Michael Moore December 30th, 2011
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/75-years-ago-today-first-occupy
On this day, December 30th, in 1936 -- 75 years ago today -- hundreds of workers at the General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, took over the facilities and occupied them for 44 days. My uncle was one of them.
The workers couldn't take the abuse from the corporation any longer. Their working conditions, the slave wages, no vacation, no health care, no overtime -- it was do as you're told or get tossed onto the curb.
So on the day before New Year's Eve, emboldened by the recent re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, they sat down on the job and refused to leave.
They began their Occupation in the dead of winter. GM cut off the heat and water to the buildings. The police tried to raid the factories several times, to no avail. Even the National Guard was called in.
But the workers held their ground, and after 44 days, the corporation gave in and recognized the UAW as the representative of the workers. It was a monumental historical moment as no other major company had ever been brought to its knees by their employees. Workers were given a raise to a dollar an hour -- and successful strikes and occupations spread like wildfire across the country. Finally, the working class would be able to do things like own their own homes, send their children to college, have time off and see a doctor without having to worry about paying. In Flint, Michigan, on this day in 1936, the middle class was born.
But 75 years later, the owners and elites have regained all power and control. I can think of no better way for us to honor the original Occupiers than by all of us participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement in whatever form that takes in each of our towns. We need direct action all winter long if we are to prevail. You can start your own Occupy group in your neighborhood or school or with just your friends. Speak out against economic injustice at every chance you get. Stop the bank from evicting the family down the block. Move your checking and credit card to a community bank or credit union. Place a sign in your yard -- and get your neighbors to do it also -- that says, "WE ARE THE 99%." (You can download signs here and here.)
Do something, anything, but don't remain silent. Not now. This is the moment. It won't come again.
75 years ago today, in Flint, Michigan, the people said they'd had enough and occupied the factories until they won. What is stopping us now? The rich have one plan: bleed everyone dry. Can anyone, in good conscience, be a bystander to this?
My uncle wasn't, and because of what he and others did, I got to grow up without having to worry about a roof over my head or medical bills or a decent life. And all that was provided by my dad who built spark plugs on a GM assembly line.
Let's each of us double our efforts to raise a ruckus, Occupy Everywhere, and get creative as we throw a major nonviolent wrench into this system of Greed. Let's make the politicians running for office in 2012 quake in their boots if they refuse to tax the rich, regulate Wall Street and do whatever we the people tell them to do.
Happy 75th!
Showing posts with label General Motors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label General Motors. Show all posts
Friday, January 6, 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa was buried in cement at General Motors' HQ
Book claims Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa was buried in cement at General Motors' HQ
Has one of America's most enduring mysteries been solved?
Lydia Warren
26th December 2011
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2078470/Teamsters-boss-Jimmy-Hoffa-buried-cement-General-Motors-HQ.html
The disappearance of Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa remains one of America's most enduring mysteries.
But now, nearly four decades after Hoffa vanished, his driver has claimed he knows where he is buried – and how he got there.
Resting place? Informant Marvin Elkind claims a mob boss insinuated Hoffa was buried at the Renaissance Center in Detroit, Michigan - now General Motors' HQ
‘It was his own people who did it,’ Mr Elkind said in excerpts of a new book published in the New York Post, adding Mafia member Tony Jack insinuated he was responsible.
The startling claim comes 36 years after Hoffa, who led the labour union for 13 years, vanished while on his way to meet two mobsters he knew well, Anthony Provenzano and Tony Jack – real name Anthony Giacalone.
The Renaissance Center was under construction when he disappeared.
Mr Elkind explains how, during a Teamsters conference in 1985, he was among a group of men walking from the city’s Omni International when the Center came into view.
Tony Jack nodded toward the tower’s base and said, ‘Say good morning to Jimmy Hoffa, boys’, Mr Elkind alleges in The Weasel: A Double Life in the Mob by Adrian Humphreys.
He also describes the rush to build the Renaissance Center following the disappearance of Hoffa – and claims the body was buried in wet cement.
‘There was a mad rush to get the concrete poured,’ the New York Post quotes the book as saying.
Hoffa was declared legally dead July 30, 1982, when he would have been 69.
He was a union stalwart, serving as its General President from 1958 to 1971 and playing a key part in its growth and development.
During his term as its leader, membership surged to more than 1.5 million members, becoming the largest single union in the country.
As well as a role as Jimmy Hoffa's driver, Mr Elkind had careers as a loan collector, a boxer - and a police informant.
He was working as a busboy in a Toronto restaurant frequented by Jimmy Hoffa's crew when he was poached as a driver.
Mr Elkind initially said he didn't want the job, but he was told: 'Nobody's asking you.'
He began testifying against the mob when police discovered he'd worked with a con man. They gave him an ultimatum - tell or be charged.
The book, by Canadian reporter Adrian Humphreys, follows his life.
It takes its title from Mr Elkind's nickname, The Weasel, which he claims was his boxing moniker - rather than to do with his snitching.
Has one of America's most enduring mysteries been solved?
Lydia Warren
26th December 2011
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2078470/Teamsters-boss-Jimmy-Hoffa-buried-cement-General-Motors-HQ.html
The disappearance of Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa remains one of America's most enduring mysteries.
But now, nearly four decades after Hoffa vanished, his driver has claimed he knows where he is buried – and how he got there.
Resting place? Informant Marvin Elkind claims a mob boss insinuated Hoffa was buried at the Renaissance Center in Detroit, Michigan - now General Motors' HQ
‘It was his own people who did it,’ Mr Elkind said in excerpts of a new book published in the New York Post, adding Mafia member Tony Jack insinuated he was responsible.
The startling claim comes 36 years after Hoffa, who led the labour union for 13 years, vanished while on his way to meet two mobsters he knew well, Anthony Provenzano and Tony Jack – real name Anthony Giacalone.
The Renaissance Center was under construction when he disappeared.
Mr Elkind explains how, during a Teamsters conference in 1985, he was among a group of men walking from the city’s Omni International when the Center came into view.
Tony Jack nodded toward the tower’s base and said, ‘Say good morning to Jimmy Hoffa, boys’, Mr Elkind alleges in The Weasel: A Double Life in the Mob by Adrian Humphreys.
He also describes the rush to build the Renaissance Center following the disappearance of Hoffa – and claims the body was buried in wet cement.
‘There was a mad rush to get the concrete poured,’ the New York Post quotes the book as saying.
Hoffa was declared legally dead July 30, 1982, when he would have been 69.
He was a union stalwart, serving as its General President from 1958 to 1971 and playing a key part in its growth and development.
During his term as its leader, membership surged to more than 1.5 million members, becoming the largest single union in the country.
As well as a role as Jimmy Hoffa's driver, Mr Elkind had careers as a loan collector, a boxer - and a police informant.
He was working as a busboy in a Toronto restaurant frequented by Jimmy Hoffa's crew when he was poached as a driver.
Mr Elkind initially said he didn't want the job, but he was told: 'Nobody's asking you.'
He began testifying against the mob when police discovered he'd worked with a con man. They gave him an ultimatum - tell or be charged.
The book, by Canadian reporter Adrian Humphreys, follows his life.
It takes its title from Mr Elkind's nickname, The Weasel, which he claims was his boxing moniker - rather than to do with his snitching.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Detroit Rock City Population Drops Like Rock
How bad has the economic downturn hurt Detroit? Almost as bad as Hurricane Katrina has damaged New Orleans.
The city's population fell to 713,777 in 2010, down from 951,270 in 2000, a drop of 25 percent. In contrast, NOLA fell by 29 percent, though it only had half the population.
Flint, another Michigan city tied to the auto industry and the birthplace of General Motors, lost 18 percent of its population. All told, Michigan lost 0.6 percent of its population during the decade, making it the only state to have a population decline during the zeroes.
Census: Detroit's population plummets 25 percent
3/22/2011
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42220834
The city's population fell to 713,777 in 2010, down from 951,270 in 2000, a drop of 25 percent. In contrast, NOLA fell by 29 percent, though it only had half the population.
Flint, another Michigan city tied to the auto industry and the birthplace of General Motors, lost 18 percent of its population. All told, Michigan lost 0.6 percent of its population during the decade, making it the only state to have a population decline during the zeroes.
Census: Detroit's population plummets 25 percent
3/22/2011
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42220834
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Chevy Volt Review
From Salon.com:
An hour's drive north of Warren, in Flint, is an abandoned GM auto plant called Buick City. In the 1970s, Buick City employed 28,000 autoworkers. Today, it's America's biggest brownfield, anchoring a neighborhood that also features a boarded-up tavern, a defunct United Auto Workers hall and an out-of-business party store. The land around Buick City is so worthless that a patriotic couple bought several corner lots, for $200 apiece, and built a memorial to American soldiers killed on 9/11.
Buick City and so many other factories are industrial waste sites because General Motors hasn't had an original idea since it put a V-8 engine in the Oldsmobile. In the 1970s, when the Arab Oil Embargo began a small-car craze, Honda was already building the Civic. Toyota was building the Corolla. GM responded with -- the Chevette. Named one of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time by Time magazine, the Chevette turned an entire generation of Americans onto Japanese cars. It was the first car I ever owned. My mechanic diagnosed the hole under the pedals as "Chevette Floor Cancer." He pounded a sheet of tin over the opening, but my shoes still got wet whenever I drove through a puddle.
And then, in the 2000s, there was GM Chairman Robert Lutz's reaction to the Prius: "Hybrids are an interesting curiosity and we will do some, but do they make sense at $1.50 a gallon? No, they do not." They do make sense at $4 a gallon, but Toyota dominates the market now.
That's why I was so excited about the Volt. Like any Michigander who grew up seeing "Assholes Buy Jap Cars" spray-painted on overpasses, I've been conditioned to root for the home team. Now, for once in my life, stodgy old Papa Jimmy was going to be first at something. As Toyota was the hybrid company, Chevy would be the electric company.
"I want that brand right here on top of my forehead," Farah said, pointing at the space above his safety glasses.
Farah worked on GM's first, failed attempt: the EV1, subject of the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Its problem: the battery weighed 1,200 pounds. To wring 40 miles out of a single charge, the EV1 was a two-seater, with no trunk.
"You had to build the car around the battery," he said.
The lithium-ion battery pack weighs a third of that. The Volt is an "extended-range" vehicle. Once the charge runs down, a gasoline engine takes over. But it doesn't power a drive train, as on a traditional vehicle. It powers the electrical system that runs the car.
The energy required to drive 40 miles on battery power is equivalent to "well under a gallon" of gasoline, Farah told me, because running an electrical system is 50 percent more efficient than running a drive train. Fueling the Volt costs 2 cents a mile. At $4 a gallon, a gasoline-powered car costs 13 cents a mile.
On electric power, the Volt emits no exhaust. Drawing electricity from a coal-powered grid may produce more greenhouse gases than a gasoline-powered car. But coal produces only half America's energy, and that percentage is declining as utilities switch to cleaner fuels. The Volt can draw power "from the wind, from the sun," Farah said. "You don't have to burn fossil fuels." As a plug-in hybrid, the Volt would be a compromise between the Prius, which has a 4-cylinder gasoline engine, and the all-electric Nissan Leaf.
The Volt is finally out this year. It was named 2011 Motor Trend Car of the Year. When I heard that the Volt rides were the No. 1 attraction at last month's Chicago Auto Show, I was more excited than the moment I first laid eyes on the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point. I'd been waiting years to sit inside the salvation of the American auto industry.
When I got to the Auto Show, little pod-shaped cars were circling a go-kart-sized track, landscaped with real grass and real shrubs. The foliage would die indoors, but from lack of sunlight, not air pollution. When a Volt finally stopped, I climbed into the passenger seat. My first reaction?
"Wow, this is even more cramped than my old Dodge Neon." The engine was silent, but I couldn't tell whether that was because we were only going five miles an hour.
"How much is this going to cost?" I asked the driver.
"They start at $41,000," he said, "although there is a $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric car."
I looked at the back seat. Two American-sized people could squeeze in there. The driver tried to focus my attention on a computer screen displaying the remaining charge.
"Are they ever going to make a bigger version?" I asked.
