GM bankruptcy !!!

[clytle374]

Strictly from a canadian point of view, isn't the massive debt in the US directly a result of the war?  That's what our press is reporting.

Stan

Not nearly.  We can only dream of being that little in debt.

[compig]

As a Brit , one thing I find amazing about the US in particular but also Canada is that both countries have oil , minerals etc and yet their debt is still massive ??!! What am I missing ?

[mobile_bob]

very interesting thread indeed

here is my opinion of why things came unraveled

aside from corporate mismanagment, union greed, sloppy banking, crooked stock brokers, all of which have always been here
to some degree we compounded their combined effect by going to a world economy in such a relatively short time.

what happened is no different than what happens to a small farming community when a large manufacturing plant moves in to
exploit cheaper labor and pays higher wages,,, the process generally damages and destroys the core fabric of the community
by tipping over the established companies that cannot pay that level of wages. they can't pay those wages not because they are
greedy and getting filthy rich but because they have tied their business structure to the economy of the area that is in place.
this rapid change cannot happen without unforeseen consequence.

really no different when we all got into bed in global markets, places like china with lower wages and no benefit workers have a hugely unfair advantage over an american company which is strapped with union contracts and the fight to keep corporate profits up so the corp stock continues to grow at a rate wall street expects... so they don't have folks dumping their stock and forceing them into bankruptsy.

on the one hand it is a very complex cause and effect problem, and on the other exceedingly easy to understand.

about the time someone gets handle on the problem he is met with a plethora of politicians that play the class envy card to get elected
and once elected they seem to feel the need to claim they have a mandate to make dramatic changes right friggin now.

just like a supertanker you cannot turn the worlds largest economy around a dime, you can't make dramatic and rapid change, it goes back to
instant gratification,, everybody wants to feel good now, nobody wants to feel any pain.

sometimes we are better served to feel the pain and take a more reasoned rational approach to change, watching for what effects our changes make.

but that is not the way of the world
certainly not the way of obama and his cronnies in congress
they want it all done yesterday and to hell with decenting opinion.

there is enough blame to go around everyone, including every one of us little folks
some of us have union contracts that we know are over the top, some of us have retirment funds that
we want double digit gains from, some of us vote to elect the very politicians that are at the root of our problems,
etc. etc.

time to get out "walden" and reread it and its companion "civil disobedience"
and learn to take responsibility for ourselves and our families, time to lead by example
time to be fiscally responsible, learn to live within our means and not within our credit ability, time
to think before we vote and if we don't know vote for a right in candidate or don't vote at all.
time to downsize before we are forced to, learn to garden and raise small animals before we get hungry.

time to band together and lobby congress to get an exclusion for small diesel engines from the epa



bob g

[t19]

Interresting how these things come up in times of economic turmoil


Michael Coren: Britain's Labour party is reaping what it sowed
Posted: June 10, 2009, 9:00 AM by NP Editor
Michael Coren, Full Comment
The definition of a Fascist? Someone who is winning an argument against a liberal. In other words, the term is so abused in North America that it has little or no meaning. Not so in Britain, Holland, Hungary and elsewhere where ultra-nationalists won seats in last week’s European Community elections.


This was, however, more of a rumble than a revolution. In Britain the perfect political storm emerged for the far right with an intensely unpopular government, a parliamentary corruption scandal, an economic recession, a dramatically low electoral turnout and a polarizing Islamic population. Even so, the British National Party received around 6% of the vote and returned two members to the European assembly. It is most unlikely that it could ever elect an MP in the House of Commons but the result has managed to introduce a new sound into the British governmental symphony. Panic. The establishment parties have been forced to realize that a growing number of people are angry with the way their sometimes valid anxieties are being treated.


In the early- and mid-1980s, while working for Britain’s New Statesman magazine, I reported on the then-National Front and its racist friends on the European continent. Teutonic supermen they were not. More a circus of outcasts, sexual deviants and soccer thugs. National socialism preached from a spare room in mum’s house. George Orwell encapsulated it rather nicely when he contrasted the Germans with the English of the 1930s. The former, he said, cry with emotion when they see their soldiers goose-stepping. The latter would fall about laughing.


