MY GM PREDICTIONS:

[Lt.Del]

You guys raise a good point.  The gov't gets a lot of $$ from the taxes of each gallon of gas sold.  Lots of it.  What happens when gas is replaced with electricity?  Yep, the gov't gonna wanna get some $$.

I say more nuclear power stations, the most efficient way to make electricity out there. There are two stations within 90 minutes of me, North Anna Nuclear, and Surry Nuclear.  All nuclear around here and I can breathe just fine. 


Northa Anna Nuclear Power Plant, Va here


Surry Nuclear Power Plant, Va here

[frogman68]

You guys raise a good point.  The gov't gets a lot of $$ from the taxes of each gallon of gas sold.  Lots of it.  What happens when gas is replaced with electricity?  Yep, the gov't gonna wanna get some $$.

I say more nuclear power stations, the most efficient way to make electricity out there. There are two stations within 90 minutes of me, North Anna Nuclear, and Suffolk Nuclear.  All nuclear around here and I can breathe just fine. 

But do you glow ? lol

[Lt.Del]

But do you glow ? lol

You know, now that you mention it, I do see a lot better at night as if I am holding a flashlight, but, I am not.   Being a Parrothead, it kinda reminds me of Jimmy Buffett's song Volcano, chorus below....


One more now I don't know (ah he don't know)
I don't know (he don't know, mon)
I don't know where I'm a gonna go
When the volcano blow
But I don't want to land in New York City
Don't want to land in Mexico (no no no)
Don't want to land on no Three Mile Island
Don't want to see my skin aglow (no no no)
Don't want to land in Commanche Sky park
Or in Nashville, Tennessee (no no no)
Don't want to land in no San Juan airport
Or the Yukon Territory (no no no)
Don't want to land no San Diego
Don't want to land in no Buzzards Bay (no no no)
Don't want to land on no Ayotollah
I got nothing more to say


 
Hear the song  HERE    

[DnStClr]

Because I am a GM employee and UAW member- a skilled trades machine repairman who works on robots and complicated painting application equipment in a paint shop , I have a larger stake in this discussion about the usefulness of the UAW than most. I don't disagree that the UAW has overstepped its boundries and has a bit of arrogance in many matters. I don't disagree with the statements made about our generous benefits. I don't have a problem with GM doing away with some of their low selling products. But I want you to realize how many jobs are affected by the dismantling of large industries and the lives of their employees and neighbors who are employed in supporting industries.  Rather than rant about your opinions I will instead add a local newspaper article that I think supports most of my own thoughts. I hope you'll spend a minute to read it, it's kinda lengthy. But then, so are some of your posts.Thanks.
Opinion:

American vs. foreign automakers: The Civil War rejoined

William Andrews

It’s not easy for me to say something positive about President Bush because the last eight years have witnessed one unmitigated

disaster after another.

However, in going against his party to provide $17 billion in bailout loans to the Big Three, he has not only done the right thing, in

contrast to so many decisions of the recent past, he has done the smart thing.

And yet, what strikes me as illustrative of his ideologically driven anti-union and pro-finance bias is the fact that he is

conspicuously less insistent on and attentive to restrictive conditions imposed on the financial sector bailout for $1.4 trillion than

to the automotive industry for $17 billion. The former is 9 percent of GDP. By contrast the loan to GM is dust in the wind.

The impact of the bailout locally is not insignificant. Sixteen-thousand jobs related to GM in our area are on the line, and these

jobs represent tax revenues, purchasing power, demand for goods, and economic security in a time of serious financial instability.

However, if public opinion continues to be driven by envy and ideology, I suspect the rants and railings in Sound Off will continue

to attack GM and the UAW.

The animosity is nothing new. I can remember on the eve of Saturn’s arrival in the mid-eighties, an elderly gentleman predicted in

a letter-to-the-editor that the assembly plant would stimulate crime, alcohol consumption and an invasion by ethnic groups

unfamiliar with our ways. He spoke of Northern vices transplanted in the soil of a tranquil and bucolic South.

His image of the rural South could have been lifted wholesale from “Gone with the Wind” or “Song of the South,” films that

romanticized the culture of antebellum Dixie with its happy slaves, benevolent masters and beautiful belles with their chivalrous

beaus sipping mint juleps on the airy verandas of stately plantation mansions.