"There's going to be a family-sized SUV, eventually."
Eventually. I stepped outside and watched the silent rodeo of cars. The Volt is a $20,000 car, for twice the money. Even if I could afford to replace my Ford Focus hatchback with a Volt, I wouldn't do it. It's too small for my cross-country skis and my camping equipment.
Then I got an e-mail from a retired Chevy dealer named Chuck Frank. He forwarded me an article from Automotive & Assembly Practice, which predicted that "plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and battery-only electric vehicles could account for 16 percent of overall new-car sales in New York, 9 percent in Paris and 5 percent in Shanghai by 2015."
"Are you buying a Volt?" I e-mailed back.
"I have one on order and a Leaf as well," he wrote. "I drove one recently and liked it."
Frank is the Volt's target customer: a well-to-do environmentalist. As a boy, Frank wanted to be a forest ranger. Instead, he inherited the world's largest Chevrolet dealership from his father. But Frank's love of the outdoors and his wife's struggles with asthma led him to join the Sierra Club, and he became the group's inside connection to the auto industry. As a Chevy dealer, he could talk to executives who wouldn't take an environmentalist's phone calls. For years, Frank lobbied GM to build an electric car. In 2005, frustrated that he couldn't offer his customers an alternative to the Prius, he approached Chairman Rick Wagoner at a cocktail reception.
"Why isn't GM doing anything about a hybrid?" Frank inquired.
"Hybrids don't make sense to the public," Wagoner told him. "Economically, they don't make sense."
Three months later, GM announced plans for the Volt.
Frank doesn't care that the Volt is cramped and overpriced. He has bigger Chevys in his garage, and he sold enough Corvettes to understand that when it comes to choosing a car, practicality is less important than looking badass. Otherwise, everyone would be driving an Aveo...
General Motors just announced it earned $4.7 billion last year, its first profit since 2004. It's not because of the Volt, obviously, but the Volt is another sign that GM has finally learned to do business like a 21st century auto company. It's too late to save Flint, but the Volt is coming off the assembly line in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck.
Even though the Volt is a tiny, expensive toy, GM did the right thing by rushing it into showrooms before guys like me are ready to buy one. Eventually, lithium-ion batteries will be cheaper. Eventually, apartment buildings will install charging stations. Eventually, gas will cost $5 a gallon. When all that happens, a lot us will buy electric cars. I want to own a Volt someday. GM hopes that brand on its forehead is big enough to make you to want one of its electric cars, too.
Can an electric car save the American dream?
Edward McClellan
Saturday, Mar 12, 2011
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/03/12/chevy_volt_can_they_pull_it_off/index.html
An hour's drive north of Warren, in Flint, is an abandoned GM auto plant called Buick City. In the 1970s, Buick City employed 28,000 autoworkers. Today, it's America's biggest brownfield, anchoring a neighborhood that also features a boarded-up tavern, a defunct United Auto Workers hall and an out-of-business party store. The land around Buick City is so worthless that a patriotic couple bought several corner lots, for $200 apiece, and built a memorial to American soldiers killed on 9/11.
Buick City and so many other factories are industrial waste sites because General Motors hasn't had an original idea since it put a V-8 engine in the Oldsmobile. In the 1970s, when the Arab Oil Embargo began a small-car craze, Honda was already building the Civic. Toyota was building the Corolla. GM responded with -- the Chevette. Named one of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time by Time magazine, the Chevette turned an entire generation of Americans onto Japanese cars. It was the first car I ever owned. My mechanic diagnosed the hole under the pedals as "Chevette Floor Cancer." He pounded a sheet of tin over the opening, but my shoes still got wet whenever I drove through a puddle.
And then, in the 2000s, there was GM Chairman Robert Lutz's reaction to the Prius: "Hybrids are an interesting curiosity and we will do some, but do they make sense at $1.50 a gallon? No, they do not." They do make sense at $4 a gallon, but Toyota dominates the market now.
That's why I was so excited about the Volt. Like any Michigander who grew up seeing "Assholes Buy Jap Cars" spray-painted on overpasses, I've been conditioned to root for the home team. Now, for once in my life, stodgy old Papa Jimmy was going to be first at something. As Toyota was the hybrid company, Chevy would be the electric company.
"I want that brand right here on top of my forehead," Farah said, pointing at the space above his safety glasses.
Farah worked on GM's first, failed attempt: the EV1, subject of the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Its problem: the battery weighed 1,200 pounds. To wring 40 miles out of a single charge, the EV1 was a two-seater, with no trunk.
"You had to build the car around the battery," he said.
The lithium-ion battery pack weighs a third of that. The Volt is an "extended-range" vehicle. Once the charge runs down, a gasoline engine takes over. But it doesn't power a drive train, as on a traditional vehicle. It powers the electrical system that runs the car.
The energy required to drive 40 miles on battery power is equivalent to "well under a gallon" of gasoline, Farah told me, because running an electrical system is 50 percent more efficient than running a drive train. Fueling the Volt costs 2 cents a mile. At $4 a gallon, a gasoline-powered car costs 13 cents a mile.
On electric power, the Volt emits no exhaust. Drawing electricity from a coal-powered grid may produce more greenhouse gases than a gasoline-powered car. But coal produces only half America's energy, and that percentage is declining as utilities switch to cleaner fuels. The Volt can draw power "from the wind, from the sun," Farah said. "You don't have to burn fossil fuels." As a plug-in hybrid, the Volt would be a compromise between the Prius, which has a 4-cylinder gasoline engine, and the all-electric Nissan Leaf.
The Volt is finally out this year. It was named 2011 Motor Trend Car of the Year. When I heard that the Volt rides were the No. 1 attraction at last month's Chicago Auto Show, I was more excited than the moment I first laid eyes on the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point. I'd been waiting years to sit inside the salvation of the American auto industry.
When I got to the Auto Show, little pod-shaped cars were circling a go-kart-sized track, landscaped with real grass and real shrubs. The foliage would die indoors, but from lack of sunlight, not air pollution. When a Volt finally stopped, I climbed into the passenger seat. My first reaction?
"Wow, this is even more cramped than my old Dodge Neon." The engine was silent, but I couldn't tell whether that was because we were only going five miles an hour.
"How much is this going to cost?" I asked the driver.
"They start at $41,000," he said, "although there is a $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric car."
I looked at the back seat. Two American-sized people could squeeze in there. The driver tried to focus my attention on a computer screen displaying the remaining charge.
"Are they ever going to make a bigger version?" I asked.
"There's going to be a family-sized SUV, eventually."
Eventually. I stepped outside and watched the silent rodeo of cars. The Volt is a $20,000 car, for twice the money. Even if I could afford to replace my Ford Focus hatchback with a Volt, I wouldn't do it. It's too small for my cross-country skis and my camping equipment.
Then I got an e-mail from a retired Chevy dealer named Chuck Frank. He forwarded me an article from Automotive & Assembly Practice, which predicted that "plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and battery-only electric vehicles could account for 16 percent of overall new-car sales in New York, 9 percent in Paris and 5 percent in Shanghai by 2015."
"Are you buying a Volt?" I e-mailed back.
"I have one on order and a Leaf as well," he wrote. "I drove one recently and liked it."
Frank is the Volt's target customer: a well-to-do environmentalist. As a boy, Frank wanted to be a forest ranger. Instead, he inherited the world's largest Chevrolet dealership from his father. But Frank's love of the outdoors and his wife's struggles with asthma led him to join the Sierra Club, and he became the group's inside connection to the auto industry. As a Chevy dealer, he could talk to executives who wouldn't take an environmentalist's phone calls. For years, Frank lobbied GM to build an electric car. In 2005, frustrated that he couldn't offer his customers an alternative to the Prius, he approached Chairman Rick Wagoner at a cocktail reception.
"Why isn't GM doing anything about a hybrid?" Frank inquired.
"Hybrids don't make sense to the public," Wagoner told him. "Economically, they don't make sense."
Three months later, GM announced plans for the Volt.
Frank doesn't care that the Volt is cramped and overpriced. He has bigger Chevys in his garage, and he sold enough Corvettes to understand that when it comes to choosing a car, practicality is less important than looking badass. Otherwise, everyone would be driving an Aveo...
General Motors just announced it earned $4.7 billion last year, its first profit since 2004. It's not because of the Volt, obviously, but the Volt is another sign that GM has finally learned to do business like a 21st century auto company. It's too late to save Flint, but the Volt is coming off the assembly line in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck.
Even though the Volt is a tiny, expensive toy, GM did the right thing by rushing it into showrooms before guys like me are ready to buy one. Eventually, lithium-ion batteries will be cheaper. Eventually, apartment buildings will install charging stations. Eventually, gas will cost $5 a gallon. When all that happens, a lot us will buy electric cars. I want to own a Volt someday. GM hopes that brand on its forehead is big enough to make you to want one of its electric cars, too.
Can an electric car save the American dream?
Edward McClellan
Saturday, Mar 12, 2011
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/03/12/chevy_volt_can_they_pull_it_off/index.html
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
GM Meets Segway: The EN-V
"General Motors brought several of its EN-V 'electric networked vehicles' to CES. Built on Segway platforms, they're intended for efficient use in crowded urban centers... It may be cute, with cuddly Chinese names that translate to Pride, Magic and Laugh, but it's a very serious attempt by GM to deal with urban congestion, pollution and resource use... It should be able to travel up to 25 miles at 25 mph on a single charge. Christopher Borroni-Bird, its inventor, says that's plenty to cover the needs of most people in dense cities, who he said research shows rarely drive more than that each day."
CES: Automated two-wheeler aims to be the car of the future
M. Alex Johnson
1-7-11
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/07/5787276-ces-automated-two-wheeler-aims-to-be-the-car-of-the-future
Monday, October 11, 2010
Apple may surpass Exxon as most valuable company
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jVBkp_DhGmQ3dSOv71f7y5e0240QD9IKD31G0
Apple may surpass Exxon as most valuable company
DAVID K. RANDALL
10-3-10
NEW YORK — Here's something to think about the next time you pick up a call on your iPhone: the device you're holding may soon be the signature product of the most valuable company in the world.
Thanks to its line of gadgets that combine the ability to make calls, send email, read books, watch movies and listen to music, Apple Inc. is on a path to overtake Exxon Mobil Corp. as the largest company by market capitalization.
While Apple CEO Steve Jobs will no doubt be happy about his new perch atop the business world, there's more at stake here than mere bragging rights. As soon as the total value of the company's shares edges above Exxon's, Apple will take over the top spot in the Standard and Poor's 500, the market index used by most professional money managers.
That means that billions of dollars invested in funds that track the index will have to shift their holdings to reflect Apple's new weighting. Exxon, meanwhile, may see its share price fall from the same effect. That slide could be accelerated by hedge funds and technical traders who make bets based on the rebalancing of major indexes and would be primed to short the shares of Exxon.
Just as important as the day-to-day flow of dollars among investors, the move will also reflect how the market, and the overall economy, continues to evolve. The list of companies that have sat atop the S&P 500 is short. For years, the top spot rotated among stalwart industrials like General Electric Co., General Motors, and AT&T Inc., before that company was broken up as a result of an antitrust suit in 1984. Twenty years ago, IBM Corp. held the No. 1 position, narrowly beating out Exxon.
Apple's move to the top would be a strong signal that the market is no longer placing as high a value on industrial companies that depend on traditional manufacturing, business spending or natural resources for revenue. Instead, investors are now expecting growth to be driven by spending from average consumers on technology and entertainment.
If Apple becomes more valuable than Exxon, it will be only the second time that a growing technology company which doesn't pay dividends will make up the greatest share of the S&P 500. The first, Microsoft Corp., held the position for two years in the late 1990s during the boom that made personal computers a staple in households around the world.
Today, Apple dominates the business of putting the Internet in your pocket. That's quite a feat for a company that was worth only $7 dollars a share 10 years ago. It closed Friday at $282.52.