The British National Party does not goose-step. It has worked diligently to expunge the Nazi image of previous rightist parties, claiming to be nationalist rather than Fascist. It’s both true and false. Almost every believing right-wing extremist supports the BNP, but most BNP supporters are not right-wing extremists. Indeed, while the party is not trusted by the vast majority of minority groups, it does has a Jewish municipal councillor and some support in elements of the black, Hindu and Sikh communities.


Most of all, it has support within a white working-class that has been taken for granted by the Labour Party for half a century.
These are the unheard, the anonymous, the ordinary. The sort of people who fight the wars, build the cities and hold the country together. When, however, they complain of the disappearance of their culture and values and speak of inner-city crime and decay, their collective cry is dismissed as racism by a political and social elite that can afford not to understand. The BNP, employing the tested tactic of fascism, merely takes advantage of the situation.


The new number in the equation is Islam, and the number is growing. While there is an expanding and quintessentially English Muslim middle class and a strong resistance to fundamentalism, Islamic isolationism is a major factor now in dozens of British cities. Entire self-imposed ghettoes resembling Mecca Road rather than Coronation Street make routinely tolerant, moderate British people feel excluded, afraid and irrelevant.


This is not mere fantasy. There are honour killings, Muslim gang crime aimed at the white community, young Muslim men dealing drugs and prostitution. There is also a political fanaticism that culminated in the 2005 terror attacks which killed 52 people and injured 700.


The response of the traditional parties, the churches and the BBC is to try to silence the already largely powerless with lectures about Islamophobia. It’s disingenuous, patronizing and counter-productive. A new conversation has to be formed, and sensitive yet difficult questions have to be asked of everybody concerned, including British Muslims and their new left-wing comrades. Otherwise the laughter might stop and the marching begin. Even in good old England.
National Post
Author and broadcaster Michael Coren’s Web site is www.michaelcoren.com

[Stan]

Bob you are absolutely right with your analogy of a large manufacturing plant ruining a small agricultural community.

The exact same thing has happened all over america and is now happening in canada.  Large, big box stores come into a small community and locate on the outskirts of town on cheap land.  They import cheap chinese junk from thousands of miles away, produced by poor people making pennies a day.  Their low prices undercut the traditional mom and pop stores in the center of town and they went broke.  The mom and pop owners of their businesses usually owned the buildings, sat on town councils, library boards etc. and generally kept the town alive.  They have now retired sold the buildings to absentee landlords who don't take care of them,  and are living in Florida and the center of the town is dead or dying.

Soon the big box stores will go broke, as it's now too expensive to import the goods from China, as well the chinese workers are getting higher and higher wages as the chinese government is getting increasingly nervous about the state of affairs in its country.  You can't make a billion people mad at you without some consequences.

That has been the driving force behind the ruination of the small town in N. America.
Stan

[GuyFawkes]

I'm afraid you are all right where it doesn't matter, and all wrong where it does matter...

I've blogged about this, but the basic points are these.

The 4th estate (look up Louis XVI) is the Press, things went wrong when the mechanical governor of the government machine, namely the 4th estate, started to abandon their posts and take up roles within the 3rd estate, government.
(1st estate is clergy, 2nd is nobles)

Now the 4th estate in the UK has maybe 12 actual journalists, but that job is now called "investigative journalist" and those 12 or so stand zero chance against the barrage of flacks who simply wait in line for the PR handouts and print them verbatim.

differentiating "investigative journalism" from "journalism" is EXACTLY like saying this city has 2,488 detectives, and 12 "investigative detectives" and wondering why you have a crime pandemic, with 2,488 detectives just sitting in the precinct waiting the criminals to turn up with ready prepared pdf documents and power point presentations and signed confessions.

the 4th estate abandoned its post because we the people prefer fantasy to reality, and it doesn't matter how rich or powerful you are, you still prefer fantasy to reality, had a girl here last week being offered the career break/opportunity of her lifetime, and she starts wittering on about how so and so in reality tv programme the apprentice would handle it.

told her straight, what the fuck are you doing wasting your time on that shit and in doing so GIVING THEM A JOB when you have this opportunity in your fucking face right here and right now.

nobody held a gun to anyone's head and made them build, or buy, a hummer.

in a way it sucks, I was always an olds man myself, delta 88/98 was it for me (old man liked buicks) when it came to yank metal, but it's gone, dead, let it die.

don't kid yourself that the economic bomb has dropped and now all we have to do is survive the fallout, that isn't what happened, like the 4th estate abandoning its post what happened here was a sea change, as big as any of the big changes in the past.

