Re: Would You Buy a Car from Chrysler?


"Bill Putney" <bptn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
"Bill Putney" <bptn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
"Bill Putney" <bptn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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News wrote:
So let's discuss the issues instead of using Nathan Thurm diversions.

Under current card check legislation, the only difference is that if
the union organizers get 50% signatures on the cards, the union is
automatically formed.

Yes - And the workers are thereby denied a secret ballot.

So you ARE arguing with a straight face that a unionization drive
will get 50% signatures on cards when the employees and the
employer don't want a union.

You really have a problem with your paranoia. Get help! :-)


Why? What if 2 of the 50 would have voted the other way had their vote
been secret? Not preposterous at all. I'm just sayin'.


Consider that the employees who publically state they don't want a
union are going to get 100% support from their management and the
ones saying they want a union will be blacklisted, it IS preposterous
to make the claim that an employee who really doesen't want a union
is going to remain silent. He has NOTHING to gain by remaining
silent, and an ENORMOUS amount to gain by speaking out against
the union.

The reality is that in a secret ballot system the results always have MORE
people voting in support of the union than were willing to publically
sign cards saying they were in support of one.


You are claiming the the employer conducts the election that is ordered by
the NLRB? I've never worked in a union environment, thank God, but don't
think so.


Yes they do, read the rules, Bill. A number of companies have been
sued in the past by failing to carry out the election even after being
ordered to do so by the NLRB. Foot dragging on holding the election
is one of the primary tools to fight unionization drives.


they can force
all employees to attend anti-union presentations, and they routinely
claim that if the plant unionizes that they will shut it down and lay
everyone off. This is particularly prevalent in big-box retail like your
Walmarts, for example when the meat cutters in Texas Walmart unionized
back in 2000, Walmart closed it's meatcutting in ALL of it's 180 Texas
Walmart stores...

So they told the employees ahead of time what the prudent business
decision would be if business had to be done under new, less profitable
conditions, and they did it. Good for them. If business conditions
change, someone should hold a gun to the employer's head and say they have
to keep that part of the business open? I don't think so.

Do you know how much money the CEO of Walmart makes? How much
the Walton family makes? It is nothing but a pack of lies to claim that the
company would lose money if it was unionized. They would still make
money, just slightly less of it. And in exchange wages would rise for their
employees which have a beneficial effect on the community the businesses
are in.

Don't you understand why it is that so many people are pissed at Walmart
for coming into communities and destroying all the ma-and-pa stores? Why
so many communities have fought to keep them out? It is because they
come in, undercut the small stores, the small stores go out of business,
and all their employees come to work for Walmart at minimum wage.
Then tax revenue goes down in the community and the community goes
to hell.

Then people cannot understand why it is that 10 years later nobody in the
country can afford to buy cars or homes anymore and the car makers are
failing and there's tons of foreclosed homes all over the place.

When manufacturing leaves the United States because
of cheap Asian imports, retail is about all a lot of these communities have
left to provide jobs. And if the retail is paying minimum wage, the
communities
get bled dry. That's why cities like Buffalo NY, and Flint MI are such
hell-holes
today and many have entire communities of homes that have sat abandonded
for two decades. Essentially the entire community ends up full of poor
bluehairs surviving off their social security checks, and Medicade-funded
hospitals with a small crust of rich doctors in the community.


The employer is doing this in these NLRB elections. When the employer
puts one of these elections on at 4:00pm in the afternoon, and requires
all employees to attend a 7 hour presentation starting at 8:00am where
they spend the entire time dragging up example after example of why
unions are bad, then finishes it off by telling the employees that if
they
vote for the union they will shut down and fire everyone, it should be
illegal but it's not.

I agree - that's unreasonable - those employees should quit and go to work
somewhere else. :) (actually they do have the right to do that)

Seriously - telling the truth should be illegal? Sounds like to me that
they are being prudent in telling them the business decision that will
result if the conditions under which business has to be conducted are
changed. You look at it as a threat. I look at it as telling them the
facts of life.

I see it as no different than an employer telling me that if such and such
a contract is lost, we will be laying off x% of our employees. I would
appreciate the heads up. In fact, in the early 90's, an aerospace company
I used to work for warned its employees of an upcoming downturn so that
they could start looking for other jobs. I appreciated that. Should that
company have been required to keep everyone employed (and end up going out
of business) when business conditions that they had no control of changed?
Unionization has the same kind of impact on the profitability of a
business - more cost - less (income generating) output.


If the CEO and owners of the businesses are working alongside the
employees and making a REASONABLE amount of money - I'll
be generous and say, 20 times what the average peon makes - then
I have no problem with that. And you know something Bill? If you
read the case studies of companies where the workers succesfully
de-unionized, that's exactly what you find.