His sentiments, in cruder form, reflected the views of Fugitive writers like Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate who evoked

nostalgia for the virtues of an antebellum agricultural South uncontaminated by the crass commercialism of the industrial North.

Although I was born in Michigan, I have lived in Tennessee since I was 6 months old and consider myself a Southerner. However,

from visits to my maternal grandparents in Detroit, I have come to appreciate both worlds.

From my study of history, I have learned that strength comes from adaptation and that failure to adjust to new realities ensures

stagnation and ultimate decline. Communities unable or unwilling to create good jobs suffer from a hemorrhaging of their young,

the life blood of future growth.
   

Every change brings challenges, but if change is anticipated by thoughtful planning and embraced by locals with a sense of

adventure and optimism, growth can be empowering. I know that my college, my church, my neighborhood and even my social life

have benefited from the arrival of newcomers.

Yes, we are in a serious global recession and, as President Bush said, “these are not normal times.” We are not in a position to

indulge the luxury of ideological consistency. To permit the collapse of the Big Three while we continue to subsidize their foreign

competitors somehow strikes me as unpatriotic.

Those local critics of the bailout plan for the American automotive industry don’t seem to understand that from the outset foreign

companies producing cars in the United States have inherent advantages over our domestic car companies by virtue of being

foreign. Their home countries heavily subsidize their enterprises abroad. Their healthcare systems are so much more

cost-effective in their countries of origin that German and Japanese firms can afford to provide benefits for workers here by

merely transferring savings. And they don’t suffer from the accumulating legacy costs of American car companies paying benefits

for a century. Not only are these foreign companies heavily subsidized by their own governments, they are heavily subsidized by

state and local governments here in the United States.

Today when Sound Off callers criticize GM workers for their higher wages, those who rant seem to forget that union wages have

elevated millions of industrial workers into the middle class and that middle class purchasing power has stimulated the economic

growth responsible for our national prosperity.

Commentators with an affinity for hyperbolic embellishment keep citing wages at $80/hour at GM. They are being deceptive and

disingenuous, because they factor in accumulated legacy costs for others. The reality is that beginning workers at GM labor for

$14/hour and the average is $28/hour.

A close friend who recently retired after a lifetime of work for GM told me that his final salary was $24/hour. All this is

conspicuously more modest than U.S. Senators like Bob Corker, Mitch McConnell, and Richard Shelby would have us believe.

And why, pray tell, are these politicians suddenly reciting the mantra of balance budgets and fiscal responsibility? Why have they

become poster boys in the battle against the UAW? The answer is that Nissan, Volkswagen, Toyota and other foreign automobile

companies are enticed to locate their assembly plants in these Southern states because of the promise of non-union labor along

with heavy subsidization by state and local governments.

And to placate their foreign “guests,” these unofficial “lobbyists” for foreign carmakers must smash unions, albeit with sound

bites about the need for competitiveness and efficiency. Corker’s anti-UAW animus is prompted by the fact that GM’s are the

only major auto-assembly facilities in the South that are unionized.

Allen Tate was one of the Fugitive writers from Vanderbilt University who in his prose and poetry promoted the romantic image of

a Southern way of life heroically resisting the temptation to sully its honor and betray its past by imitating the North. In old age,

however, he began to soften his views. During his final years in Nashville, my teenage sister was a volunteer caregiver at a

Catholic nursing home where she got to know the famous writer. She saw him prepare himself stoically for the ultimate change in

his life. I suppose he was more apt to embrace change when it could not be avoided.

By the time of his death in 1979, he had accepted a view of the South that was less provincial and more inclusive. He was more

comfortable with modernity. Times had changed and so had he. In this sense, Allen Tate could appreciate Teddy Roosevelt’s quip

about how organisms that fail to adapt set themselves up for their own extinction. And that progressive Republican president also

had a label for people who feared change and who clung emotionally to a past they had no role in fashioning. He called them

fossils.

William X. Andrews is a professor in the History Department at Columbia State Community College.

Story created Dec 23, 2008 - 16:17:07 EST.
 