You think the people living through the Industrial Revolution in England realised they were living through the industrial revolution? No way. That shit is only visible with 20/20 hindsight maybe 50 years later.

Only two words you need to know

"indentured servitude"

190 years ago an hours drive from here we had the tolpiddle/tolpuddle martyrs, in 1834, George Loveless, a FUCKING FARM LABOURER, long before anyone had heard of modern education, upon being sentenced, wrote;

"God is our guide! from field, from wave, From plough, from anvil, and from loom; We come, our country's rights to save, And speak a tyrant faction's doom: We raise the watch-word liberty; We will, we will, we will be free!"

I don't know many Managers in 2009 who could be so eloquent, which says a LOT about the lower working class stiffs, which explains why the 4th estate was allowed to abandon its post so easily... we have systematically and deliberately been driving down the level of education (reeding and riting ain't the same thing as being educated) of the common man.

There is NO DIFFERENCE, intellectually, between a nigerian 419 scam and a sub prime mortgage, and frankly there is no difference in the level of stupidity and lack of common sense that it takes to enter into either one... either way, you richly deserve to lose everything including your shirt.

the cheese eating surrender monkeys, without whom the USA as we know it would not exist, were the last people to effectively make these scams carry a suitably deterrent price, and put large parts of whole classes to madame guillotine.

existentialism is another good word, everything material is an illusion, a concept that those carry debt will become increasingly familiar with in the coming years, as they find that there is not a single thing that they own that will not be taken away as soon as they default on their tithes and taxes.

[Doug]

I don't agree with you on all points where you blame the 4 estate ( we have a 5 estate in Canada bur no ones watches the CBC anymore since all the cuts lol ). Our chool system was designed to take our young people and give them the skills to be a productive member of the working class free thinking not required.

I blame the lack of a spending power for the working man inspite of huge and accelrating productivity gains on the shop floor. When you automate and deskill and work force, out source and then deregulate everything else in the economy your going to end up with debt and ponzy skemes.

Any mention of redistribution of wealth is greated with pinger pointing and peole yelling Witch ( comie take your pick ).

So here we are.
Mother Courage said something to the effect " learn to eat shit and smile because at least your eating..... " to a young Swedish soldier full and revolutiuonary anger, piss and vineger( and strips him of his will to fight for his rights ).
I don't think there is enough anger and disgust with the state of things for people to get mad with or with a media doing its job
So lets all enjoy a plate of steaming goodness and move already.....

[SHIPCHIEF]

STAN;
US debt is a long complicated thing. It turns out that the US Gov't has run deficits for centuries. Economic growth usually expands fast enough to make the debt service a minor issue. Unfortunately, FDR accelerated the whole thing with a ponzi scheme called social security. Masses of people paid in, more than 30 per each one collecting a check in the beginning. But now we are down to about 4 people paying to support one person, and soon it will be 2:1. I can't imagine that those paying will like that much. Generations of politicians and economists knew this day would come. Each hoped it would not happen on their watch.
None of that early overage was saved, it was like free money, and dumped into the general fund to hide deficits.
 Families keep getting smaller, instead of 5 children, now 2 is the average. Immigration would help, if they paid taxes. Illegal imigrants don't pay, yet collect social services and get residential tuition rates in post secondary education. More drain. Employers like to hire them 'under the table' because they don't have the government burden of employment taxes like unemployment insurance, Labor and Industries Insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Payroll tax, no medical benefits and they just plain pay them less. Pretty tough on the unemployed guys who used to do that work.
Add wellfare, as well as growth in virtually every aspect of government, and you end up with a money shortage. As the US borrows 42 cents of every dollar they spend, they plan to make sure health care is a right, and pay for that as well.
Bill Clinton did ballance the budget against his will. But I don't think any deficit was paid off, just that the Republican congress closed the purse on him just enough to keep outgo = income. Once they had GW in, it was the same trough, just different pigs.
Once the Dems got congress back, they showed us what pikers the Repubs were! I'm just waiting for the 'other shoe to drop' I have no idea what is comming, but reading history is scarey.
With the US gov't so deep in debt that we can never pay it back, will they Gov't inflate it away to a managable level? When did that ever work? Will the economy pick up so fast that growth will reduce the debt to a managable level? I don't think it can with the entitlement bubble hitting us right now. We have no years of slack before the baby boomers start to retire.
Add a massive energy deficit, because the US won't exploit our own resources, the odd war, employment outsourcing laws and who knows what other counter productive policies? They all add up to where we are now.
The final problem? What do politicians and bankers do? A: They move money. What happens when there is no more money? A: They move money faster. They don't seem to know anything else.

