Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

The system needs an enema.

http://www.reelmovienews.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/z4374466o.jpg

The US car industry has a choice of radical systemic change or ceasing to exist. The UK comparison bears a lot of looking at. The UK now has some of the most efficient and productive car plants in the world, owned by the Japanese.

Who made up the term "legacy costs"? It can't be an accident that it sounds immediately like something outdated that should be cut from the budget. "Legacy benefits" would at least convey how they are both an asset and a liability, albeit to different people.

If the only way the Big Three can survive is by breaking promises they made to the people who actually create their products then they DESERVE to fail! wait, shit

this seems like a fairly coherent case for a big-3 bailout, including recognition of how much has already changed or started to.

nb "create" as a verb puts a bit more onus on the laborer than I think you want. "We tried to make things that weren't ugly and huge, but the workers refused!"

xpost They deserve to fail for a lot of reasons, but the fact that they have made huge investments in the welfare of their workforce is not one of them.

I'm kinda thinking any and all bailouts right now are really just going to pay for one generation's retirement. It would appear that any business that isn't about raw materials, information technology, or service is impossible to run in this country and break even. If the Volt is worth saving, somebody will save it. If the Ford F-series is worth saving, and so on and so on. I'm not interested in this turnaround taking a decade. Fuck them.

xpost apparently, the computer industry made it up Kenan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_costs

they deserve to fail because they made BAD investments in so many arenas.

"starting to change" isn't a vote of confidence to bankroll a systemic problem. There's no real evidence that the systemic problems have inertia to change.

I'm not interested in the union arguments, because they don't hold any water with a reasonable person. I repeat: "We tried to make things that weren't ugly and huge, but the workers refused!" This statement is absurd.

Car jobs were, thanks to ford, the very epitome of what a skilled manufacturing job should be like, secure in work and retirement, good healthcare etc. That all seems to be a blip, an abbaration, thanks to the US (and before that the UK's) failure to produce cars that people want at a price people want and the failure of Unions and the wider left to come up with a response to globalisation that doesn't try and ape King Canute and now it has come to the stage where only radical surgery can save the big three, become the companies they should have evolved into over 20 years in 1 and it is going to be the workforce that suffers. there doesn't seem to be another way. just pumping money in to keep things as they are just delays the inevitable.

It's guaranteed that a bailout would still result in plants closing and people being laid off, losing benefits, etc. while management stays in place (they did a good job, because they were able to wrangle a bailout)! Not bailing them out means that management and its attendant institutionalized incompetence gets appropriately defenestrated.

OTM.

Industries come and go. The American car industry, as imagined from the 1900s to the 1970s, is in decline. There simply isn't any good evidence that I'm aware of--someone please give me an example--of an industry that was able to radically change (while in a decline) and prosper/innovate its way back to glory. Paying lip service to radical change when your competitors are KICKING YOUR ASS ON EVERY METRIC isn't good enough. You cannot radically change corporate culture that is so ingrained. It doesn't happen.

case #1. Benz, chrysler's eurodad, is doing great business with the Smart line. Americans want Smarts. Chrysler introduces an SUV-crossover "smart" car at a US auto show and says they might sell them in 2009. Hertz-Penske wrangles a deal with Benz to start selling Smart ForTwos in the states in 2008, waiting lists promptly fill up into 2009 and beyond.

case #2. Ford makes a 58-mpg little thing called a Ka and sells it in many parts of the world, except America. The Ka is featured in a James Bond movie which, as expected, breaks a box office record upon North American release. There are still no plans to sell the Ka in the US.

car biz releases the Inner Anarchist in Tom & DDW

You cannot radically change corporate culture that is so ingrained.

Of course you can. You can regulate the shit out of them. You can tax them when they do bad things and give them tax cuts when they do good things. It's just a dumb capitalist puppy; it's not all that hard, in theory. But someone in Washington has to have the sack to decide those things.

x-post -- They can be the hosts of New Car Talk on the Nabisco network.

kenan you're an idiot. Morbius get the fuck off my thread.

well i never.

Dandy has it ever occurred to you that a system in which upwards of a million people losing their jobs in a single stroke is considered "normal" might have something seriously wrong with it?