[Stewart G Griffin]

Not sure i understood the gist of the article, but thanks for posting it.  i had pictures in my mind of some southern gentleman standing on the porch telling some woman he doesn't give a dam and then walking off into the sunset.  Could you please help me understand it (the article)?

1) i am not against unions, in fact my next job may be union and my previous job was union.  (Machinists and before that, Steamfitters)

2) More importantly i think the three big factors causing the current situation at GM are as follows, not nessesarily in order:

a) inaccurate prediction(s) of future market share;  In the 60's, when you have 60% of the market, you feel big, confident and generous---hence the big pensions and healthcare.

b) bad styling.  Self explainitory, but basically psychologically, it feels like you are paying more for less in my book at least.  Also, let's face it, most/many people buy cars based on looks.

c) General shift towards other company's, specifically Japanese company's products.  I.e., in the 80's if you were in high school or college, regardless if male or female, you had a third-gen trans-camaro period.  This was the car to have.  Now, today those same schmucks now drive honda rav 4's.  Coincidence?  No way.      In the second true example, both my neighbors to the left and right, when i lived at home, used to drive domestic fullsizers---caprice, impala, lesabre etc.  Now they both drive toyota camry's.  And you have neigbors like that too!  But also, in general, many people who bought caprice, crown victoria, now buy the toyota camry.

Toyota camry is the new impala.

This may be due to percieved notions that Japanese companies have higher quality.  Irregardless, the shift has happened.

So, basically, i don't blame the union directly.  i mainly blame GM for agreeing to, what i feel to be, possibly too generous of a healthcare/pension program.

[VileZambonie]

Personally I've never agreed with unions. People should receive wages and benefits based on performance, dedication, work ethic etc. They are losing out on paying assembly line workers, janitors, security guards etc all of these things that they may never even have earned but I also understand big businesses may benefit for many reasons having employees guranteeing that they will be there x number of days and do what their contracts state. Is that the blame for all of this? No but Stewart you bring up some valid points. A lot of people buy foreign because they think those cars will last forever and have better workmanship. What does that tell you? the truth! Americans know Americans and know we are in general lazy people.

Styling, well every manufacturer is guilt of that! Why do people drive cars like this?

[JRConnieK10]

Vile, I agree with you on the styling of those. When I see something like those driving down the road I always think who is the person that goes to a car lot and looks at one of those and says to themselves "I'M NOT GOING HOME WITHOUT IT". I just recently had my other truck in the bodyshop some stupid old man hit it so his insurence had to give me a rental car it was a Kia POS suv it was the nastiest pea green looking thing so I figured that they were all bought by rental car companies cause there ain't no way somebody would buy one of these.

[Lt.Del]

I believe in a union to a small extent.  My dad was the pres. of the Richmond chapter of his union in his job.  People kinda voted him in because he spoke the way it is.  He knew wrong, he said his mind. He cut through all the b.s.  I do that myself at my work, but, i have to be careful, but, my supervisors know i speak the truth and see through the b.s.  Unions have a place.  Employers can and will do wrong concerning employees, whether it is working too many hours, going against the Federal Labor Standard Acts, or simple questions of granting vacations.  Some unions even pay legal fees if they see that employers do wrong and a court case is in order.  The employee will not be afraid to lose his/her job as well.   Great.  BUT, there is a point when a union can go too far. I think we see that in the UAW.  Every other year it seems some sort of work stoppage is being forced upon GM.  Knowing that GM doesn't have the revenue coming in, someone (the workers) need to be able to pull the reins on the union.  If not, the union will break the company's back and therefore NO ONE will have a job tomorrow. Why do we allow unions to force our jobs overseas??

[choptop]

Vile......I have a disturbing confession.......I like Edsels....will you guys forgive me?

[Captkaos]

Vile......I have a disturbing confession.......I like Edsels....will you guys forgive me?

No! 

[Lt.Del]

What would Freud say about that?

[VileZambonie]

The new edsel



lol

[bigblue09]

haha. nice.

[eventhorizon66]

Subaru really has ugly down to a fine art.  But they are good cars though.

[VileZambonie]

I believe enough people threw up in their mouths when Subaru came out with that ugly monster and I believe they changed it already.