[Stan]

Just imagine the pickle they are in in China.  They have a billion + people that have suddenly discovered the "west" style of life and they all want it. The current gov't there knows very well they can't all have it!   Don't kid yourself, China has had her share of revolutions and when they happen over there, you don't want to be in the ruling or upper class!
Stan

[SHIPCHIEF]

Stan;
I believe you are correct. I heard that communism didn't have such an iron fist control over the country; that about 50 local warlords maintained an uneasy truce with the central gov't.
We often think of China as a monolithic power block, who is marking time and getting ready to take on the whole world. Yet some say that they can't, because they are so broken up with internal factions. What gives?

[Doug]

I have been thinking about this as the latest round of layoff was anounced today....

The Company says we are all " stake holders ". So what does that mean?

A shareholder is also a stake holder but they never get layed off and they don't seem to have limits imposed on their dividends.

So I am  a stake holder of sorts? I don't own any paper but I have invested my time and labour in my job in order to make it profitable and safe. My community is suported by the resource under foot so are they a stake holder. They do after all provided direct services to my employer and I indirectly suport local buisness with my spending power. Goverment is a stake holder they tax and you aren't going to cheat the tax man so they are a more important stake holder than me but still don't hold any paper. My son is a stake holder too what responsibility for his future does my employer have for tommorow with regard to how a resource is extract and refined

So a stake holder is realy only useful to a company as long as you contribute to the benifit of the company. After you retire you are a liability so its best not a have a traditional garranteed benifit pension ( less the company is on th hook to look atfter you ). And medial expenses after you retire may also not be in the companies bennifit since you may have wore out your joints and organs breating profit for them.

Why should a money man in a pension fund or other large investor so much more important than me?
Maybe I should be payed in special shares as well as cash.....
Maybe share holders should have limits on how much influance they have in a company ( a cast sytem for shares lol )

If we are going to move forward in this century I think we need to change the way we look at the value of work, money, debt and distribution of wealth and power.

[AdeV73]

The Company says we are all " stake holders ". So what does that mean?

I think technically, it means they can't just sack you with no consequences, which is what they really want to do. So instead they have to make you redundant with a payoff.

Also, whilst shareholders certainly mop up profits in the good times, if the company goes bump, they get squat back, and usually lose their investment to boot. The "coal face" worker usually only sees the fat profits going to the shareholders, rarely does he see the painful losses.

Payment in "special shares" is generally a waste of time - if you want shares, you'd be better off taking the money & buying voting stock. At least then, if you work there long enough & buy enough stock, you might actually end up with a decent stake in the company. Remember though - if a company goes bust, the special (non-voting) shares are worth exactly the same as the standard shares: The square root of f**k all.

Shareholders usually get a beating at the hands of the workers - but without shareholders, not a single one of you would have a job... If you want to know what life on the edge is like, start your own small business, or join a small business & invest some of your own money in it. If you get lucky - or are exceptionally crafty, hard-working and/or hard-nosed, you might - just might - end up being Mr Big in the next General Motors...

(Doug, this is not meant as a dig at you, just a bit of a rant in general...)

[Doug]

No Digs taken at all.
Thank you for your input.....

But I would rather not be anything but man with an Iron rice bowl .

[Stan]

Just remember the present small upward trend in the stock markets is referred to in some quarters as the "dead cat bounce".
Stan

[clytle374]

Just remember the present small upward trend in the stock markets is referred to in some quarters as the "dead cat bounce".
Stan

That's what we call it here.  http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/may-employment-report-not-believable/20102 is a little bit of info from a guy I like a lot about the recent turn around in the unemployment numbers.  This guy's video "The Crash Course"  is also worth watching.