goes back to that country is not the answer.  Japan invests money in this country.  They get billions of dollars in benefits to do this.  Much more then American companies.  They pay less taxes then American companies.  They hire us as laborers for their investment.  When the investment pays off the profits go back to Japan NOT AMERICA.  We are worker bees for them.  The less they pay us the bigger their profits. 

Look what happened to Chrysler.  Germany bought her, ruined her, laid off thousands of American workers, sold everyone out BUT the German employees all got a $1500 bonus that year. 

Abolish unions???  That day may be coming but will it be a good day?  I remember when our salaried department voted on a union.  Before the vote I met CEO's I didn't know existed.  They came to my desk, shook my hand, gave me an embossed letterhead message telling me why I should not vote for the union and made a lot of promises.  Several hours later the vote came in and it was NO UNION.  An hour later I got a cheap mass produced letter stating for the next year we would lose our hearing benefits and would not be paid for Saturdays, blah blah blah.  Never did see those executives again. We were being punished like children for even thinking of voting on a union.  It was downhill from there.  One by one we lost benefits, COLA and pay.

It's a greedy world folks.  Have you not noticed what happened to Wall Street? No union means no control. You give all the power and MONEY to the higher ups and you will lose and lose and lose.  You will make less money, you will have no benefits, no pensions and work longer and harder. You will end up back in the 30's. You will all be minimum wage worker bees and only the executives and CEO's will make the money and control everything you do.  That's when the pendulum swings too far and people get fed up and began to stand up for themselves AGAIN.  Guess what?  Unions will then become a necessity and they will try to take back what rightfully belongs to them.  History just keeps repeating itself.  We never seem to learn.  Greed constantly interfers.

Let the industry bail themselves out, the government is not supposed to be in bed with business, this is not socialism,

So, the policy of steadfastly clinging to a buisiness model any idiot could have told them was doomed (by maintaining the production of HUGE SUV's and vehicles of inferior quality) instead of buckling down and creating what people WANT to buy now entitles you to defy the laws of simple economics and get yourself a handout that will not save you anyway? 

We need to let these companies fail, as they have failed to evolve within the system.  Make way for more innovative companies.  Or claw themselves out of it.  If we are to survive, new and adept companies will rise to fill the job voids.

Or we can continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

My Fellow Americans:

Let the evil bastards die and soon! This corporation has killed so many people with defective vehicles over Americas history we are running out of land to bury them all. I am the waling dead due to exposing Corporate Fraud agaisnt GM during a Class Action Lawsuit in California with the Lemon Law firm of Norman Taylor, Esq. Burbank CA in 1991.

All I have left in life is my life living in tent with my backpack, homeless, unemployed on food stamps. Degreed at SFSU, credentials to teach Automotive Technology and without recovery hope to date.