The disease that has brought down GM is the same one that is going to

[KlatooBNikto]

bring down the U.S. It is called pride,vanity, ego,hubris, you name it.

At one time GM thought that it had rewritten the rules of history with Charles Wilson proclaiming what is good for GM is good for the U.S. and vice versa. It had perfected the art of making shoddy cars and foisting them upon the public at exorbitant prices,dealing the unions in generous raises and benefits.At long last,those days appear to be at an end as the public flee to get themselves trouble free cars made by more efficient carmakers.The management of GM,at once arrogant and foolish,assumed that switching over from the less profitable cars to the more profitable SUV's and big trucks would provide them a haven from their own inefficiencies, are now scrambling to find what they can do to save their own skins as S&P and the raider Krekorian are circling the badly bleeding behemoth waiting to pick its carcass clean.

Compare that with the U.S. public policy.At the end of WWII, the U.S. was unassailable as the world's dominant power.Instead of capitalizing on the enormous goodwill a grateful world bestowed on us, our Ivy League Imperialists set about to concoct a Cold War to enrich themselves and their corporate cronies.Wars became the means to this enrichment and a permanent armament industry was born along with a National Security State aided and abetted by a socalled Free Press with shills like Walter Lippman,James Reston , C.L.Sulzberger,Joseph Alsop creating a new version of a Press that trained itself to ignore the misdeeds of the rulers and to dress up their warmaking as a necessary evil in a 'dangerous world'. The Korean,the Vietnamese and numerous other wars were duly born with varying degrees of blood shed and treasures spent.That permanent Warfare State has found the perfect apostle in George Bush,a coward,who thinks nothing of killing of 100,000 civilians and thousands more of our own soldiers in an illegal war.His remarkable arrogance, the hallmark of fools,is the same trait has laid low GM.And the outcome of George's March of Folly cannot be expected to be anything different.In fact, they have synergistically help engineer each other's downfall.GM's demise is going to create such a havoc with our economy that, even George, who is adept at stealing other people's money and walking away from disasters, will find it hard put to come up with the financing for his imperial misadventures.

A wind of change is blowing and it is sweeping away GM and very soon George too.

[The Blue Flower]

1. "As GM goes...

...so goes the nation."

Or something like that.

[Sadie5]

6. What's wrong with Unions

QUOTE:dealing the unions in generous raises and benefits.
If not for the Unions we would be working right now for slave wages with no control over hours, or pay for those hours.

[KlatooBNikto]

9. I am not against Unions per se.I agree with you that living standards

would closely approximate those of slaves in southern plantations were it not for the unions. What I was trying to say was that,the managements of GM,by ignoring the realities of the marketplace and taking the unions into confidence by dealing with them fairly,have squandered a chance to enlist their help in keeping their company competitive.

[Robert Oak]

34. you really need to do some research

it's just not true at all...GM has been screwing the unions..
moving everything offshore outsourcing, big disaster for
unions
and hence you have bean counters making design and manufacturing
decisions and why GM has turned into a big turd.

I mean that is some sort of piece of propaganda where unions
were just blasted in major media (through corporations trying
to bust them) over and over and in this case, truly not.

It was management and their inability to innovate and design
as well as improve their manufacutring beyond "how to screw the worker"
(notice that Japanese cars are made by US UNIONS) and they blow
GM out of the water in both innovation and quality...

[Robert Oak]

2. Unions opposite they have gotten royally screwed

Ever watch "Roger and Me" by Michael Moore? Illustrates the truth
on GM and unions. They have been busting unions for years
starting in the 80's.

They also outsourced almost everything, their accounting, their designing, their components...

and surprise suprise they have a shit automobile.

Like the S10, I have the last year made in America...still running,
damn solid.

Buy a S10 that was made in Mexico with repressed labor...it's a real
turd, all sorts of problems.

Outsource design and made negineers basically procurement officers
and contract managers? Well, you get a tinker toy turd.

[LSK]

15. what year S10 do you have??