Apple still has some catching up to do before it takes the lead, of course. As of now, there is a $60 billion difference in the two companies' market capitalization. If the price of Exxon stays flat, Apple's stock will need to rise 12 percent to move ahead of the oil giant, according to Brian Marshall, an analyst at Gleacher & Company. Exxon doesn't seem likely to surge ahead in value anytime soon, according to research by Morgan Stanley analyst Evan Calio. Exxon "will likely lag in a continued recovery, particularly one driven by oil rather than gas," Calio recently wrote in a note to clients.
For most companies, a 12 percent jump in a year would be fantastic, let alone in a few months. But Apple has proven that it's not a normal company. In May, it leapfrogged ahead of Microsoft to take the No. 2 spot on the S&P 500 list. Gleacher's Marshall expects Apple to pull off a similar feat with Exxon not long after it reports its earnings on Oct. 18.
What sets Apple apart? For one thing, it's one of the few gigantic companies that is still growing like a startup. Its revenue is expected to jump 50 percent by the end of this year and an additional 20 percent next year, Marshall says. Much of that comes from its line of iPads and iPhones, which account for half of its revenue.
The fact that all of this growth comes in the midst of an economy that, until recently, was thought to be toeing the line of another recession is all the more impressive. While consumers have been putting off big-ticket items like new cars or homes and downsizing their vacations, they seem to have convinced themselves that they may as well buy devices to make all that time spent at home more exciting.
That helps Apple in another way, too. Because users of iPads and iPhones are tapped into Apple's iTunes store, where the company rents and sells movies and television shows, you could easily consider Apple a cable company as well. If you look at it that way, its base of 200 million customers makes it five times larger than Comcast Corp., the largest cable company in the United States.
Sales through iTunes now account for 8 percent of Apple's revenue, but will likely increase as the company gets a bigger share of the consumer's living room with its updated Apple TV device that streams entertainment to television sets. Any small increase in iTunes sales pumps up the company's bottom line, considering that it gets 30 cents for every dollar spent on a song or book purchased through its online store.
The company is also poised to expand its share of the global personal computer market, which accounts for 300 million units sold each year. "As people buy the iPad and get accustomed to it, it may become their primary PC device," said Toan Tran, an analyst at Morningstar.
For lay investors, Apple's move to the top of the S&P 500 won't bring drastic changes. Even though Apple doesn't pay a dividend like Exxon, its new positioning wouldn't affect the yield of the index, said Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst at Standard and Poor's.
And Apple shareholders will still have something to complain about: the approximately $50 billion in cash sitting on the company's balance sheet.
"Apple needs to do something with all of that capital," Tran said. "I could understand wanting to have something in reserve, but $50 billion is such a ridiculous number that they should seriously consider returning some of it to shareholders in the form of share buybacks."
Apple may surpass Exxon as most valuable company
DAVID K. RANDALL
10-3-10
NEW YORK — Here's something to think about the next time you pick up a call on your iPhone: the device you're holding may soon be the signature product of the most valuable company in the world.
Thanks to its line of gadgets that combine the ability to make calls, send email, read books, watch movies and listen to music, Apple Inc. is on a path to overtake Exxon Mobil Corp. as the largest company by market capitalization.
While Apple CEO Steve Jobs will no doubt be happy about his new perch atop the business world, there's more at stake here than mere bragging rights. As soon as the total value of the company's shares edges above Exxon's, Apple will take over the top spot in the Standard and Poor's 500, the market index used by most professional money managers.
That means that billions of dollars invested in funds that track the index will have to shift their holdings to reflect Apple's new weighting. Exxon, meanwhile, may see its share price fall from the same effect. That slide could be accelerated by hedge funds and technical traders who make bets based on the rebalancing of major indexes and would be primed to short the shares of Exxon.
Just as important as the day-to-day flow of dollars among investors, the move will also reflect how the market, and the overall economy, continues to evolve. The list of companies that have sat atop the S&P 500 is short. For years, the top spot rotated among stalwart industrials like General Electric Co., General Motors, and AT&T Inc., before that company was broken up as a result of an antitrust suit in 1984. Twenty years ago, IBM Corp. held the No. 1 position, narrowly beating out Exxon.
Apple's move to the top would be a strong signal that the market is no longer placing as high a value on industrial companies that depend on traditional manufacturing, business spending or natural resources for revenue. Instead, investors are now expecting growth to be driven by spending from average consumers on technology and entertainment.
If Apple becomes more valuable than Exxon, it will be only the second time that a growing technology company which doesn't pay dividends will make up the greatest share of the S&P 500. The first, Microsoft Corp., held the position for two years in the late 1990s during the boom that made personal computers a staple in households around the world.
Today, Apple dominates the business of putting the Internet in your pocket. That's quite a feat for a company that was worth only $7 dollars a share 10 years ago. It closed Friday at $282.52.
Apple still has some catching up to do before it takes the lead, of course. As of now, there is a $60 billion difference in the two companies' market capitalization. If the price of Exxon stays flat, Apple's stock will need to rise 12 percent to move ahead of the oil giant, according to Brian Marshall, an analyst at Gleacher & Company. Exxon doesn't seem likely to surge ahead in value anytime soon, according to research by Morgan Stanley analyst Evan Calio. Exxon "will likely lag in a continued recovery, particularly one driven by oil rather than gas," Calio recently wrote in a note to clients.
For most companies, a 12 percent jump in a year would be fantastic, let alone in a few months. But Apple has proven that it's not a normal company. In May, it leapfrogged ahead of Microsoft to take the No. 2 spot on the S&P 500 list. Gleacher's Marshall expects Apple to pull off a similar feat with Exxon not long after it reports its earnings on Oct. 18.
What sets Apple apart? For one thing, it's one of the few gigantic companies that is still growing like a startup. Its revenue is expected to jump 50 percent by the end of this year and an additional 20 percent next year, Marshall says. Much of that comes from its line of iPads and iPhones, which account for half of its revenue.
The fact that all of this growth comes in the midst of an economy that, until recently, was thought to be toeing the line of another recession is all the more impressive. While consumers have been putting off big-ticket items like new cars or homes and downsizing their vacations, they seem to have convinced themselves that they may as well buy devices to make all that time spent at home more exciting.
That helps Apple in another way, too. Because users of iPads and iPhones are tapped into Apple's iTunes store, where the company rents and sells movies and television shows, you could easily consider Apple a cable company as well. If you look at it that way, its base of 200 million customers makes it five times larger than Comcast Corp., the largest cable company in the United States.
Sales through iTunes now account for 8 percent of Apple's revenue, but will likely increase as the company gets a bigger share of the consumer's living room with its updated Apple TV device that streams entertainment to television sets. Any small increase in iTunes sales pumps up the company's bottom line, considering that it gets 30 cents for every dollar spent on a song or book purchased through its online store.
The company is also poised to expand its share of the global personal computer market, which accounts for 300 million units sold each year. "As people buy the iPad and get accustomed to it, it may become their primary PC device," said Toan Tran, an analyst at Morningstar.
For lay investors, Apple's move to the top of the S&P 500 won't bring drastic changes. Even though Apple doesn't pay a dividend like Exxon, its new positioning wouldn't affect the yield of the index, said Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst at Standard and Poor's.
And Apple shareholders will still have something to complain about: the approximately $50 billion in cash sitting on the company's balance sheet.
"Apple needs to do something with all of that capital," Tran said. "I could understand wanting to have something in reserve, but $50 billion is such a ridiculous number that they should seriously consider returning some of it to shareholders in the form of share buybacks."
Monday, October 12, 2009
GM Expected to Seal Hummer Sale
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703746604574462111444795076.html
OCTOBER 8, 2009
GM Expected to Seal Hummer Sale
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU
BEIJING – General Motors Co. is expected to seal a deal as early as Friday to sell its Hummer unit to China's Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. for $150 million, according to people close to the talks—a high-profile acquisition China's central government could still balk at because of Hummer's reputation for gas-guzzling excess.
Tengzhong Chief Executive Yang Yi has flown to Detroit, where Hummer has headquarters, this week and is likely to be on hand to announce the deal with GM, according to these people.
They said the deal would allow Tengzhong, based in the western Chinese city of Chengdu in Sichuan province, to take over the Hummer brand and acquire the technology to produce its products: two hulking SUVs called H2 and H3.
The people said Tengzhong-owned Hummer would remain a U.S.-headquartered brand with manufacturing capability, although there is a possibility a Hummer factory will be built in China down the road to make the brand, currently focused on North America, a more global brand. The people said Tengzhong would retain Hummer's current management, led by CEO Jim Taylor, and take over core members of the brand's engineering team.
Write to Norihiko Shirouzu at norihiko.shirouzu@wsj.com
OCTOBER 8, 2009
GM Expected to Seal Hummer Sale
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU
BEIJING – General Motors Co. is expected to seal a deal as early as Friday to sell its Hummer unit to China's Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. for $150 million, according to people close to the talks—a high-profile acquisition China's central government could still balk at because of Hummer's reputation for gas-guzzling excess.
Tengzhong Chief Executive Yang Yi has flown to Detroit, where Hummer has headquarters, this week and is likely to be on hand to announce the deal with GM, according to these people.
They said the deal would allow Tengzhong, based in the western Chinese city of Chengdu in Sichuan province, to take over the Hummer brand and acquire the technology to produce its products: two hulking SUVs called H2 and H3.
The people said Tengzhong-owned Hummer would remain a U.S.-headquartered brand with manufacturing capability, although there is a possibility a Hummer factory will be built in China down the road to make the brand, currently focused on North America, a more global brand. The people said Tengzhong would retain Hummer's current management, led by CEO Jim Taylor, and take over core members of the brand's engineering team.
Write to Norihiko Shirouzu at norihiko.shirouzu@wsj.com
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Greed Is Good? He Begs to Differ
http://nytimes.com/2009/09/23/movies/23capitalism.htmlGreed Is Good? He Begs to Differ
Michael Moore gets a less-than-warm welcome when he visits General Motors headquarters in “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
By MANOHLA DARGIS
September 23, 2009
Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” is anything but — something you, I and everyone who has ever watched him shamble into action, megaphone to mouth, know from the start. He might have had a crush on capitalism early on, yet anyone who thinks that the two have been on friendly terms for a while hasn’t been paying attention. After years of needling big business in movies like “Roger & Me” (about the auto industry) and “Sicko” (health insurance), and giving voice to the disempowered, he has finally decided to go after the system that, in his words, is dedicated to “taking and giving, mostly taking.”
His timing couldn’t be better, as the headlines and innumerable journalists, politicians, bloggers, tea partiers, talk-show bloviators and millions of unemployed, underemployed, fed-up and freaked-out citizens are making clear. It’s the morning after in America (where one of the big movie hits of the year is titled “The Hangover”), and Captain Mike is here to explain it all or at least crack jokes, milk tears, recycle the news and fan the flames of liberal indignation. Along the way, because his heart is in the right place even if his images aren’t always, he also makes room for other voices, including those of striking workers and members of one family in foreclosure who videotaped the police breaking down the door to evict them.
Nothing if not direct, Mr. Moore cuts right to the point or rather the queasy joke, opening the movie with surveillance shots of citizens partaking of a favorite pastime: robbing banks. He then introduces some wittily culled clips from a movie titled “Life in Ancient Rome,” which looks and sounds like one of those educational flicks you tried to sleep through in school and which he juxtaposes with more recent totems of American power, including the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center draped in the Stars and Stripes. (The New York premiere of the movie on Monday was at Alice Tully Hall, the main site for the New York Film Festival. Mr. Moore isn’t in this year’s lineup, but still grabbed some of its spotlight.)
America, in other words, is headed straight down the historical toilet, along with Nero and his fiddle (or rather Dick Cheney, who’s anointed with a throwaway reference to the “emperor”), a thesis that Mr. Moore continues to advance if not refine with another hour and a half or so of alternatingly entertaining and distracting found footage; some stirring archival images of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; snippets from charming home movies; and assorted weeping, gloating, pontificating and sensible talking heads. Some of those heads are baffling (the actor and author Wallace Shawn, enlisted to explain free enterprise); some of them are sharp, welcome, bracing, provoking, mostly when they’re able to talk without too much interference from the comically mugging, slack-jawed Mr. Moore.