Card check legislation isn't going to affect these companies.

The companies it's going to affect are the ones where the CEO's and
owners are making 250 times the amount a line worker makes, and have
golden parachutes that guarentee them tens to hundreds of millions of
dollars
EVEN IF the company loses money.

Just like GM not being able to implement cost savings if it meant
eliminating requirements for the number of people on the line.


GM and the Big 3 and the UAW are a special case, and do not represent
most unions and union employees in the country. And at any rate,
GM is UAW's problem now. Frankly, it's been many years since
the last of the founding owners of GM died, and GM as a corporation
has made the argument "what's good for GM is good for America"
so many times in the past, while sticking it's snout into the public
trough, that the company should have been handed over to the UAW
20 years ago. Let the UAW fight amongst themselves to figure
out how to sell cars profitably and make wages they are happy with.
I won't shed any tears for them. In any case, card check isn't going
to do squat for UAW anyway since they are fully unionized. Card check
will help the rest of the unions who don't have penetration in their
industries.

If that happened in federal elections there would be a riot.

I'm not following you there. If *what* happened in federal elections?

If a candidate for the incumbent was allowed to closet up all the voters
for 6 hours before the election lecturing them about the advantage of voting
to keep things the way they are.

If you mean there are consequences of the results of federal elections,
there are. My grand children and great grandchildren will be paying for
these last elections.

There you go, forgetting about Bush's 2 stimulus handouts. So, your
grandchildren are gonna only be paying for Obama's handouts? Did the
magic money fairy pay for Bush's handouts? Drop those Republican
talking points for a moment and use your mind.

Since McCain voted for the Bush stimulus I highly doubt that he would
NOT have done another stimulus after he was elected. Conservatives
just need to face the facts that we tried 28 years of trickle-down starting
with RayGun and the economists have universally concluded that it
is an utter failure. Trickle-down is voodo economics, even Bush Sr. knew
that.

I'm not saying the stimulus is perfect. But this idea that we are going to
just toss all regulations on every business is utterly foolish and is the
real problem.

What you want is people to vote in a union environment and not have to
deal with the consequences of their choices (i.e., jobs being lost).
Their problem is they want their cake and eat it too. And that's their
problem.


No not at all. What I want is for if the majority of workers in an industry
want to be unionized that they get to be.

The only reason that Walmart could get away with shedding all the
meatpackers in the Texas example is that Walmart successfully intimidated
the rest of the employees and the entire store and chain didn't unionize.
If it had, Walmart would have been forced to work things out. And
if the rest of the retail sector had unionized at the same time then
customers
would not be able to go run down the street to some undercutting
competitor and put Walmart out of business.

I don't mind it if employees get paid minimum wage IF the prices of
stuff in the economy that they need to buy are low. If bread cost 25 cents
a
loaf and milk 50 cents a bottle, and everything else was similarly priced,
then I'd agree that the unions don't have any place anymore.

But instead what I'm seeing is entire communities where the majority
of jobs in the community ONLY PAY min. wage, or a few cents above
it, and everyone in those communities is living in hell-holes. Not every
commuity is like that, of course, but way more than should be. And in
the meantime the owners of these companies are literally rolling in
money.

If you read the wikipedia entry for card check you have read all
the pro and con arguments so there's no point in rehashing them here.
I will merely point out that when a professor points out that rising
wages are a good thing for the economy, HE is tenured and HE
has nothing to gain or lose either way. By contrast when the head of
Walmart makes claims that unions are bad, he's motivated by his own
personal self interest. So I don't really put any stock in that.

You wanna argue economic theory, go ahead. I'll argue with you.
But you better use logic to support your points, not quotes from
some chamber of commerce.


So - you want those who don't know how to succeed in business to run the
show?


That's not how modern business works and you know it, Bill. If all or even
most consumers out there were educated consumers and spent wisely,
then companies would be forced to compete with each other on the basis
of how good their products were, not on how well they are marketed. But
instead the business world is saturated with examples of inferior products
putting companies that make superior products out of business due to
the snowball effect of marketing dollars. That drags down the quality of
life for everyone, even for the minority of educated consumers.

The people on top of things are largely there from luck. You cannot
seriously
argue that people like Nardelli know how to run Chrysler, hell -I- could do
a better job than he did, hell YOU could do a better job than he did. Geze,
Home Depot fired his ass as far as they could
when he screwed them over, the guys flat out incompetent. He was
probably screwing the sister of one of the Cerebus board members to be
put on Chrysler.

who are the same people responsible for ruining the economy - are the
ones with the gold. If they had not been so greedy then the US
population
would still trust these people and the Republicans would still be running
the show.