I have a 94 that is pretty reliable, but I know people who have bought recent models who hate them.

[Robert Oak]

33. 90, call it the beater truck that will not die

4.3L V6, 188k 4x4, amazing it's going strong.

I've heard the > 94 (they phased out to Mexico) are real turds
too. I think 94 maybe the last year I was told 90 100% USA.

[oscar111]

3. cold war superbly chronicled, .. you do history very well

I would only add that the GOP rode to victory on unspoken racism... carrying the same states as the Confederacy, plus a few.. as a result of the integration movement and the white backlash to it.

Another great post, Klatoo!

[oscar111]

5. PS Nominate for greatest page: button bott of Orig Post

i did

[JDPriestly]

19. I second.

This post speaks truth to power.

[tanyev]

4. You obviously didn't see one of today's top headlines.

Job growth explodes in April, up 274,000
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2005-05-06-april_x.htm?csp=24&RM_Exclude=Juno

This economy is smokin' hot!!!

[KlatooBNikto]

7. You will find that simply reciting numbers from time to time without

talking about the underlying disease of an economy based on menial jobs will continue our decline. The old adage of Not By Bread Alone can now be rewritten to say Not By McJobs Alone.

[tanyev]

10. McManufacturing McJobs.

:D

Sorry, I know it really isn't funny. But it is ludicrously absurd.

[LSK]

16. isnt college ending and kids are looking for summer jobs?

[orwell]

8. Ship of Fools

Nice post.

While I can't necessarily come to the same conclusions you do, I agree with much that you wrote. Empires topple very slowly, as do the fantasies of the ideologue. George will be most likely be replaced by a more moderate fool, who will still be required by an arrogant public to revel in the glories of the muscular national identity.

As far as GM, the best thing that can happen to it is that it is radically downsized. It has simply become too large and ossified to effectively compete. Here your analogy with the US Titanic is apt.

That being said, the arrogance that has led GM to this brink is also borne by a majority of the American people who continue to believe the marketing spin promulgated by the corporate backed crony capitalist shills you cite. (Let's not forget good old Henry Luce.)

Is it just human nature that power breeds arrogance? The problem is, with the vast military that we control, our fall from power is likely to be very bloody indeed - the Iraq catastrophe representing the tip of a well hidden iceberg.

Ah ship of fools...on a foolish sea.

[Just Me]

11. Indeed! GWB is the last apostle of Ivy League Imperialists!!!

Great analogy!!! Well-stated!!!

BRAVO!!!:applause:

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Batgirl]

13. your characterization of "the cripple and his commie toad"

shows that your effort to sound all scholarly and stuff, failed.

[TR Fan]

23. Do you really think that the "commie toad"

Alger Hiss was not one. If so, then you have ignored virtually all scholarship over the last 30 years -- try, for starters, The Haunted Wood. There are not many that defend the traitor Hiss any more, except his relatives and die-hard fellow travelers who don't think Stalin was so bad either.

As for "the cripple," that's an apt description that my wife, who had the opportunity to grow up and see first hand the tender mercies of the Russians, uses. During that education in utopia, she was privledged to see her grandfather shot for being ... horror of horrors ... a capitalist. While I don't necessarily completely agree with the description, I certainly understand it. The policy of containment is wonderful, if you're on the right side of the containment.

[Batgirl]

26. I don't doubt

that you know more about these historic events than I do. I also think you are being sincere in your remarks. Furthermore, I would not presume to defend the perpetrators of the horrors you describe.

But as far as GM's current situation, I agree with the OP that management of this company has a lot to answer for the current crisis.

[TR Fan]

27. And I totally agree with you...

I'm simply objecting to somewhat prevelant notion on this board that the Cold War did not need to be fought.

As far as GM is concerned, we are in total agreement.

[KlatooBNikto]

14. After looking at the fiascos in Vietnam and now Iraq, if you continue

to believe in the fables about the U.S. doing anything out of altruism and helping people achieve democracy be my guest.