Despite the waggish invocation of ancient Rome, the story in “Capitalism” more truly begins where and when its director did, in Flint, Mich., after the end of World War II. In broad strokes Mr. Moore, who was born in 1954, positions himself as an Everyman whose family reaped all the usual rewards of postwar middle-class prosperity. This collective dream begins to disintegrate rather fuzzily (cue the Vietnam War), coming to a bummer climax in the 1970s (cue an unsmiling Jimmy Carter in a cardigan) and culminating in the ascension of the Smiler in Chief, Ronald Reagan, whom Mr. Moore introduces as a “spokesmodel for president.” Tax cuts, union busting and household debt ensue, as does some protest, notably in the form of “Roger & Me,” Mr. Moore’s first movie.
Mr. Moore doesn’t just refer to “Roger & Me,” which involved his attempts to speak with Roger Smith, the chief executive of the floundering General Motors; he also includes some nominal highlights from that 1989 movie. A lot of performers like to replay their early hits, so it isn’t surprising that Mr. Moore, a practiced showman, recycles images of his younger, slimmer self engaging in one of his trademark moves: trying to enter a building to speak truth to power, only to be turned away by security guards. It was faintly amusing theater then, especially if you didn’t think too hard about the fact that he was hassling working people just trying to do their jobs. It’s less amusing when he repeats the same routine in “Capitalism.”
He’s on far firmer ethical ground when he doesn’t use other human beings as props. Some of the more effective scenes in “Capitalism” involve his straightforward, journalistic interviews with people who have been abused by the greed of their employers. In one segment he visits with a widower whose wife was unknowingly insured by her company — a sleazy practice colloquially known as dead peasant insurance — which earned it a chunk of change when the woman died. (Even after death, your boss can exploit you.) Like many of the stories Mr. Moore pulls together in this movie, dead peasant insurance might not be a revelation to those who follow the news, but it makes for infuriating viewing.
In the end, what is to be done? After watching “Capitalism,” it beats me. Mr. Moore doesn’t have any real answers, either, which tends to be true of most socially minded directors in the commercial mainstream and speaks more to the limits of such filmmaking than to anything else. Like most of his movies, “Capitalism” is a tragedy disguised as a comedy; it’s also an entertainment. This isn’t the story of capitalism as conceived by Karl Marx or Naomi Klein, and it certainly isn’t the story of contemporary American capitalism, which extends across the globe and far beyond Mr. Moore’s sightlines.
Neither is it an effective call to action: Mr. Moore would like us to vote, which suggests a startling faith in the possibilities of social change in the current political system. That faith appears to be due in some part to the election of President Obama.
As it happens, the most galvanizing words in the movie come not from the current president but from Roosevelt, who in 1944 called for a “second bill of rights,” asserting that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” The image of this visibly frail president, who died the next year, appealing to our collective conscience — and mapping out an American future that remains elusive — is moving beyond words. And chilling: “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” It’s a brilliant moment of cinema both for the man delivering the speech and for Mr. Moore, who smartly realized that he’d found one other voice that needed to be as loud as his own.
“Capitalism: A Love Story” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Strong language.
CAPITALISM
A Love Story
Opens on Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by Michael Moore; directors of photography, Daniel Marracino and Jayme Roy; edited by John Walter and Conor O’Neill; music by Jeff Gibbs; produced by Mr. Moore and Anne Moore; released by Overture Films. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes.
Michael Moore: Capitalism has proven it's failed
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/24/lkl.michael.mooreMichael Moore: Capitalism has proven it's failed
Story Highlights
Filmmaker Michael Moore takes on capitalism in his latest documentary
Moore says Wall Street took our money and made bets with it
Moore: Richest 1 percent in America are wealthier than bottom 95 percent combined
September 24, 2009
(CNN) -- It has been 20 years since filmmaker Michael Moore took on General Motors in "Roger and Me." He's still sticking it to big business for what he sees as the deliberate shafting of the little guy.
Filmmaker Michael Moore says Wall Street created a "invisible virtual casino" with people's money.
His new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," opened Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles, California, and opens nationwide next week.
Moore talked with CNN's Larry King about whether capitalism is key to the American dream or the cause of an American nightmare. The following is an edited version of the interview.
Larry King: You describe this movie as the culmination of all the films you've made. Does that mean this is it?
Michael Moore: No. I hope not. It means that, for 20 years, as you said, I've been doing this. I started out by showing people what General Motors was up to and how this was a company that was making a lot of bad decisions and it wasn't good for the company nor for the country. That was 20 years ago.
And since then, I've covered a number of issues and different things. But it all seems to come back to this one issue of "follow the money."
Who's got the money? And whoever has the money has the power. And right now, in America, tonight, Larry, the richest 1 percent have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.
King: You're in that 1 percent, though?
Moore: I don't think I'm in that 1 percent, but I make documentary films. But I mean, obviously, I do well because my films have done well. But, you know, even if I were, I think it's my responsibility -- my moral duty that if I've done well, that I have to make sure that everybody else.
King: Does well too or has a chance?
Moore: Well, has at least a chance but that -- and that the pie is divided fairly amongst the people and not just a few people get the majority of the loot and everybody else has to struggle for the crumbs.
King: Are you saying capitalism is a failure?
Moore: Yes. Capitalism. Yes. Well, I don't have to say it. Capitalism, in the last year, has proven that it's failed. All the basic tenets of what we've talked about the free market, about free enterprise and competition just completely fell apart. As soon as they lost, essentially, our money, they came running to the federal government for a bailout -- for welfare, for socialism. And I thought the basic principle of capitalism was that it's a sink-or-swim situation. And those who do well, the cream rises to the top and, you know, those who invest their money wrongly or, you know, don't run their business the right way, then they don't do well. Watch Moore talk about corporate greed
And if you run your business the wrong way, where does it say that you or I or anybody watching this has to bail them out?
I understand why everybody seemed to get behind it, because a lot of people were afraid, because these people down on Wall Street had taken our money and made bets with it. I mean, they essentially created this invisible virtual casino with people's money -- people's pension funds, people's 401(k)s. They took this money and they made bets. And then they made bets on the bets. And then they took out insurance policies on the bets. And then they took out insurance against the insurance -- the credit default swaps.
King: You started filming before Lehman Brothers went belly up.
Moore: Yes.
King: The stock market tanked. Now, how did the events, as it occurred, affect the movie? Did it change gears?
Moore: It didn't change in terms of what I was looking at, but it did, obviously, offer probably the best example of why this is a system that is really corrupt at its core -- corrupt because it doesn't, it isn't run with democratic -- small "d" -- democratic principles. There's no democracy in our economy. You and I and the people watching have no say in how this economy is run. The upper 1 percent, the people down on Wall Street, the corporate executives, they're the people that control this economy.
King: And they don't want to see the economy do well? They don't want to see people...
Moore: Oh, they sure do.
King: Don't they want people to make money so they can buy the products? I mean it's silly if they want people unemployed?
Moore: Oddly enough, yes.
King: Why?
Moore: I'll tell you why. Because your employees are your biggest expense. And, as you've noticed in the last few months, as the unemployment rate has gone up, so has the Dow Jones. Now, you'd think, you know, that Wall Street would respond with "Oh, my God, unemployment is going up, you know, this is bad for business." But the reality is, is that Wall Street likes that. They like it when companies fire people because immediately the bottom line is going to show a larger profit.
King: Are you saying the investor is more important than the employee?
Moore: Yes. The investor -- and the investor, these days, they want the short-term, quick profit and they want it now. But in the long-term, here's what happened. When I was on this show 20 years ago, 20 years ago this week, I was here with "Roger and Me".
King: I remember.
Moore: And General Motors, that year, made a profit of $4 billion. And yet they had just laid off another 30,000 people. Now, why would you lay people off when you're making a record profit of $4 billion?
I mean that was totally insane. But they thought, well, you know, we can make a bigger profit. Maybe we can make $4.2 billion if we move those jobs to Mexico. And so they're always, you know, we can make a little bit more money if we do this. By firing those workers, Larry, they got rid of the very people who buy their cars.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Michael Moore: 'Capitalism is anti-Jesus'
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/22/news/economy/michael_moore_capitalism_love.fortune/
Michael Moore: 'Capitalism is anti-Jesus'In a Fortune interview, the flame-throwing director explains why his new film brings his religion into the picture for the first time.
By Scott Cendrowski, reporter
September 23, 2009
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- The title of Michael Moore's latest film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," may be ironic, but there's nothing subtle about the message, right from the opening scenes.
The two-hour documentary begins with footage of a family being evicted from their foreclosed home by a half dozen police officers. Then he presents more incriminating evidence: a bankrupt Chicago factory where workers are denied pay, a privately run juvenile prison that paid off judges to give convicts longer sentences, and last year's $700 billion bailout of the banking system.
Moore, 55, ends with this conclusion: "Capitalism is an evil and you can't regulate evil. You have to replace it with something that is good for everyone."
The writer-director-partisan, who rose to prominence after his 1989 takedown of GM in the documentary "Roger & Me" and his mainstream hit "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004, spoke with Fortune on the eve of his film's Wednesday opening in New York City and Los Angeles (it opens nationwide on Oct. 2).
Moore talked about how his Catholic upbringing influenced the film, why Corporate America still irks him, and how to fix his economically troubled home state of Michigan. Excerpts:
You've said you started filming "Capitalism: A Love story" a year and a half ago. Did the film change after Lehman went bankrupt and the stock market crashed?
I've thought about this for 20 years. Ever since "Roger and Me," I've felt the problem here is an economic system that is unjust and unfair. It's not democratic. And I keep making these films but I dance around the subject: it's General Motors here, the health-care industry there, and I started thinking, "Why don't I just name it?"
I started out wanting to explore the premise of capitalism being anti-American, and anti-Jesus, meaning it's not a Democratic economy. And it's not run with a moral or ethical code. But when the crash happened, it added a third plot line: not only is capitalism anti-American and anti-Jesus, it doesn't work.
[The wealthiest Americans] proved that the free market is something they really don't believe in, they don't believe in competition, they actually do believe in socialism, that we the people should use our tax dollars to keep them in their mansions and their yachts.
I think they exposed themselves to a lot of middle class people who did believe in their system and they showed everybody the Ponzi scheme that it is. It's set up like a pyramid, so that the richest 1% at the top have more financial wealth than the 95% beneath them.
But the trick here is to get the 95% believing that if they work hard and slave away, they would get to the top of the pyramid. Of course, as we know, only a few people can stand on top of a pyramid. The fact that this crash exposed our economic system as a corrupt scam was something I didn't intend on happening while I was making the movie.
How is this film different from your previous ones?
I talk about my religion, which I have never talked about. I think religion should be a private matter. But I thought it was important to this discussion. I'm not a proselytizer, but I do have very strong beliefs and these beliefs were formed not in the school of Karl Marx, but in the Catholic Church. Priests and nuns taught me these lessons of how we're to treat each other, how we're to treat the poor, and how we're to divide up the pie.
I'm one of the few people on the left who's been fortunate to have access to a mainstream audience. I'm always thinking about ways to communicate with them and stay true to myself, because I am them, and I come from Middle America. I have very conservative values that go contrary to the fictional character that's been created of me by Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and the Fox News Channel. I've been with the same woman for 30 years, I don't invest my money in anything but a savings account.
Has your view of corporate America changed since your first film, "Roger & Me," opened in 1989?
I've become all the more agitated, especially with what I've seen and with having a peak behind the curtain. Having the life I do, working in an industry that's owned by major corporations. [Moore's film is distributed by a unit of Liberty Media, whose CEO John Malone is a formidable capitalist.]
Just a couple weeks ago, the film was going to debut in the Toronto Film Festival in the Elgin Theatre. Visa sponsors the theater, so during the festival it's called the Visa Screening Room. So they had [the film studio] call me to ask, Is there any reference against Visa in the movie? And this is while they're still deciding whether to put the movie in the festival.
Are there any good things happening in American business?
I see very little support for the things we really need to be investing in. Where's the cure for cancer? Where's the bullet train to take us from New York to L.A. in 10 hours? Where are the alternative energy systems to save us when we run out of oil?
I wish these were the priorities. But when Wall Street sucks up our best mathematicians, physicists, engineers, when they should be working on these other things and instead they're working to create derivatives ... c'mon. We're in deep, deep trouble. We need the best minds working on these things.
