"Home folks think I'm big in Detroit city,
From the letters that I write they think I'm fine,
But by day I make the cars,
by night I make the bars,
If only they could read between the lines."
- Bobby Bare, Detroit City
Every August, shining vehicles from the glory days of Detroit mysteriously appear on a specified weekend and roll up and down Woodward Avenue, the city's main local artery. Collectors and restorers of classic cars bring out their 55 Chevy's and Buick Dynaflows and original Ford Thunderbirds and parade them in an automotive celebration known as The Dream Cruise. The music of Motown fills the air as people indulge in the nostalgia of when Detroit and its cars were king. Lost prosperity is remembered, quality is celebrated, and the reflections in the chrome and buffed-out paint jobs are often of someone who once worked an assembly line.
Detroit has prompted a different sort of parade in Washington these days. Hypocrisy and contradiction are strutting the halls of Congress with the same style that drivers display during The Dream Cruise. Elected and appointed officials are traveling to and from their bailout appointments in big, black SUVs, which, in Washington, is an expression of importance. Of course, when they exit their outsized V-8s with the windows tinted dark to suggest an even greater significance of the passenger, the member of congress hustles off to a microphone to complain about Detroit's production of SUVs.
They want answers from carmakers and they want them now. How will the industry work itself out of its present financial mess? What will taxpayers get in return for the estimated $15 billion rescue plan? How fast can the money be repaid? What concessions are you willing to make if we give you these funds? Answer or you don't get the money.
Of course, nobody asked any such questions when Wall Street came calling. What was there - $750 billion in blank checks for AIG and anyone who could afford a $3000 suit? All they had to do was show up and say their institution was going under and it foretold a great fiscal tragedy for America. Ben the Billpayer gave away taxpayer money as if it were Halloween candy and investment bankers were children leaning on the doorbell.
We still don't really know what we are getting out of the Wall Street bailout. The pitch to taxpayers was that credit had frozen up and no one was lending and small businesses were endangered. Listen to the news and there isn't any indication that the credit markets have unfrozen in any meaningful fashion. But the money is still getting stuffed into banks and Wall Street institutions while politicians act as if it were going to help homeowners facing foreclosure. It ain't.
Maybe the Manhattan hotshots did a better job of dropping campaign cash than did the Detroit City executives. Perhaps, that's why they were never questioned about their bailout the way Detroit is being cross-examined. Carmakers, too, have done a fairly good job of spreading cash around Washington, however. Mileage standards keep getting pushed back and there are all kinds of tax breaks for alternative fuel vehicles that don't do anything more than complicate food costs and production and increase CO2 emissions. But Detroit would not have kept making those gas-guzzling SUVs and Ford F-150 pickups if American consumers were not snapping them up with great enthusiasm.
Was Detroit supposed to anticipate $150 barrel oil any more than Wall Street was expected to know they were playing a funny money game with credit derivative swaps and collateralized debt obligations? Detroit's lack of vision is less of a crime than a financial institution selling unsecured debt like an addicted, delusional gambler convinced the next roll of dice is the big moment.
Why one set of standards for Detroit and another for Wall Street? The answer is in the Senate where Republicans are not going to support their president's carmaker rescue plan without concessions from the unions. Our entire economic problem, of course, was caused by the unions. The wages they earned allowed them to live middle class lives and buy the products they built. We can't have that and the Republicans in the senate see this bailout as a chance to break the back of the union.
According to Sen. Jim Demint, a Republican from South Carolina, "It's the unions that have brought them to the brink." Demint and four other Republicans called the auto bailout a "travesty." It would not be, though, if the unions conceded wage and benefit cuts, reductions in retiree health care obligations, and agreed to elimination of the Jobs Bank Program, which protected automotive worker employment.
No such demands are being made of Wall Street, though; dollared-up big dawgs are getting bonuses and Ben the Billpayer keeps writing checks with our tax money. But everybody knows Wall Street is important.
And unions have got to go........
Read More:
Should the Government Bail Out the Big Three U.S. Automakers? HuffPost Bloggers Weigh In
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The neo con paradise made possible in Iraq by our US Army and a plan for America.
The financial bailout may fit this pattern. The distribution of the money seems un inspected. Some of the banks to get it never requested any and, like JP Morgan, are talking about using it for acquisitions. The indifference toward an industry that actually makes things is also like Iraq where unemployment may have gone to 50%. Here in Milwaukee, a local conservative with a column in the Journal-Sentinel, writes that the auto company support manufacturers have extended credit to the big three as a normal part of business and stand to lose millions of dollars.
The cause and effect with the Finance industry’s impact on the Automotive industry is clearly established. First the $150 a barrel gas price that was predominantly caused by the market speculators. The car industry did not, nor did anyone else, see it coming. Then the financial collapse punched the automotive industry like a jab and a left hook. First there was no liquidity (and it still remains tight) and then there are fewer people that the banks will qualify. Yet the congress gives $700 Billion under TARP and the Fed give $2 Trillion ($2 Thousand Billion – to keep the units consistent), for which we are not getting any accounting – (See today’s, Dec. 12’s, story http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aGvwttDayiiM&refer=home ).