[LSK]

17. and Stalin died in 1953

So how so you explain the 40 some years after he died???

[TR Fan]

24. And what effect do you think his death had

upon the system he established. Very little. Some relaxation of the Soviet's policies of relocation, some improvement for Russians, but virtually none for the captive countries of Eastern Europe. Both Hungary 1956 and Prague 1968 occurred after Stalin's death.

[LSK]

35. and Stalin was a paranoid maniac

Are trying to tell me the next leaders were paranoid maniacs who sent everyone they ever met to Siberia???

[Just Me]

20. Just 'cause US imperialists advantaged themselves of the "Cold War",...

,...does NOT mean that "the people" who were fully responsible for overcoming it are being dismissed. Don't mix sour grapes with melons,...'kay?

[JDPriestly]

22. You also err in your view of history.

You are probably too young to know about it first hand, but WWII took a terrible toll all over the world. The U.S. felt it less than many other countries, but it was still a very difficult time here. I was very young, but I have never forgotten the day my mother threw away the sugar rationing stamps she had been saving for a couple of years after the War just in case. She tried to explain to me how devastating the Depression and War years were. Although I did not understand her words, I remember her emotion to this day.

The fact is we were not invincible in WWII, even with all our military strength. Without our Soviet and British allies, we could not have won that war. And to end it on as close to our terms as possible, we had to strike a bargain. The choice was to deal with the Soviets or fight them then and there. Had Roosevelt not ended the war as quickly as he did, we might have eventually actually lost it. After all, we were fighting on foreign continents. The Soviets were fighting close to their homes. Our allies were war weary and ready to compromise. The logistics of fighting alone at that time would have defeated us sooner or later.

I was in Europe during the Prague summer and met Czechs while traveling in Yugoslavia. In fact, I was in Munich on the day that Prague fell and met many, many Czechs who, having come to the West on vacation, had to decide whether to go back to their homes or start new. I lived near the borders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the early to mid '80s where I got a close-up view of the fall of the Soviet Reich.

One of the lessons I learned from those experiences was that, while a strong military is a necessity for a country like ours, maintaining an open society is the mightiest weapon of all. Trust me. I was a front row witness. While American military superiority played an important role in defeating the Communist dictators, it was free travel, truly free trade (not the corporate cannibalism of today), a free culture, and free access to different points of view that did them in.

The author of the above post is correct in criticizing the United States' excessive reliance on force in conducting its foreign policy since WWII. Granted, we need a strong military, and military actions are sometimes necessary. But, our governments since Roosevelt have far too often committed our forces to fight for vague goals and with no exit plan. Too often, our military has been spread so thin that we have been unable to respond to situations that genuinely needed our intervention. The role of our military power should be simply to defend and to deter. The threat of our military power is sufficient. We do not need to be constantly engaged in war -- and we should never be the aggressor. We pose a far more credible threat when we are not engaged in conflict. Who poses the greater threat to you -- the man with a weapon in each hand alert and ready and poised to attack you? or the man who is distracted because he is fighting someone other than yourself?

The Prague Spring is a good example of what I am talking about. In 1968, we had forces in Europe and could have sent more to deter the Soviet Union entry into Czechoslovakia, but our military was bogged down in the quagmire of Viet Nam. As a result, we did not pose a credible threat. Considering our military superiority, we had far less influence in Eastern Europe than we should have had. Sound familiar. It should. Right now, we are so bogged down in Iraq and elsewhere that if we needed to fight or to threaten force in a hot spot, we would have serious problems.

To the extent that we were successful internationally following WWII, it was mostly due to our attention to expanding and protecting our individual liberties here at home, the openness of our society and the economic expansion we enjoyed thanks to our openness, creativity, ingenuity and the lessons we had learned about working together under FDR during WWII. We became a beacon of hope to people all over the world. In the past few years, we have lost that vision and betrayed the liberal values that opened our society and made it the model of democracy. I hope the current conservative trend will end, and that we return soon to the core values of human rights, openness and creativity that made us a great nation.

