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Auto Industry Bailout Scam
by Debs is Dead
lifted from a comment
Well I was interested by Mike Whitney’s comments
on the seeming dissonance on the support the banks and financials are
getting and the complete lack of support for the auto industry bailout.
Yeah yeah I know the American auto industry is a basket case completely
captured by the myth of infinite and cheap hydrocarbons, their
inability to change has stranded them on the beach like an old whale
who doesn’t realise he will die before a tide big enough to float him
off comes again.
But the same can be said of the banks and all the rest of Wall St. They
used outmoded inflexible solutions to an ever-changing environment and
consequently got beached too.
Whitney maintains that the auto industry will be bailed out alright
but not until the big two have been chapter 11’d and the unions broken
along with worker’s entitlements:
So why would GMAC want to become a bank holding company if General
Motors is headed for the chopping block? Could it be that the
government is working out a secret deal with management to put the
company through Chapter 11 (reorganization) just so it can crush the
union and eliminate their pension and health care benefits in one fell
swoop?
You bet. Car workers will be reduced to slave wages just like they
are in sunny Alabama where sharecropping has moved indoors. And–no
surprise–the Democrats are right on board with this labor-busting
charade. The auto industry isn’t going to be shut down. That’s just
more fear-mongering like the blather about martial law and WMD. Detroit
is going to be transformed into a workers gulag; Siberia on Lake
Michigan, which is why Paulson is withholding the $25 billion. It’s
plain old class warfare.
The ultimate sellout by the dems. Those of us who live in nations
where a ‘leftist’ party finally won government during the great
depression where government then introduced the safety nets and
Keynsian economics and a more friendly attitude towards labour unions;
are probably unaware of the horrors introduced by the likes of Ramsay
McDonald as a labour PM in England when the depression hit.
A roundabout way of saying many of us have been brought up to
believe that the pale pink leftish political parties that appeared to
be aligned with ordinary workers during the depression, only became so
aligned against their natural instincts. After they had seen ersatz
socialist political parties like the English labour party crack down on
workers just as bad if not worse than the right wing conservative
parties, but the great recovery promised by the capitalist mouthpieces
never eventuated. So the likes of FDR and Mickey Savage had no choice but to go left, as much as it went against their natural instincts.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden are not the workers’ friends. Neither are
any of the other pseudo working class champions in Congress. They may
have come from the working class although really both Biden and Obama
are products of the bourgeoisie, and even those dem pols who did come
outta housing projects or other extreme poverty, couldn’t wait to get
away from it.
They wear the title "champions of the ordinary people" simply
because the sort of petite bourgeois scaredy cats who hang round the
lower echelons of the rethug party would have chased them off had the
‘working class heroes’ tried to get ahead with the party of one man
against the world (ie extreme selfishness) that more properly suited
their personal ethos, the rethugs. Sure the rethugs do let a few tokens
in but only if the tokens touch their forelocks and don’t scare them,
and don’t try and push Johnny Governorson offa his reserved spot.
Shit sorry bout the digression – the dem party hacks mostly have the
values of the class enemy and will destroy American workers’
entitlements in a heartbeat while claiming this is necessary to keep
the auto industry ‘globally competitive’.
Complete lies- utter bullshit – total distortion – check out how
well car company employees are looked after in Germany or Japan. Even
Korea where auto industry wages rose an average of 15% a year for the
15 years between 87 and 02 and where Kia attempted the same sort of
Chapter 11 scam, the auto workers are much better looked after than
other similar industries. They have strong unions in the other car
manufacturing nations too. Why? Because these fork tongued under snakes
belly high jumpers will never admit it but the success of such a
complex industry such as vehicle manufacturing depends upon a good
working relationship between management and workers. A good formalised
relationship. Formalised by using the democratic structure of the
labour union to facilitate effective consultation.
The lack of competitive car products outta Detroit has nothing to do
with pension plans or dental benefits and everything to do with
shit-house management.
The auto industry executives and their lackeys in Congress along
with old school chums in treasury, figure if they can scare the
workers, then slice and dice their working conditions, while paying off
key unionists with cash or political favours to ensure the auto
industry unions have the balls of a gelded racehorse, then management
will be able to stay in it’s nice little comfort zone safe from the
exigencies of peak oil reality because American auto industry workers
will be the cheapest on the planet.
Who cares if Detroit can only make ‘yank tanks’ if the much lower
labour costs mean the ignorant can justify the relatively high cost of
gas due to inefficient energy usage by offsetting it against the
cheaper purchase price.
Everyday we see items that have a much higher running cost outsell
far cheaper to maintain items. This by citizens who consider themselves
value oriented, because the initial upfront cost of the expensive to
run item is lower than that of the more efficient product.
That is the ‘niche’ the marketers hope to be steering Detroit product into.
Only if ordinary Americans, particularly ordinary members of the dem party, let their representative ‘freckle punch’ them.