There is no evidence of the Automotive industry harming the finance industry in any way. Yet we are busting the balls of the folks in the automotive industry. Where is the folksy wing of the Republican Party when the folks need it? Why not pull a ‘John the auto mechanic’ like we pulled the ‘Joe the plumber’.
I am sure that even God is perturbed by this injustice perpetrated by the current government.
The logical solution would be to fire all workers, and stop paying for healthcare and retirement. Those receiving pensions could be punished because they were once unionized.
Yes this is hypocrisy. But, so what? Creating a solution is the hard part.
Take healthcare from the unions - the workers/owners will still pay into it - and develop US healthcare from there. Invite the workers from the Toyota, Hyundai, BMW, etc. plants to enroll in this healthcare and roll out the plan into various industries on a regular basis.
Shelby and his ilk might win a little political capital, but it's already waning. Shelby might be re-elected with the electorate knowing he led the charge to bankrupt the Big 3, but he'll have a big fight.
Don't get caught unaware - as the No Prop 8 people did - start organizing and informing people now.
We can always ship your jobs overseas.
Perhaps if you grovel.....
The auto industry has operated on the same non-reality level
as the presidential bubble. Things "are what we say, not as they be." YET--- while we should be forcing them as part of the terms to refit for electric/hybrid and much lower priced vehicles for short distance commuter travel, the lesson of Hoover has to be applied. This is a bridge loan, but the bridge that the "Confederacy-Publicans" don't wanna cross; their objective being the destruction of Unionized Labor and the servicing of their in-state, out of country auto manufacturers.
What economically ignorant lunacy - neither of the bailouts is justified; they involuntarily force all of us to participate and share in the business failure of strangers we have nothing to do with.
WTF do I have to pay for someone else's failures?
Did I have anything to do with it? Did I get to share in their financial successes? Answer NO & NO.
This is sheer Aesop, might makes right.
This is a financial burden I don't need, didn't ask for, had the forthought to not participate in, and it is galling presumptuousness for someone else to obligate ME in their morass.
And here you are defending it. Socialism at its worst.
Did I have anything to do with it? Did I get to share in their financial successes? Answer NO & NO."
Do you think you are isolated from their failures?
What time tense is this question?
I WAS separate from their failures, until someone decided unilaterally to obligate me to pay for them.
So yes I was, and now I am not, through no fault of my own.
What implied idiocy is this question so supposed to highlight?
But whose going to bailout the bankers in the future?
The Brits are holding the bulk of our economy now; they have been one of the majority owners for years. Maybe they could impose another tax on tea ?
Obviously we are being repossessed by London for missing too many payments, even though the Fed is frantically sending Trillions of our Dollars to their financial masters in London.
Becoming a colony again may have its advantages; after all they are obligated to take care of their subjects needs such as healthcare and providing living wage jobs to produce wealth for their oligarky, a brighter future than we have right now. In return, they get all the Capitalist sycophants that currently pass as our leadership; a just settlement for those who choose to pursue empire. You have got to be careful what you wish for, you might get it !
Answer #2: Hank Paulson has been CEO of Goldman Sachs.
The Treasury Secretary hails from the same peer group of institutional finance leaders in Wall Street.
And yes, Answer #1: Republicans want to bash the unions, even if it is done through bankrupting GM or Chrysler. Ford is, seemingly, doing alright; if so, kudos to them.
Answer#3: There is an undercurrent of class warfare that has been emanating from the right-wing for years, and since they've been in power, the effects have hurt America. Their paradigm of society appears to be that the man at the top is king, and deserves unmeritted priviledges and vast awards. His loyal vassals occupy the silver tier, while those serfs below him are merely the disposable means to his all important, holy, profits. Loyalty & consideration for the welfare of these serfs, and their fair economic share for their hard work, are beneath recognition, in comparison to the vassals and the king.
Ie: the social pattern of feudalism reverberates in our economy. This is not a critique of capitalism, rather I'd assert that social feudalism is a corrupting, inefficient force within a capitalist economy.
When there is greater economic fairness (ie: vast sums of pay not being wasted at the top tiers), and such that disposable income in the form of pay, is distributed over a greater number of people, there is greater cash circulation, and thus higher economic activity & GDP.
Get Richardson, Waxman, Leahy and Durbin to begin investigations into Treasury, Federal Reserve, banking industry, housing industry and credit cards.
There's no reason to wait "for things to calm down" because that's what we're always told, and the more we wait for a mellow period, the further it'll be away. "Grab the bull by the horns."
Dosen't it seem like treason thoug, to let American jobs die, in favor of companies that are owned by foreigners. In some cases, by the very foreign country, that bombed us in Pearl Harbor. I remember in the 60's and 70's it was considerated unpatriotic to buy foreign cars, instead of American. It's to bad a whole generation, and going on two were raised by people no longer believing in American. I still get angery, to think about these foreign car manufactures, that have destroyed our economy, and brought our own car manufacturers to it's knees. Anyone, who wants to take the time, google this, American manufacture employees actually earn less, then the people working here for foreign manufacturers. Nope that argument, that the unions are at fault, have been proven to be liars.
I was hoping our grandchildren would be able to see our beautiful cars. Some of us remember when those classics were driving the roads, pulling up to an A+W, watching the delivery girls, with those tight shorts and roller skating car to car. Those were the days.