[TR Fan]

25. Thanks for a well-thought out reply...

Yes, I missed WWII by five years, being a child of the Cold War. And, for years, I worked against the Soviets, developing systems to eavesdrop on them, to impede their progress, and, sometimes, to kill them outright.

I also fully understand that the capabilities of the US at the end of WWII were limited. However, that does not excuse FDR and later Truman from selling out millions in Eastern Europe. Clearly, part of the problem was that FDR was dying by the time of Yalta and Truman, at Potsdam had only been in office about 3 months. However, they cannot feign to not know what Stalin would do -- he had repeatedly shown his true colors in the Baltics, the Ukraine, and in the show trials of the 1930s. Therefore, they knowingly ceded the freedom and liberty of millions to someone they knew was a mass murderer on a scale much larger than Hitler's.

I too have lived in Eastern Europe -- Budapest and Sarejevo -- and my wife was born and grew up in an Eastern European country, in one of the proletariat paradises where everyone was equal. While your example regarding the Prague spring is apt, i.e., that our troops were bogged down in Vietnam, where were they in 1956, certainly not in Budapest. No, America was satisfied with a policy of containment and proxy wars, which, by the way, obviously led to Vietnam. Perhaps if we had been more willing to confront the evil at the time and at its source, we might have avoided later mistakes to which you refer.

[KlatooBNikto]

28. Many people the world over have realized far better than us here that

the Ivy League Imperialists talk a good game about Democracy but when the chips are down run away from a strong enemy.This, more than anything else caused the abndonment of the Czechs, the Hungarians,the Kurds and numerous other Freedom Fighters. Even our expedition into Iraq would not have occurred if Iraq possessed a nuclear weapon. This fact is not lost on North Korea or Iran.And it is this fact that is going to unleash a weapons proliferation of an unheard of scale.

When you so glibly talk about being more willing to confront evil, please remember you are talking about the annihilation of mankind when confronting the Soviet Union.That same calculation must have occurred to an evil ignoramus like Rumsfeld ( another Ivy League Imperialsit, if there was one, from Princeton) when he started spouting talk about confronting China when one of our planes was shot down over the coast of China and quickly backtracked with sweet reasonableness.That the Chinese Communists would rank even higher in mass murder than Stalin would probably have occurred to you.

[TR Fan]

29. You were not talking about "the annihilation of mankind"

in 1945. The lesson is to destroy your enemies while they are still weak.

[KlatooBNikto]

30. We certainly were talking about the annihilation of mankind when

confronting the Soviet Union in 1953 in Hungary.

On Edit: It was the realization of George Kennan that the Soviet Union through its huge sacrifices to save the world from Nazi barbarism had earned the moral and material right to be considered on a par with Western powers that made him propose the containment policy.As it is the window of opportunity for Western Imperialism closed in 1948 when the Soviet Union exploded its own nuclear weapon and closed further when it exploded its fusion weapon in 1951.Any of the mad schemes proposed by you as far as confronting evil or destroying the enemy when he was weak would have plunged the world even further into crises from which it would have taken years to recover.In effect, you are proposing taking on both China and the Soviet Union when we have our hands full just taking on Vietnam or Iraq, supposedly 'weak' countries by your definition.

I think we need to abandon military solutions to problems, period.And abandon the idea that we are somehow morally superior to others when we have killed more than 3 million people in Indo-China pursuing a war of Aggression there and now make no pretenses about a policy of preemptive wars that even our own prosecutor at Nuermeberg has condemned as a war crime.

[JDPriestly]

31. Hindsight is easy.

Do you know who was president in 1956? Eisenhower. It was his call, not Roosevelt's, and as I remember, there were a lot of other things going on at that time. We were "drawing the line" in No Man's Land in Korea -- North Korea is still a threat. There were problems in the Suez. Kennedy's brave stand on the Berlin Wall put an end to the most egregious Soviet aggression for many years.