You live in Michigan, where you were born and raised. How can Detroit be saved?
It revolves around good-paying jobs. We've allowed the middle class to be decimated over the last 30 years. We've allowed our industrial infrastructure to collapse. So instead of initially giving bailout money to a General Motors that was never going to change or to banks so they can cover losses from crazy betting schemes, this money should be going to helping to create jobs in places like Detroit. People need to work. There are so many things we need to build and create for the 21st century.
I would do what my friend Dan Kildee is doing in Flint, Michigan. He's the county treasurer and he's taken over 9,000 homes that have been abandoned. He's tearing them down and his idea essentially shrank the city in physical size. They restored neighborhoods by building parks, fields and woods.
For crime in Detroit: what is the chance, if the person down the street is making $50,000 to $60,000 a year, [that he would] break into your home to steal your TV?
You tried to get Hank Paulson on the phone in the film, but weren't successful. If you got him on the phone today, what would you ask?
If I had a chance to talk to him, I'd want him to come clean and tell me the truth about how he rigged this whole thing. Tell us what happened because we don't know the details. How did so many Goldman people end up in the administration? How is it that Goldman's chief competitors are left to die -- not bailing out Lehman Bros., Bear Stearns falls apart, Merrill Lynch is absorbed into Bank of America -- and look who's left standing: the company that's got all their boys inside the administration.
If capitalism is evil, what's the solution?
Some people say to me, democracy is not an economic system, it's a political system. My answer to that is, you think capitalism has nothing to do with politics?
Let's quit talking like we're back in Economics 101. Capitalism is not only an economic system that legalizes greed, it also has at its foundation a political system of capitalism that is, "We have to buy the political system because we don't have enough votes. We're only 1% of the votes. We have to buy the people, and we have to buy the people by convincing them if they work hard, they too can be rich one day." [Americans] have gone along with it for the last 30 years.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Q&A: Michael Moore
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/features/interviews_profiles/e3i85f38c299a3a459a9f350da8eb4a3674
Q&A: Michael Moore
By Matthew Belloni
Aug 18, 2009
Since bursting onto the documentary scene 20 years ago with "Roger & Me," a blistering critique of General Motors, Michael Moore has directed the highest-grossing documentary of all time (2004's "Fahrenheit 9/11") and become a professional populist provocateur. The Flint, Mich., native is now busy finishing "Capitalism: A Love Story," his take on the U.S. financial crisis, which will premiere next month at the Venice and Toronto film festivals ahead of its wide release Oct. 2.
The Hollywood Reporter: Your new film was announced in May 2008 as a follow-up to "Fahrenheit 9/11" that would look at America's role in the world. Then the economy tanked. Do you feel pressure to make movies that respond to the zeitgeist?
Michael Moore: That was our cover. From the spring of '08, we were always doing a film about capitalism and corporate America. But, as you've seen from the recent revelations about the health insurance industry's secret campaign to attack my last film (2007's "Sicko"), I have to be extremely dodgy in order to outsmart these corporate guys. I had no way of knowing in May of 2008 that the economy would crash four months later. We were right in the middle of this Wall Street movie when it happened.
THR: The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that in tough economic times, moviegoers want an escape. Is there a big audience for a film that looks at the financial crisis?
Moore: I have no doubts that people will want to come to a movie that goes after, with humor and reckless abandon, those bastards who've made their lives miserable. They deserve a night out at the movies where the movie is on their side.
THR: Given your history with "Roger & Me," what was your reaction to the initial bailout of GM, its subsequent bankruptcy and the firing of CEO Rick Wagoner?
Moore: All my films, in one way or another, speak to my experience of growing up in the hometown of General Motors. As for GM's demise, I tried to warn people about that some 20 years ago. Nothing made me happier than seeing President Obama fire the head of GM. It was every Flint boy's dream come true. They arrogantly kept making lousy cars that few people wanted to drive. They fought every safety measure from mandatory turn signals to controls that would protect the melting of our polar ice caps. They fired tens of thousands of people over the years for the short-term benefit of making their balance sheet appear to be in profit. That was a fraud of major proportions, and to date, no one has yet to go to prison.
THR: You supported President Obama in the election. How do you grade his response to the financial crisis and the health care issue? How about congressional Democrats?
Moore: I'm still in a stupor of stunned ecstasy that Obama won. And I approve of most everything he's done, from apologizing to the Iranians for America overthrowing their democratically elected president in 1953 to appointing Kumar (actor Kal Penn of the "Harold and Kumar" movies) to a White House position. He is doing the best he can with the mess he inherited, and I and millions of others are counting on him never to forget that he came from the working class and that his people need him now more than ever. As for the congressional Democrats, what a bunch of losers -- weak, scared, stupid. They had better get a clue pretty quick or the Dark Forces will return.
THR: Bill Maher recently said that "America is stupid" and "too dumb to be governed." Do you agree?
Moore: Eight years ago I wrote a book called "Stupid White Men." In that book, I wrote a chapter entitled "Idiot Nation." I think that says it all. Sad, sad, sad.
THR: Have you ever considered leaving the U.S.?
Moore: Thank you for asking! I had never considered this idea until you mentioned it, and now that you have, it doesn't sound like such a bad idea! I guess if I were going to live outside the U.S., I would live in Texas.
THR: What's the No. 1 thing you want to teach your kids?
Moore: Never trust anyone from Texas.
THR: In your opinion, what's the single worst legacy of George W. Bush?
Moore: That he has yet to be arrested for committing the worst crime the leader of a nation can commit: lie to the people and convince them to invade another country and kill its people with absolutely no provocation. There are 8,662 parents who might better answer this question.
THR: Your films are big boxoffice draws, and you won an Oscar for 2002's "Bowling for Columbine," but you've always been considered an outsider to the entertainment community. Do you like Hollywood?
Moore: Yes. I've met only very nice people out here, and if I wouldn't miss the 20-below winters, I'd live here for sure.
THR: What's the last movie you saw? The last book you read?
Moore: A Norwegian film called "Troubled Water." Best drama I've seen this year. The last book was "The Coming Insurrection" (a French leftist call-to-arms manifesto that has been labeled a "manual for terrorism" by the French government). I'm also reading the daily newspaper religiously, considering how there won't be any to read a year from now.
THR: There were reports you were feuding with Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who executive produced "Fahrenheit," "Sicko" and "Capitalism." Will you work with them again?
Moore: In 20 years of knowing the brothers, I have had only one fight with them, and that was over who would get the last cannoli.
Q&A: Michael Moore
By Matthew Belloni
Aug 18, 2009
Since bursting onto the documentary scene 20 years ago with "Roger & Me," a blistering critique of General Motors, Michael Moore has directed the highest-grossing documentary of all time (2004's "Fahrenheit 9/11") and become a professional populist provocateur. The Flint, Mich., native is now busy finishing "Capitalism: A Love Story," his take on the U.S. financial crisis, which will premiere next month at the Venice and Toronto film festivals ahead of its wide release Oct. 2.
The Hollywood Reporter: Your new film was announced in May 2008 as a follow-up to "Fahrenheit 9/11" that would look at America's role in the world. Then the economy tanked. Do you feel pressure to make movies that respond to the zeitgeist?
Michael Moore: That was our cover. From the spring of '08, we were always doing a film about capitalism and corporate America. But, as you've seen from the recent revelations about the health insurance industry's secret campaign to attack my last film (2007's "Sicko"), I have to be extremely dodgy in order to outsmart these corporate guys. I had no way of knowing in May of 2008 that the economy would crash four months later. We were right in the middle of this Wall Street movie when it happened.
THR: The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that in tough economic times, moviegoers want an escape. Is there a big audience for a film that looks at the financial crisis?
Moore: I have no doubts that people will want to come to a movie that goes after, with humor and reckless abandon, those bastards who've made their lives miserable. They deserve a night out at the movies where the movie is on their side.
THR: Given your history with "Roger & Me," what was your reaction to the initial bailout of GM, its subsequent bankruptcy and the firing of CEO Rick Wagoner?
Moore: All my films, in one way or another, speak to my experience of growing up in the hometown of General Motors. As for GM's demise, I tried to warn people about that some 20 years ago. Nothing made me happier than seeing President Obama fire the head of GM. It was every Flint boy's dream come true. They arrogantly kept making lousy cars that few people wanted to drive. They fought every safety measure from mandatory turn signals to controls that would protect the melting of our polar ice caps. They fired tens of thousands of people over the years for the short-term benefit of making their balance sheet appear to be in profit. That was a fraud of major proportions, and to date, no one has yet to go to prison.
THR: You supported President Obama in the election. How do you grade his response to the financial crisis and the health care issue? How about congressional Democrats?
Moore: I'm still in a stupor of stunned ecstasy that Obama won. And I approve of most everything he's done, from apologizing to the Iranians for America overthrowing their democratically elected president in 1953 to appointing Kumar (actor Kal Penn of the "Harold and Kumar" movies) to a White House position. He is doing the best he can with the mess he inherited, and I and millions of others are counting on him never to forget that he came from the working class and that his people need him now more than ever. As for the congressional Democrats, what a bunch of losers -- weak, scared, stupid. They had better get a clue pretty quick or the Dark Forces will return.
THR: Bill Maher recently said that "America is stupid" and "too dumb to be governed." Do you agree?
Moore: Eight years ago I wrote a book called "Stupid White Men." In that book, I wrote a chapter entitled "Idiot Nation." I think that says it all. Sad, sad, sad.
THR: Have you ever considered leaving the U.S.?
Moore: Thank you for asking! I had never considered this idea until you mentioned it, and now that you have, it doesn't sound like such a bad idea! I guess if I were going to live outside the U.S., I would live in Texas.
THR: What's the No. 1 thing you want to teach your kids?
Moore: Never trust anyone from Texas.
THR: In your opinion, what's the single worst legacy of George W. Bush?
Moore: That he has yet to be arrested for committing the worst crime the leader of a nation can commit: lie to the people and convince them to invade another country and kill its people with absolutely no provocation. There are 8,662 parents who might better answer this question.
THR: Your films are big boxoffice draws, and you won an Oscar for 2002's "Bowling for Columbine," but you've always been considered an outsider to the entertainment community. Do you like Hollywood?
Moore: Yes. I've met only very nice people out here, and if I wouldn't miss the 20-below winters, I'd live here for sure.
THR: What's the last movie you saw? The last book you read?
Moore: A Norwegian film called "Troubled Water." Best drama I've seen this year. The last book was "The Coming Insurrection" (a French leftist call-to-arms manifesto that has been labeled a "manual for terrorism" by the French government). I'm also reading the daily newspaper religiously, considering how there won't be any to read a year from now.
THR: There were reports you were feuding with Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who executive produced "Fahrenheit," "Sicko" and "Capitalism." Will you work with them again?
Moore: In 20 years of knowing the brothers, I have had only one fight with them, and that was over who would get the last cannoli.
Friday, August 14, 2009
GM says new Volt could get 230 mpg in city driving
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gTbzGj-FRO_vOw4xVy1tOG6DBn_wD9A0THOO0
GM says new Volt could get 230 mpg in city driving
By KIMBERLY S. JOHNSON (AP)
8-11-9
WARREN, Mich. — General Motors said Tuesday its Chevrolet Volt electric car could get 230 mpg in city driving, making it the first American vehicle to achieve triple-digit fuel economy if that figure is confirmed by federal regulators.
But when the four-door family sedan hits showrooms late next year, its efficiency will come with a steep sticker price: $40,000.
Still, the Volt's fuel efficiency would be four times more than the popular Toyota Prius hybrid, the most efficient car now sold in the U.S.
Most automakers are working on similar designs, but GM would offer the first mainstream plug-in with the Volt, which seats four and was introduced at the 2007 Detroit auto show.
The Volt will join a growing fleet of cars and trucks powered by systems other than internal combustion engines.
Unlike the Prius and other traditional hybrids, the Volt is powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile range. After that, a small internal combustion engine kicks in to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles. The battery pack can be recharged from a standard home outlet.
Hybrids use a small internal combustion engine combined with a high-powered battery to boost fuel efficiency. Toyota's Prius — which starts at about $22,000 — gets 51 mpg in the city and 48 mpg on the highway.