You mean like the hearings in which the Republicans were demanding proper
oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the demonratic leaders pulled
the race card and said they were trying to lynch Raines, who cooked the
books at the proper time to take in personal bonuses of over 90 million
dollars in 6 years? Those Republicans and those Democrats? You know who
Barney Frank is?


No I mean the Republicans like Phill Gramm who inserted a 250 page
rider into the 11,000 page "Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000"
two days after Bush was elected, on the very day Congress was recessing
for the holidays. That rider was later dubbed the "Enron Loophole"
and it allowed the unregulated trading of subprime mortage packages,
which fired off the economic collapse we have now.

You see, Bill, Freddie and Fannie WERE regulated until Republicans
convinced Bush for the first time in history to use the federal
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to pre-empt all of
the state lending laws that had outlawed predatory lending by these
banks. All 50 state banking superintendents fought these rules but
Bush prevailed.

Truth is the federal government threatened the lending institutions with
all kinds of business-ending penalties if they didn't throw prudent
business practices out the window and loan money to people to buy houses
they couldn't afford. The lenders had no way to fight that.


No, that is not the truth. It is a Republican talking point that is a big
lie.

The Community Reinvestment Act didn't cause the housing meltdown,
what caused it was the large number of ARMS issued that adjusted upwards
after the housing market start to go south.

You understand the concept of a snowball dolling downhill, or the
concept of a vicious circle, don't you?

What we had is a classic bubble of people in the early 2000's who were
jumping into home-flipping in a huge way. The typical scenario was buy
a decent family home for $200K and add a bunch of fripperies then
resell it for $400K to some empty-nester who was selling their $200K
home. The flipper used zero-percent loans to hold on to the home and
that worked as long as the housing market was hot.

Then prices went up too far, and the supply of ignorant/lazy/uneducated
empty nesters with money burning holes in their pocket got used up,
and the prices started to fall. The second they did, the flippers caught
out
on the floor when this musical chairs game stopped were all underwater
and they all walked away from their so-called "investments" so the banks
took them back and wrote them off and themselves collapsed. And
since these ARMS were all bundled up in securites, the investors that
financed this nonsense saw their portfolios heading for the toilet and
they paniced and pulled what money they had into commodities
speculation. That drove gas prices to 4 a gallon as well as food prices
and killed consumer spending, and another related whammy was
all these idiots buying these overpriced homes were using home equity
loans to finance cars, furniture and other nonsense and when the value
of their home dropped, the equity lines all were shut down by the banks,
and consumer spending ended up starved.

Do you actually know what the 2007 default rate of loans made in, let's see,
massasschuetts banks that were under the CRA was? I'l tell you. ONE POINT
EIGHT
PERCENT. compared to FIVE percent for all other types of loans.

The scapgoating of the CRA was a desperate attempt by supply-siders
to cover the real reason for the crash - the lack of regulation of financial
institutions. Thank God that we didn't elect McCain, we now have a
chance to put some regulation on the banks.

The idea that the Democrats were somehow anti-regulation of banks
is a myth.

You are going to see card check legislation passed, along with a whole
host
of other what you call "socialist" legislation. You can blame the greed
of
these people - all of them members of the Republican party and heavy
donors to it - for squeezing the general population in the US to the
point
that people have snapped, and now are reacting by going left.

Socialist programs like CRA are what caused it.

no

So socialism caused the problem,

no

and the answer is more socialism?

define "socialism" other than the definition your using here
which is "everything I don't like and don't understand"

The Social Security Administration is a socialist government bureau.
Wanna get rid of it? I'm young, Bill, I'm still working and I got
another 30 years at least of paying into the damn thing. I'll be more
than happy to stop doing that now and send the money into a
401K

I see. Again - Republicans tried to get proper oversight over Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac,

baloney.

and the Democrats stopped that in the hearings. Certainly you've seen the
youtube compilation of those hearings. Very eye-opening.


Then why did Bush styme all the states from regulating their banks?

The states know better than some dumb bureaucrat in Foggy Bottom
what scams the banks are engaged in, they should regulate them.

I've seen the youtube vid your referring to and it's lifted out of context.
Unless your willing to spell out all of the connections like I did here,
all your doing is throwing biased talking points around.

The conservatives, Bill - YOUR PEOPLE - have done FAR FAR more to
push the US population into the liberals arms than ANYTHING that WE could
have done to attract people...

No - the people that did it were not conservatives. Many of them may have
been Republicans, but they were not conservatives. (Some talk radio
personalities refer to them as RINO's - Republicans In Name Only.)


I'll give you that one. But, I didn't see conservatives voting against
Bush or other Republicans in large numbers for the 200 or 2004
elections. They chose to stand with the RINO's and that's what matters.