Or however that sentence ought to be written, eesh

lol tom self fulfilling prophecy

haha tracer I said the same thing about public health in the 17th century! You can thank me for the NHS.

tom, explain what's idiotic about, say, imposing fuel efficiency regulations? Government can't solve all our problems, as someone somewhere once said, but why not give it a shot?

xpost - Which system is that, Tracer? I have no idea what you're alluding to.

i'm suspicious any time republicans don't want to bail out big business. it must be a good idea.

there's nothing wrong with imposing efficiency and safety standards. but your comment above is fucking ludicrous to read. lead industry around by the nose with tax incentives! yes this has done wonders for our food.

Well of course it didn't work for food; we let the same tax incentives go on about 30 years past their expiration date.

i'm suspicious any time republicans don't want to bail out big business

Detroit is in Michigan.
Detroit's competition is mostly in the Bible Belt.

omg its one of those big government tax and spend liberals

see username below

Just say it aloud Tombot:

The big three are mostly unionized, and the foreigners down south ain't. It's called dry humping your constituency.

im pretty sure its never called that

kenan I don't know if you understand that you're pushing the status quo on this thread

Dandy you're saying "let the Big Three fail if they're gonna fail" - unless I've misread you. The result will potentially be upward of a million people losing their jobs, taking into account all the dependent businesses and suppliers. Or maybe just a few hundred thousand. In any case, it sounds like you're seeing this failure as a correction of bad business practice - cutting out the deadwood. This correction is somewhat automatic unless mitigated or arrested, thus "normal"

I don't think the republican party actually gives a shit about unions one way or the other, Don, you're assuming some kind of conservative movement still exists

believe i read somewhere recently that Toyota's US plant might be downshifting production, but without any layoffs. employees are instead being retained for training and stuff, with an eye towards future upticks in the market. whereas the US model has traditionally involved massive layoffs during the auto market sours.

Tracer do you have any documentation to support the idea that the Big Three are NOT going to fail?

btw who the fuck cares who DESERVES to fail

Toyota has money because they sell cars to people who can pay for them.
Also, Toyota is exactly what it says it is, a motor company, while Ford and GM (and I guess chrysler to some extent but I don't know now) have long been described as loan servicers with a steel fabrication subsidiary, which we haven't gotten into much.

kenan I don't know if you understand that you're pushing the status quo on this thread

No. But admittedly, I don't have a plan or anything. The balance is obviously between shoring up an industry that probably SHOULD fail, and screwing a lot lot of people who have about zero chance of going elsewhere.

or rather, watching passively as they are screwed

too BIG to FAIL

that euphemism also needs to go

and yet too small for you ever to retire

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/18/business/18paulson2_337.jpg

congressional democrats are walking into the ruin of their party's first majority presidency in forever with this shit. I'm throwing my hands up over here.

Dandy you're saying "let the Big Three fail if they're gonna fail" - unless I've misread you.

I'm saying that there's no historical or solid empirical evidence to suggest they can succeed in a declining industry without a radical makeover, a makeover so radical that it's never been successful anywhere at anytime, certainly not a scale of 4% of our GDP. Google "industry life cycle" or "product life cycle"...it's a commonly held theory. It's not cutting out the deadwood, which happens much earlier in the industry life cycle. It's burning down the whole forest. So yes, I see this as perfectly normal. (See also, the music business et al)

Is it alarming that a million people at minimum are going to suffer? Hell yes. But this smells an awful lot like a short term problem with virtually no chance of "saving" the industry. Or, in more cynical circles, a vote buying scheme.

Also, Toyota is exactly what it says it is, a motor company, while Ford and GM (and I guess chrysler to some extent but I don't know now) have long been described as loan servicers with a steel fabrication subsidiary, which we haven't gotten into much.

― TOMBOT, Tuesday, November 18, 2008 11:18 AM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

??

I saw a car on the road yesterday that looked like a cross between a pickup truck and an SUV - what is it called? The sight of that monstrosity has me leaning toward "fuck em".

Why don't we demand 50 MPG cars within a couple years? No doubt they already have this technology buried away and can dig it out at will. Hell, let's just say 50 MPG cars NOW.