The number of all-electric vehicles available to U.S. consumers remains limited. The Tesla Roadster, a high-end sports car with a range of 224 miles, is perhaps the best known. But its $100,000-plus price tag keeps it out of reach of all but the wealthiest drivers.
The company is working on an electric family sedan that will be priced considerably less.
Nissan Motor Co. unveiled its first electric car, the Leaf, earlier this month. Nissan said the vehicle will go on sale in Japan, the U.S. and Europe next year.
General Motors Co. is touting the 230 mpg figure following early tests that used draft guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency for calculating the mileage of extended-range electric vehicles.
The EPA guidelines, developed with help from automakers, figure that cars such as the Volt will travel more on straight electricity in the city than on the highway. If drivers operate the Volt for less than 40 miles, in theory they could do so without using a drop of gasoline.
Highway mileage estimates for the Volt based on the EPA's methodology have yet to be released.
"We are confident the highway (mileage) will be a triple-digit," GM CEO Fritz Henderson said.
The EPA conducts testing to determine the mileage posted on new car stickers. The agency said in a statement Tuesday that it has not tested a Volt "and therefore cannot confirm the fuel economy values claimed by GM."
The EPA is working with the Society of Automotive Engineers and state and federal officials to develop testing procedures to measure the fuel efficiency of advanced vehicles, according to a draft outline of the proposal obtained by The Associated Press.
The plan could be released later this year.
It was not immediately clear how GM reached the 230 mpg in city driving, but industry officials estimated the automaker's calculation took into consideration the Volt traveling 40 miles on the electric battery and then achieving about 50 mpg when the engine kicked in.
Although Henderson would not give details on pricing, the first-generation Volt is expected to cost nearly $40,000, making it cost-prohibitive to many people even if gasoline returns to $4 per gallon.
The price of the sporty-looking sedan is expected to drop with future generations of the Volt, but GM has said government tax credits of up to $7,500 and the savings on fuel could make it more affordable, especially at 230 mpg.
"We get a little cautious about trying to forecast what fuel prices will do," said Tony Posawatz, GM's vehicle line director for the Volt. "We achieved this number, and if fuel prices go up, it certainly does get more attractive even in the near-term generation."
The mileage figure could vary as the guidelines are refined and the Volt gets further along in the manufacturing process, Posawatz said.
Chrysler Group, Ford Motor Co. and Daimler AG are all developing plug-ins and electric cars, and Toyota Motor Corp. is working on a plug-in version of its gas-electric hybrid system.
GM has produced about 30 Volts so far and is making 10 a week, Henderson said during a presentation at the company's technical center in the Detroit suburb of Warren.
Henderson said charging the Volt will cost about 40 cents a day, at about 5 cents per kilowatt hour.
GM is nearly halfway through building about 80 Volts that will look and behave like the production model, and testing is running on schedule, Posawatz said.
Two critical areas — battery life and the electronic switching between battery and engine power — are still being refined, but the car is on schedule to reach showrooms late in 2010, he said.
GM is simulating tests to make sure the new lithium-ion batteries last 10 years, Posawatz said, as well as testing battery performance in extremely hot and cold climates.
"We're further along, but we're still quite a ways from home," he said. "We're developing quite a knowledge base on all this stuff. Our confidence is growing."
The other area of new technology, switching between battery and engine power, is proceeding well, he said, with engineers just fine-tuning the operations.
"We're very pleased with the transition from when it's driving EV (electric vehicle) to when the engine and generator kick in," he said.
GM also is finishing work on the power cord, which will be durable enough that it can survive being run over by the car. The Volt, he said, will have software on board so it can be programmed to begin and end charging during off-peak electrical use hours.
It will be easy for future Volt owners living in rural and suburban areas to plug in their cars at night, but even Henderson recognized the challenge urban, apartment dwellers, or those who park their cars on the street might have recharging the Volt. There could eventually be charging stations set up by a third-party to meet such a demand, Henderson said.
GM says new Volt could get 230 mpg in city driving
By KIMBERLY S. JOHNSON (AP)
8-11-9
WARREN, Mich. — General Motors said Tuesday its Chevrolet Volt electric car could get 230 mpg in city driving, making it the first American vehicle to achieve triple-digit fuel economy if that figure is confirmed by federal regulators.
But when the four-door family sedan hits showrooms late next year, its efficiency will come with a steep sticker price: $40,000.
Still, the Volt's fuel efficiency would be four times more than the popular Toyota Prius hybrid, the most efficient car now sold in the U.S.
Most automakers are working on similar designs, but GM would offer the first mainstream plug-in with the Volt, which seats four and was introduced at the 2007 Detroit auto show.
The Volt will join a growing fleet of cars and trucks powered by systems other than internal combustion engines.
Unlike the Prius and other traditional hybrids, the Volt is powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile range. After that, a small internal combustion engine kicks in to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles. The battery pack can be recharged from a standard home outlet.
Hybrids use a small internal combustion engine combined with a high-powered battery to boost fuel efficiency. Toyota's Prius — which starts at about $22,000 — gets 51 mpg in the city and 48 mpg on the highway.
The number of all-electric vehicles available to U.S. consumers remains limited. The Tesla Roadster, a high-end sports car with a range of 224 miles, is perhaps the best known. But its $100,000-plus price tag keeps it out of reach of all but the wealthiest drivers.
The company is working on an electric family sedan that will be priced considerably less.
Nissan Motor Co. unveiled its first electric car, the Leaf, earlier this month. Nissan said the vehicle will go on sale in Japan, the U.S. and Europe next year.
General Motors Co. is touting the 230 mpg figure following early tests that used draft guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency for calculating the mileage of extended-range electric vehicles.
The EPA guidelines, developed with help from automakers, figure that cars such as the Volt will travel more on straight electricity in the city than on the highway. If drivers operate the Volt for less than 40 miles, in theory they could do so without using a drop of gasoline.
Highway mileage estimates for the Volt based on the EPA's methodology have yet to be released.
"We are confident the highway (mileage) will be a triple-digit," GM CEO Fritz Henderson said.
The EPA conducts testing to determine the mileage posted on new car stickers. The agency said in a statement Tuesday that it has not tested a Volt "and therefore cannot confirm the fuel economy values claimed by GM."
The EPA is working with the Society of Automotive Engineers and state and federal officials to develop testing procedures to measure the fuel efficiency of advanced vehicles, according to a draft outline of the proposal obtained by The Associated Press.
The plan could be released later this year.
It was not immediately clear how GM reached the 230 mpg in city driving, but industry officials estimated the automaker's calculation took into consideration the Volt traveling 40 miles on the electric battery and then achieving about 50 mpg when the engine kicked in.
Although Henderson would not give details on pricing, the first-generation Volt is expected to cost nearly $40,000, making it cost-prohibitive to many people even if gasoline returns to $4 per gallon.
The price of the sporty-looking sedan is expected to drop with future generations of the Volt, but GM has said government tax credits of up to $7,500 and the savings on fuel could make it more affordable, especially at 230 mpg.
"We get a little cautious about trying to forecast what fuel prices will do," said Tony Posawatz, GM's vehicle line director for the Volt. "We achieved this number, and if fuel prices go up, it certainly does get more attractive even in the near-term generation."
The mileage figure could vary as the guidelines are refined and the Volt gets further along in the manufacturing process, Posawatz said.
Chrysler Group, Ford Motor Co. and Daimler AG are all developing plug-ins and electric cars, and Toyota Motor Corp. is working on a plug-in version of its gas-electric hybrid system.
GM has produced about 30 Volts so far and is making 10 a week, Henderson said during a presentation at the company's technical center in the Detroit suburb of Warren.
Henderson said charging the Volt will cost about 40 cents a day, at about 5 cents per kilowatt hour.
GM is nearly halfway through building about 80 Volts that will look and behave like the production model, and testing is running on schedule, Posawatz said.
Two critical areas — battery life and the electronic switching between battery and engine power — are still being refined, but the car is on schedule to reach showrooms late in 2010, he said.
GM is simulating tests to make sure the new lithium-ion batteries last 10 years, Posawatz said, as well as testing battery performance in extremely hot and cold climates.
"We're further along, but we're still quite a ways from home," he said. "We're developing quite a knowledge base on all this stuff. Our confidence is growing."
The other area of new technology, switching between battery and engine power, is proceeding well, he said, with engineers just fine-tuning the operations.
"We're very pleased with the transition from when it's driving EV (electric vehicle) to when the engine and generator kick in," he said.
GM also is finishing work on the power cord, which will be durable enough that it can survive being run over by the car. The Volt, he said, will have software on board so it can be programmed to begin and end charging during off-peak electrical use hours.
It will be easy for future Volt owners living in rural and suburban areas to plug in their cars at night, but even Henderson recognized the challenge urban, apartment dwellers, or those who park their cars on the street might have recharging the Volt. There could eventually be charging stations set up by a third-party to meet such a demand, Henderson said.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Citigroup’s $100 million banker
http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j29.shtml
Citigroup’s $100 million banker
29 July 2009
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that a top Citigroup trader is demanding that the bank follow through on a 2009 pay package estimated at $100 million. Andrew J. Hall, who runs Citigroup’s energy trading division, has threatened to quit should the bank fail to honor his pay deal in full.
According to the Journal, Hall, an energy speculator and top money-maker for the bank, received more than $100 million last year. Such nine-digit salaries exemplify the plundering of social resources that has become a hallmark of American capitalism and the American financial elite.
The crash of 2008 and Great Recession of 2009 have had no impact on the obscene levels of wealth that flow to a parasitic elite at the top of the economic ladder. On the contrary, the power of the aristocracy has, if anything, been enhanced as a result of the policies of the Obama administration, which has made the bailout of Wall Street at public expense its number one priority.
It would take a minimum wage worker, working full-time without vacations, 6,269 years to earn $100 million. Hall’s yearly pay is roughly equivalent to the annual wage of 2,000 workers in the US. He makes in an hour about the same amount most American workers earn in a year.
Hall’s two-year take of $200 million will be greater than the budget deficits confronting a large number of US cities and their public school systems.
Hall heads Citigroup’s energy-trading unit, Phibro LLC, which the Journal describes as “a secretive operation, run from the site of a former Connecticut dairy farm [that] occasionally accounts for a disproportionate chunk of Citigroup’s income.”
The federal government has plowed $45 billion in cash into Citigroup and guaranteed over $300 billion of the bank’s assets. It will soon own 34 percent of the bank’s common stock, making it Citigroup’s largest shareholder.
Yet the Obama administration is tied up in knots over the demands of a single Citigroup energy speculator. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the complete subordination of the government and the entire political system to the financial mafia.
The Journal writes that the payout would set “the stage for a potential showdown between Citigroup and the government’s new pay czar,” Kenneth Feinberg. President Obama recently appointed Feinberg to the Treasury Department to oversee executive compensation at seven corporations holding outstanding TARP (Trouble Asset Relief Program) funds—Citigroup, Bank of America, American International Group, General Motors, Chrysler, and the two automakers’ finance arms.
Far from a “showdown,” a chummy discussion among Wall Street insiders is underway over how to pay Hall. The Journal reports that Citigroup officials have been lobbying Feinberg to approve Hall’s pay package, especially Citigroup Vice Chairman Lewis Kaden, “who has been handling most of the discussions with the pay czar, trying to capitalize on the two men’s longtime friendship.” The newspaper indicates that Citigroup might finesse the TARP pay limits by formally spinning off Phibro.
In a statement on the controversy over Hall’s pay, Citigroup declared, “Retaining and attracting the best talent is very important to the success of Citigroup and all its stakeholders.”
The type of talent so prized on Wall Street is indicated in a separate Journal article, “Traders Blamed for Oil Spike,” published on Tuesday. The article points to the socially destructive nature of Hall’s line of work. It states that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will issue a report next month attributing the wild swings in oil prices from 2007 to the present largely to the role of energy traders.
Hall’s enormous personal income is bound up with the manipulation of energy markets, which has contributed to the broken finances of millions of American households through higher gas and home heating bills and a run-up in food prices that has dramatically increased hunger in many parts of the world. The volatility on energy markets has played a significant role in the global economic crisis, driving up unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression.