@Cynthia
As near as I can tell, movers and shakers of the auto industry were stupid enough to pour more money into the advertising of cars than into the engineering of them…
The same can be written about innumerable industries, try this one:
As near as I can tell, movers and shakers of the auto phama industry were stupid enough to pour more money into the advertising of cars drugs than into the bio-engineering of them…
see how that works? Top heavy and dangerous, It’s indicative, all in the vain of profit above people. Systemic in
The Addictive Organization:Why We Overwork, Cover Up, Pick Up the Pieces, Please the Boss, and Perpetuate Sick organizations
–Even though there is a plethora of books about organizations and corporate life and millions of dollars each year are spent on consultants and packages designed to “fix up” what is wrong with organizations, corporations continue to search desperately for models that will reverse a slipping economy and enliven a poorly producing work force. Individuals look forward to weekends so that they can recover from their “crazy-making” experiences at work only to find that they must face the same dynamics on Monday. Often, persons who come from dysfunctional families find their organizations repeating the same patterns they learned in their families. Even though these patterns feel familiar, they do not feel healthy. Though consulting packages seem to alleviate some problems for a few days or a week, those same problems reemerge with even greater force and tenacity. Even after our favorite committees have had workshops on communications skills, breakdowns in communication, dishonesty, isolation, anger, and withdrawals continue. What is going on? What are we missing?
@seneca we have to think in terms of systems theory and holism. Language is indeed, what is needed, at least for those that can think critically, my fear is the masses are visceral, the population incrementally dumbed down, and traumatized* to think, act and react from the lizard brain, in other words their limbic system (or Paleomammalian brain) without thinking at all. ‘Shock doctrine’,strategy of tension, Edward Bernays, psyops,(war on the American citizen) economic insecurity, ad nauseum.
However as American writer, philosopher, and ethnobotanist, Terence McKenna said, “If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.” Were in a race for time as the closing society is fast approaching. Perhaps, a race for our very lives as
The Camps, the “Law” and Now the Targeting System is not far off.
Almost everything is being put into place whilst America sleeps on… Post election is going to be a white knuckle ride for people who still cherish inherent rights and freedom. The system is being put in place to begin targeting dissenters, Constitution enthusiasts and whomever the state deems an “enemy combatant. Their target is definitely blogs and sites that promote information contrary to the agenda of the Fourth Reich and resistance to it. Read here: Software Developed to Monitor Opinions or in it’s entirety below.
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
October 4, 2006
Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.
By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.
Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.
Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil,” the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.
American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.
The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look “to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation,” a statement by the department said.
It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be in place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The monitoring would not extend to United States news, Mr. Kielman said.
“We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate,” he said.
Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.
“It is just creepy and Orwellian,” said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Andrei Sitov, Washington bureau chief of the Itar-Tass news agency of Russia, said he hoped that the objective did not go beyond simply identifying threats to efforts to stifle criticism about an American president or administration.
“This is what makes your country great, the open society where people can criticize their own government,” Mr. Sitov said.
The researchers, using an grant provided by a research group once affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, have complied a database of hundreds of articles that it is being used to train a computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements.
The software would need to be able to distinguish between statements like “this spaghetti is good” and “this spaghetti is not very good — it’s excellent,” said Claire T. Cardie, a professor of computer science at Cornell.
Professor Cardie ranked the second statement as a more intense positive opinion than the first.
The articles in the database include work from many American newspapers and news wire services, including The Miami Herald and The New York Times, as well as foreign sources like Agence France-Presse and The Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan.
One article discusses how a rabid fox bit a grazing cow in Romania, hardly a threat to the United States. Another item, an editorial in response to Mr. Bush’s use in 2002 of “axis of evil” to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea, said: “The U.S. is the first nation to have developed nuclear weapons. Moreover, the U.S. is the first and only nation ever to deploy such weapons.”
The approach, called natural language processing, has been under development for decades. It is widely used to summarize basic facts in a text or to create abridged versions of articles.
But interpreting and rating expressions of opinion, without making too many errors, has been much more challenging, said Professor Cardie and Janyce M. Wiebe, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. Their system would include a confidence rating for each “opinion” that it evaluates and would allow an official to refer quickly to the actual text that the computer indicates contains an intense anti-American statement.
Ultimately, the government could in a semiautomated way track a statement by specific individuals abroad or track reports by particular foreign news outlets or journalists, rating comments about American policies or officials.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the effort recalled the aborted 2002 push by a Defense Department agency to develop a tracking system called Total Information Awareness that was intended to detect terrorists by analyzing troves of information.
“That is really chilling,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “And it seems far afield from the mission of homeland security.”
Federal law prohibits the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies from building such a database on American citizens, and no effort would be made to do that, a spokesman for the department, Christopher Kelly, said. But there would be no such restrictions on using foreign news media, Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Kielman, the project coordinator, said questions on using the software were premature because the department was just now financing the basic research necessary to set up an operating system.
Professors Cardie and Wiebe said they understood that there were legitimate questions about the ultimate use of their software.
“There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of technology by the government,” Professor Wiebe said. “But it doesn’t mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government understand what is going on in places around the world.”
The empire must always gauge the resistance. What, you guys don’t support the glorious War on Sentiment!?
It’s a P.K. Dick world now…
*terror, war war, terror, terror and fear, al CIA duh, duck tape, anthrax, snipers, color codes, WMD etc, etc…
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 25 2008 22:51 utc | 19
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