As you read in my post, I do not deny that military action is appropriate at times. It certainly was in WWII. The Russians marched into both Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They would have justified their acts by their treaties with the ruling regimes of the time, I suppose. But, still, we could have argued that we were the defender, not the aggressor in each case. Still, if your wife lived in Eastern or Middle Europe during WWII, or has family that did (my husband did), she will have heard the terrible stories of what it is like to live in a war-torn country. We were probably right to wait it out. I must tell you, however, that I know what high prices were paid by the families that were divided between East and West at that time. My husband's family was among them.

As a matter of principle, we have no right to make war anywhere without ensuring that the cause is unquestionably just and physical force the last resort. The strategy of peace is always, always best. Even in countries with bad governments, most people would rather be alive and have their loved ones alive than dead. It is better to err on the side of caution. Living the example of an open society while maintaining military readiness is still the wisest, most successful policy.

Unfortunately, especially since release of the July 2002 Blair memo, we know that our war in Iraq was neither just nor necessary. What a sad day for America. It will take us a long time to recover from this moral lapse.

[KlatooBNikto]

32. You may want to recall that Johnson's war on Vietnam was also based on a

concocted incident,The Gulf of Tonkin "incident". Each war that we have engaged in post WWII, has been based on moral lapses which have reached their zenith under the eevil trio of Bush-Cheney and Rumsfeld. Not only have they concocted a war of aggression in Iraq, they have simultaneously devastated our own democracy.

[JDPriestly]

41. True.

And the Democratic Party is only now recovering from the shame and lack of a sense of integrity that Johnson's lies brought on it.

[LSK]

39. when Germany fell, we were still fighting Japan

And it was assumed that only a full scale invasion of Japan would win the war. We were hoping Russia would finally go to war with Japan which would save a lot of American lives. How could we think of going to war with Russia when we were still at war with Japan???

And how do you explain to the American people that after helping an "ally" for 4 years, that all the sudden you are going to attack them???

And how do you tell the rest of Europe that you will fight another war after they had just thought the great war which ravaged the entire continent was over.

And by the 1950s, any war with Russia could have escalated to the end of mankind.

Yes the great American ego fools some of us to think we can defeat anyone, but then there is reality and there is a cost to any war that is fought.

[Javaman]

18. If you want to know more about the good people at GM...

read up on the Los Angeles freeway system and how GM orchestrated the removal of the trolley system.
They are such fine folks, always looking out for our best interests, like buying more and more of their crappy gas guzzling SUV's or working sweetheart deals to make sure public transportation systems have a hard time making a buck. Just lovely heart warming people.

I envision them slowly burning on a spit in hell.

[unblock]

21. gm is NOT going away

first off, as a corporate credit professional, i have to say i don't understand the downgrade. gm debt is NOT sub-investment grade paper, regardless of what the rating agencies say. they may not be in great shape long-term, but they are not going to default on any debt in the next 12 months, which is normally the primary consideration in this type of ratings downgrade.

that's not to say that their stock won't continue to dwindle, etc., and it may remain a poor investment long-term, at least not until there's a change at the helm. or some government assistance of one sort or another.

either way, it's not going away anytime soon.

[Coastie for Truth]

37. USSteel hasn't left Pittsburgh either

but a hell of a lot of steel worker jobs did.

(I'm a Greenfield and Mon Valley kid)

[Coastie for Truth]

36. NIH (Not Invented Here) helped to do GM in

Their senior executive management team really believed that if GM didn't invent it - it just wasn't worth inventing.

Their last innovative success was the modern automatic transmission - and that was almost 70 years ago. Everything else has been "licensed in" or flat out "me too" copied.

[tabasco]

38. Damn. Great post.

Especially the second half. Arrogance is the hallmark of fools.

[RPM]

40. they once said the same thing about....

U.S. Steel, the Pennsylvania Railroad and myriad other companies that have faded into oblivion....

GM and this whole country shall soon join them.