Hall’s case only highlights Wall Street’s resumption of multimillion-dollar salaries and bonuses for executives and traders. In recent weeks, other major bailed-out banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, have set aside sharply higher—in the case of Goldman Sachs, record—sums for bonuses and salaries. Last week, Morgan Stanley issued its second quarter financial results, revealing that it set aside 72 percent of revenues for salaries and bonuses, even though it reported a loss for the period.
The Obama administration has worked to block any real restrictions on Wall Street pay. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and top economic adviser Lawrence Summers publicly opposed modest limits on executive pay at firms receiving TARP funds that were included in the $787 billion economic stimulus bill passed last February.
The following month, Obama intervened to block executive pay limits passed by the House of Representatives and set for a vote in the Senate following public outrage over reports that the bailed-out insurance giant American International Group (AIG) was about to dispense hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.
Obama’s July 22 prime time press conference provided a graphic demonstration of the utter servility of the president and the entire government to the barons of Wall Street. Asked by a reporter if new revelations about bank profits did not indicate that the White House should take “a harder line with Wall Street,” Obama acknowledged that the banks’ reckless speculation and profiteering had precipitated the global economic crisis.
“Wall Street,” he said, “took extraordinary risks with other people’s money, they were peddling loans that they knew could never be paid back, they were flipping those loans and leveraging those loans and higher and higher mountains of debt were being built on loans that were fundamentally unsound. And all of us now are paying the price.”
Far from suggesting that there should be any consequences for such crimes against society, Obama hastened to declare that “it’s a good thing that they’re profitable again, because if they’re profitable that means that they have reserves in place and they can lend.” (In fact, the banks have refused to significantly expand their lending to businesses and consumers). Obama added, “And this is America, so if you’re profitable in the free market system, then you benefit.”
As for the bankers’ use of taxpayer money to reward themselves with colossal salaries and bonuses, the president could do no more than make a lame appeal for greater restraint. “With respect to compensation, I’d like to think that people would feel a little remorse and feel embarrassed and would not get million-dollar or multimillion-dollar bonuses,” Obama said.
The same White House that dictates wage cuts, layoffs and poverty for auto workers dares not infringe on the wealth or prerogatives of the financial aristocracy. Such are the class realities of America and the dictatorial power exerted by the financial elite behind the trappings of American democracy.
Tom Eley and Barry Grey
Citigroup’s $100 million banker
29 July 2009
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that a top Citigroup trader is demanding that the bank follow through on a 2009 pay package estimated at $100 million. Andrew J. Hall, who runs Citigroup’s energy trading division, has threatened to quit should the bank fail to honor his pay deal in full.
According to the Journal, Hall, an energy speculator and top money-maker for the bank, received more than $100 million last year. Such nine-digit salaries exemplify the plundering of social resources that has become a hallmark of American capitalism and the American financial elite.
The crash of 2008 and Great Recession of 2009 have had no impact on the obscene levels of wealth that flow to a parasitic elite at the top of the economic ladder. On the contrary, the power of the aristocracy has, if anything, been enhanced as a result of the policies of the Obama administration, which has made the bailout of Wall Street at public expense its number one priority.
It would take a minimum wage worker, working full-time without vacations, 6,269 years to earn $100 million. Hall’s yearly pay is roughly equivalent to the annual wage of 2,000 workers in the US. He makes in an hour about the same amount most American workers earn in a year.
Hall’s two-year take of $200 million will be greater than the budget deficits confronting a large number of US cities and their public school systems.
Hall heads Citigroup’s energy-trading unit, Phibro LLC, which the Journal describes as “a secretive operation, run from the site of a former Connecticut dairy farm [that] occasionally accounts for a disproportionate chunk of Citigroup’s income.”
The federal government has plowed $45 billion in cash into Citigroup and guaranteed over $300 billion of the bank’s assets. It will soon own 34 percent of the bank’s common stock, making it Citigroup’s largest shareholder.
Yet the Obama administration is tied up in knots over the demands of a single Citigroup energy speculator. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the complete subordination of the government and the entire political system to the financial mafia.
The Journal writes that the payout would set “the stage for a potential showdown between Citigroup and the government’s new pay czar,” Kenneth Feinberg. President Obama recently appointed Feinberg to the Treasury Department to oversee executive compensation at seven corporations holding outstanding TARP (Trouble Asset Relief Program) funds—Citigroup, Bank of America, American International Group, General Motors, Chrysler, and the two automakers’ finance arms.
Far from a “showdown,” a chummy discussion among Wall Street insiders is underway over how to pay Hall. The Journal reports that Citigroup officials have been lobbying Feinberg to approve Hall’s pay package, especially Citigroup Vice Chairman Lewis Kaden, “who has been handling most of the discussions with the pay czar, trying to capitalize on the two men’s longtime friendship.” The newspaper indicates that Citigroup might finesse the TARP pay limits by formally spinning off Phibro.
In a statement on the controversy over Hall’s pay, Citigroup declared, “Retaining and attracting the best talent is very important to the success of Citigroup and all its stakeholders.”
The type of talent so prized on Wall Street is indicated in a separate Journal article, “Traders Blamed for Oil Spike,” published on Tuesday. The article points to the socially destructive nature of Hall’s line of work. It states that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will issue a report next month attributing the wild swings in oil prices from 2007 to the present largely to the role of energy traders.
Hall’s enormous personal income is bound up with the manipulation of energy markets, which has contributed to the broken finances of millions of American households through higher gas and home heating bills and a run-up in food prices that has dramatically increased hunger in many parts of the world. The volatility on energy markets has played a significant role in the global economic crisis, driving up unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression.
Hall’s case only highlights Wall Street’s resumption of multimillion-dollar salaries and bonuses for executives and traders. In recent weeks, other major bailed-out banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, have set aside sharply higher—in the case of Goldman Sachs, record—sums for bonuses and salaries. Last week, Morgan Stanley issued its second quarter financial results, revealing that it set aside 72 percent of revenues for salaries and bonuses, even though it reported a loss for the period.
The Obama administration has worked to block any real restrictions on Wall Street pay. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and top economic adviser Lawrence Summers publicly opposed modest limits on executive pay at firms receiving TARP funds that were included in the $787 billion economic stimulus bill passed last February.
The following month, Obama intervened to block executive pay limits passed by the House of Representatives and set for a vote in the Senate following public outrage over reports that the bailed-out insurance giant American International Group (AIG) was about to dispense hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.
Obama’s July 22 prime time press conference provided a graphic demonstration of the utter servility of the president and the entire government to the barons of Wall Street. Asked by a reporter if new revelations about bank profits did not indicate that the White House should take “a harder line with Wall Street,” Obama acknowledged that the banks’ reckless speculation and profiteering had precipitated the global economic crisis.
“Wall Street,” he said, “took extraordinary risks with other people’s money, they were peddling loans that they knew could never be paid back, they were flipping those loans and leveraging those loans and higher and higher mountains of debt were being built on loans that were fundamentally unsound. And all of us now are paying the price.”
Far from suggesting that there should be any consequences for such crimes against society, Obama hastened to declare that “it’s a good thing that they’re profitable again, because if they’re profitable that means that they have reserves in place and they can lend.” (In fact, the banks have refused to significantly expand their lending to businesses and consumers). Obama added, “And this is America, so if you’re profitable in the free market system, then you benefit.”
As for the bankers’ use of taxpayer money to reward themselves with colossal salaries and bonuses, the president could do no more than make a lame appeal for greater restraint. “With respect to compensation, I’d like to think that people would feel a little remorse and feel embarrassed and would not get million-dollar or multimillion-dollar bonuses,” Obama said.
The same White House that dictates wage cuts, layoffs and poverty for auto workers dares not infringe on the wealth or prerogatives of the financial aristocracy. Such are the class realities of America and the dictatorial power exerted by the financial elite behind the trappings of American democracy.
Tom Eley and Barry Grey
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Jobless rate hits 9.4 percent in May
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gNiyJ905Ho0Ur96V2TQhsBX19lGwD98KH8K80
Jobless rate hits 9.4 percent in May; layoffs slow
By JEANNINE AVERSA
6-5-9
WASHINGTON (AP) — With companies in no mood to hire, the unemployment rate jumped to 9.4 percent in May, the highest in more than 25 years. But the pace of layoffs eased, with employers cutting 345,000 jobs, the fewest since September.
The much smaller-than-expected reduction in payroll jobs, reported by the Labor Department on Friday, adds to evidence that the recession is loosening its hold on the country. It marked the fourth straight month that the pace of layoffs slowed.
Still, the increase in the nation's unemployment rate from 8.9 percent in April underscores the difficulties that America's 14.5 million unemployed are having in finding new jobs. Economists had expected the rate to hit 9.2 percent last month.
If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included, the unemployment rate would have been 16.4 percent in May, the highest on records dating to 1994.
Even with layoffs slowing, companies will be reluctant to hire until they feel certain that economic conditions are improving and that any recovery will last.
Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 6 million jobs.
As the recession — which is now the longest since World War II — bites into sales and profits, companies have turned to layoffs and other cost-cutting measures to survive the fallout. Those include holding down workers' hours and freezing or cutting pay.
The average work week in May fell to 33.1 hours, the lowest on records dating to 1964.
Job losses — while slower in May — were still widespread.
Construction companies cut 59,000 jobs, down from 108,000 in April. Factories cut 156,000, on top of 154,000 in the previous month. Retailers cut 17,500 positions, compared with 36,5000 in April. Financial activities cut 30,000, down from 45,000 in April. Even the government reduced employment — by 7,000 — after bulking up by 92,000 in March as it added workers for the 2010 Census.
Education, health care, leisure and hospitality were among the industries adding jobs in May.
Still, in another encouraging note, job losses in both March and April were less than previously thought. Employers cut 652,000 positions in March, versus 699,000 previously reported. They eliminated 504,000 jobs in April, less than the 539,000 initially estimated.
The deepest job cuts of the recession came in January when 741,000 jobs disappeared, the most since 1949.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke repeated his prediction this week that the recession will end this year, but again warned that any recovery will be gradual.
Many economists believe the jobless rate will hit 10 percent by the end of this year. Some think it could rise as high as 10.7 percent by the second quarter of next year before it starts to make a slow descent. The post-World War II high was 10.8 percent at the end of 1982.
The Fed says unemployment will remain elevated into 2011 given the expectation of tepid recovery. Economists say the job market may not get back to normal — meaning a 5 percent unemployment rate — until 2013. Economic recoveries after financial crises tend to be slower, economists say.
Evidence has been mounting that the recession is letting up, with fresh signs emerging earlier this week.
The number of people continuing to draw unemployment benefits dipped for the first time in 20 weeks, and first-time claims also fell. Manufacturing's slide is slowing. Builders are boosting spending on construction projects and a barometer of home sales firmed.
Although shoppers remain cautious according to sales results from major retailers, Bernanke and other economists are hopeful that consumers won't return to the deep hibernation seen at the end of last year.
That's when the recession hit with brutal force, causing the economy to contract at a 6.3 percent pace, the most in 25 years. Consumers cut their spending at the time by the most in nearly three decades. Economic activity shrank at a 5.7 percent pace in the first three months of this year, despite a rebound by consumers.
Many analysts believe the economy is shrinking at about a 2 percent pace in the current quarter, and that the economy could return to growth as soon as the third quarter. President Barack Obama's stimulus package should help bolster the economy.
Ripple-effects from General Motors Corp.'s filing for bankruptcy protection — the fourth largest in U.S. history — could muddy the outlook, some analysts said. GM said earlier this week it will close nine factories and idle three others indefinitely as part of its restructuring. The closings, which will take place through the end of 2010, will cost up to 20,000 workers their jobs.
Jobless rate hits 9.4 percent in May; layoffs slow
By JEANNINE AVERSA
6-5-9
WASHINGTON (AP) — With companies in no mood to hire, the unemployment rate jumped to 9.4 percent in May, the highest in more than 25 years. But the pace of layoffs eased, with employers cutting 345,000 jobs, the fewest since September.