Now that they are out of power the "real" conservatives that you
seem to think aren't Republicans can have a chance to clean up
the Republican party. Go to it! You can start with Rush aka Addict
Limbaugh.


I thank you for doing this. Hopefully, the
conservatives will eventually understand this, and clean house. The US
could
use you - if you get rid of the stinky houseguests like the evangelical
Christians
who have used and abused you. If you don't, well then expect a 3rd party
to arise.

Why do you single out "evangelical Christians"? What's that got to do
with it. Nancy Pelosi, Barak Obama, and Barney Frank are not evangelical
Christians. Funny you choose to throw that term out like you did.


the evangelicals that want to violate the constitutional separation
of church and state are just one of the many stinky fish in the
Republican party. I personally feel that they are the worst, however,
far in excess of the compromised RINOs.

And "we" are counting on socialists to overplay their hand in this
election cycle and put true conservatives in power - if we can find some.


I'm sure you are. I think that Obama is well aware of that danger,
though. I certainly will freely admit that not all of his people are.
We will have to see what happens here.

In all honesty, I agree that "Republicans" are as much to blame. I
attended a tea party, and in spite of what the news media said, they were
not anti-Obama or anti-Democrat. They were anti-big government and
anti-socialism.

Yup, anti-regulation. as in no regulations on the banks. Good, good.

My two signs said "Two Words: Term Limits" and "End Piracy in Washington
D.C.". I happen to believe that our progeny for many generations will be
paying for the "stimulationg stupidity" acts done by the government (Bush,
Obama, and Congress) in the last few months.


They would pay either way. If no stimulus was done the depression would
be far worse. Did you know that for a while there they were talking about
letting money markets collapse but at the last minute the government stepped
in and stopped that? That would have been rich. money markets are the
only accounts in most 401K's that specifically have NO risk. I guess
someone realized at the last minute that if we allow all the 401K's to be
completely defaulted then we might as well put everyone on the dole.

Read up on the Great Depression. It wasn't until the government
pumped a lot of stimulus money into the economy that the economy
started to recover. WWII completed the recovery, but today, we don't
have the luxury of starting another war.

(4) Are union leaders (for steel workers in particular) not selling
their workers down the river by their helping campaign for cap and
trade (which will actually lose jobs for union and non-union alike) as
payment to Obama for him pushing thru card check?

cap and trade is like abortion with the Republican party, it is used to
stir up the party faithful but nobody running things has any serious
intent
to do anything about it.
You're saying that Obama and his associates have no intent of passing
cap and trade?

Yes, just like they have no intent on prosecuting Bush for torture,...

Speaking of which - I couldn't believe Obama's stupid remarks regarding
that recently. He commented that maybe there were alternative methods
that could have been used to get the guy to talk. Well - as the
President, he's either dishonest or plain stupid. The "alternative
techniques" take weeks or months to work. The only problem is that the
guy told the interrogators that he had set the wheels in motion for his
plan and they would know what that was in one or two days (IOW - after
many people died), but that he wasn't going to tell them what it was or
where it was going to be. So they had less than a day to get it out of
him. Certainly Obama knew that - and if not then he's an idiot for not
knowing - being that he's the President. He's done irreparable damage to
our nation in what he did regarding that.


Equating torture of a single guy over a period of a few days, who has
a small amount of easily verifyable information to the
systematic torturing that was going on for months and years at Girab
and Gitmo and other CIA secret prisons we don't know about is
rediculous. Espically when so many of them were never charged
and let go after they figured out that they didn't know anything.

and
they have no intent to get rid of the Bush tax cut like they promised he
would
do on the election circuit. (at least, not anytime soon) and no intent
on
revoking federal wiretapping laws or immunity for telcos that illegally
spied on American citizens.

Us educated Democrats understand that when we voted for Obama that
we wern't going to get everything we wanted. But we definitely were
going to get more of what we wanted than from McCain. I don't claim
to speak for the ignorant Democrats.

McCain is one of the reasons Republicans lost. He is not a conservative.
As the common expression goes "we held our noses and voted for him".


Don't kid yourselves. If McCain hadn't selected a bimbo for a running
mate he would have won. He nearly did. You don't realize how many
people are out there who voted against Obama simply because he is
black.

If it had been an old white guy up against McCain, then McCain could
have promised everyone free ice cream and he still would have lost.

I don't buy that at all. Can you explain why the union leaders are
jazzing the union workers up to push for cap and trade to be passed?


I don't even believe that has happened at all.

Then read this:
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070711005775&newsLang=en


Ah, OK that one I see. Basically what we have here is wanting to create
an excuse we can use to apply tariffs to cheap Chinese steel. They don't
give
a rip about the environment, they just want a way to block free trade.

Ted


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