The much smaller-than-expected reduction in payroll jobs, reported by the Labor Department on Friday, adds to evidence that the recession is loosening its hold on the country. It marked the fourth straight month that the pace of layoffs slowed.
Still, the increase in the nation's unemployment rate from 8.9 percent in April underscores the difficulties that America's 14.5 million unemployed are having in finding new jobs. Economists had expected the rate to hit 9.2 percent last month.
If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included, the unemployment rate would have been 16.4 percent in May, the highest on records dating to 1994.
Even with layoffs slowing, companies will be reluctant to hire until they feel certain that economic conditions are improving and that any recovery will last.
Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 6 million jobs.
As the recession — which is now the longest since World War II — bites into sales and profits, companies have turned to layoffs and other cost-cutting measures to survive the fallout. Those include holding down workers' hours and freezing or cutting pay.
The average work week in May fell to 33.1 hours, the lowest on records dating to 1964.
Job losses — while slower in May — were still widespread.
Construction companies cut 59,000 jobs, down from 108,000 in April. Factories cut 156,000, on top of 154,000 in the previous month. Retailers cut 17,500 positions, compared with 36,5000 in April. Financial activities cut 30,000, down from 45,000 in April. Even the government reduced employment — by 7,000 — after bulking up by 92,000 in March as it added workers for the 2010 Census.
Education, health care, leisure and hospitality were among the industries adding jobs in May.
Still, in another encouraging note, job losses in both March and April were less than previously thought. Employers cut 652,000 positions in March, versus 699,000 previously reported. They eliminated 504,000 jobs in April, less than the 539,000 initially estimated.
The deepest job cuts of the recession came in January when 741,000 jobs disappeared, the most since 1949.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke repeated his prediction this week that the recession will end this year, but again warned that any recovery will be gradual.
Many economists believe the jobless rate will hit 10 percent by the end of this year. Some think it could rise as high as 10.7 percent by the second quarter of next year before it starts to make a slow descent. The post-World War II high was 10.8 percent at the end of 1982.
The Fed says unemployment will remain elevated into 2011 given the expectation of tepid recovery. Economists say the job market may not get back to normal — meaning a 5 percent unemployment rate — until 2013. Economic recoveries after financial crises tend to be slower, economists say.
Evidence has been mounting that the recession is letting up, with fresh signs emerging earlier this week.
The number of people continuing to draw unemployment benefits dipped for the first time in 20 weeks, and first-time claims also fell. Manufacturing's slide is slowing. Builders are boosting spending on construction projects and a barometer of home sales firmed.
Although shoppers remain cautious according to sales results from major retailers, Bernanke and other economists are hopeful that consumers won't return to the deep hibernation seen at the end of last year.
That's when the recession hit with brutal force, causing the economy to contract at a 6.3 percent pace, the most in 25 years. Consumers cut their spending at the time by the most in nearly three decades. Economic activity shrank at a 5.7 percent pace in the first three months of this year, despite a rebound by consumers.
Many analysts believe the economy is shrinking at about a 2 percent pace in the current quarter, and that the economy could return to growth as soon as the third quarter. President Barack Obama's stimulus package should help bolster the economy.
Ripple-effects from General Motors Corp.'s filing for bankruptcy protection — the fourth largest in U.S. history — could muddy the outlook, some analysts said. GM said earlier this week it will close nine factories and idle three others indefinitely as part of its restructuring. The closings, which will take place through the end of 2010, will cost up to 20,000 workers their jobs.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Goodbye, GM
by Michael Moore
June 1, 2009
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?
It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.
So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.
But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?
Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:
1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.
The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.
President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.
2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.
3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.
4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.
6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).
7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.
8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.
9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.
Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.
100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.
Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.
So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
June 1, 2009
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?
It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.
So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.
But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?
Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:
1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.
The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.
President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.
2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.
3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.
4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.
6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).
7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.
8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.
9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.
Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.
100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.
Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.
So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto: How Stevie the Rat bankrupted GM
by Greg Palast
Monday, June 1, 2009
Screw the autoworkers.
They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.
Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders - led by Morgan and Citibank - expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.
The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.
I smell a rat.
Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.
When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.
But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.
Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replace by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.
Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash - from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.
Preventive Detention for Pensions
So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal.
In 1974, after a series of scandalous take-downs of pension and retirement funds during the Nixon era, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA says you can't seize workers' pension funds (whether monthly payments or health insurance) any more than you can seize their private bank accounts. And that's because they are the same thing: workers give up wages in return for retirement benefits.
The law is darn explicit that grabbing pension money is a no-no. Company executives must hold these retirement funds as "fiduciaries." Here's the law, Professor Obama, as described on the government's own web site under the heading, "Health Plans and Benefits."
"The primary responsibility of fiduciaries is to run the plan solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits."
Every business in America that runs short of cash would love to dip into retirement kitties, but it's not their money any more than a banker can seize your account when the bank's a little short. A plan's assets are for the plan's members only, not for Mr. Dimon nor Mr. Rubin.
Yet, in effect, the Obama Administration is demanding that money for an elderly auto worker's spleen should be siphoned off to feed the TARP babies. Workers go without lung transplants so Dimon and Rubin can pimp out their ride. This is another "Guantanamo" moment for the Obama Administration - channeling Nixon to endorse the preventive detention of retiree health insurance.
Filching GM's pension assets doesn't become legal because the cash due the fund is replaced with GM stock. Congress saw through that switch-a-roo by requiring that companies, as fiduciaries, must
"...act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses."
By "diversify" for safety, the law does not mean put 100% of worker funds into a single busted company's stock.
This is dangerous business: The Rattner plan opens the floodgate to every politically-connected or down-on-their-luck company seeking to drain health care retirement funds.
House of Rubin
Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don't even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren't asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM?
As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys? You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who've already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama's point-man in winning banks' endorsement and campaign donations (by far, his largest source of his corporate funding).
With GM's last dying dimes about to fall into one pocket, and the Obama Treasury in his other pocket, Morgan's Jamie Dimon is correct in saying that the last twelve months will prove to be the bank's "finest year ever."
Which leaves us to ask the question: is the forced bankruptcy of GM, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, just a collection action for favored financiers?
And it's been a good year for Señor Rattner. While the Obama Administration made a big deal out of Rattner's youth spent working for the Steelworkers Union, they tried to sweep under the chassis that Rattner was one of the privileged, select group of investors in Cerberus Capital, the owners of Chrysler. "Owning" is a loose term. Cerberus "owned" Chrysler the way a cannibal "hosts" you for dinner. Cerberus paid nothing for Chrysler - indeed, they were paid billions by Germany's Daimler Corporation to haul it away. Cerberus kept the cash, then dumped Chrysler's bankrupt corpse on the US taxpayer.
("Cerberus," by the way, named itself after the Roman's mythical three-headed dog guarding the gates Hell. Subtle these guys are not.)
While Stevie the Rat sold his interest in the Dog from Hell when he became Car Czar, he never relinquished his post at the shop of vultures called Quadrangle Hedge Fund. Rattner's personal net worth stands at roughly half a billion dollars. This is Obama's working class hero.
If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers' funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat's plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.
It doesn't make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car.
*
Economist and journalist Greg Palast, a former trade union contract negotiator, is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. He is a GM bondholder and card-carrying member of United Automobile Workers Local 1981.
Palast's latest reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! are collected on the newly released DVD, "Palast Investigates: from 8-Mile to the Amazon - on the trail of the financial marauders."
by Greg Palast
Monday, June 1, 2009
Screw the autoworkers.
They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.
Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders - led by Morgan and Citibank - expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.
The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.
I smell a rat.
Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.
When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.
But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.
Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replace by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.
Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash - from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.
Preventive Detention for Pensions
So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal.
In 1974, after a series of scandalous take-downs of pension and retirement funds during the Nixon era, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA says you can't seize workers' pension funds (whether monthly payments or health insurance) any more than you can seize their private bank accounts. And that's because they are the same thing: workers give up wages in return for retirement benefits.
The law is darn explicit that grabbing pension money is a no-no. Company executives must hold these retirement funds as "fiduciaries." Here's the law, Professor Obama, as described on the government's own web site under the heading, "Health Plans and Benefits."
"The primary responsibility of fiduciaries is to run the plan solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits."
Every business in America that runs short of cash would love to dip into retirement kitties, but it's not their money any more than a banker can seize your account when the bank's a little short. A plan's assets are for the plan's members only, not for Mr. Dimon nor Mr. Rubin.
Yet, in effect, the Obama Administration is demanding that money for an elderly auto worker's spleen should be siphoned off to feed the TARP babies. Workers go without lung transplants so Dimon and Rubin can pimp out their ride. This is another "Guantanamo" moment for the Obama Administration - channeling Nixon to endorse the preventive detention of retiree health insurance.
Filching GM's pension assets doesn't become legal because the cash due the fund is replaced with GM stock. Congress saw through that switch-a-roo by requiring that companies, as fiduciaries, must
"...act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses."
By "diversify" for safety, the law does not mean put 100% of worker funds into a single busted company's stock.
This is dangerous business: The Rattner plan opens the floodgate to every politically-connected or down-on-their-luck company seeking to drain health care retirement funds.
House of Rubin
Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don't even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren't asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM?
As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys? You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who've already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama's point-man in winning banks' endorsement and campaign donations (by far, his largest source of his corporate funding).
With GM's last dying dimes about to fall into one pocket, and the Obama Treasury in his other pocket, Morgan's Jamie Dimon is correct in saying that the last twelve months will prove to be the bank's "finest year ever."
Which leaves us to ask the question: is the forced bankruptcy of GM, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, just a collection action for favored financiers?
And it's been a good year for Señor Rattner. While the Obama Administration made a big deal out of Rattner's youth spent working for the Steelworkers Union, they tried to sweep under the chassis that Rattner was one of the privileged, select group of investors in Cerberus Capital, the owners of Chrysler. "Owning" is a loose term. Cerberus "owned" Chrysler the way a cannibal "hosts" you for dinner. Cerberus paid nothing for Chrysler - indeed, they were paid billions by Germany's Daimler Corporation to haul it away. Cerberus kept the cash, then dumped Chrysler's bankrupt corpse on the US taxpayer.
("Cerberus," by the way, named itself after the Roman's mythical three-headed dog guarding the gates Hell. Subtle these guys are not.)
While Stevie the Rat sold his interest in the Dog from Hell when he became Car Czar, he never relinquished his post at the shop of vultures called Quadrangle Hedge Fund. Rattner's personal net worth stands at roughly half a billion dollars. This is Obama's working class hero.
If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers' funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat's plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.
It doesn't make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car.
*
Economist and journalist Greg Palast, a former trade union contract negotiator, is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. He is a GM bondholder and card-carrying member of United Automobile Workers Local 1981.
Palast's latest reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! are collected on the newly released DVD, "Palast Investigates: from 8-Mile to the Amazon - on the trail of the financial marauders."
Thursday, April 16, 2009
GM, Segway to Make Vehicle
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123906731177395605.htmlAPRIL 7, 2009
GM, Segway to Make Vehicle
By SHARON TERLEP
General Motors Corp. is teaming with Segway Inc., maker of the upright, self-balancing scooters, to build a new type of two-wheeled vehicle designed to move easily through congested urban streets.
The machine, which GM says it aims to develop by 2012, would run on batteries and use wireless technology to avoid traffic backups and navigate cities.
The struggling auto maker, surviving on a government lifeline, is looking to generate enthusiasm for its increasingly uncertain future ahead of the New York auto show this week.
GM has slashed product-development programs, advertising and spending on auto-show events. But it will take to the streets of Manhattan on Tuesday to show off a prototype of the vehicle, called PUMA, for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility.
The Segway Personal Transporter was launched with considerable hype eight years ago but practical issues prevented the scooter from becoming a mass-market product, including its relatively high cost and restrictions on its use in many jurisdictions.
GM is betting PUMA's more car-like traits -- an enclosed compartment and top speed of 35 miles per hour -- will lead to better results. GM didn't say how much the machines would cost, but research chief Larry Burns said owners would spend one-third to one-fourth of the cost of a traditional vehicle.
PUMA would have a range of about 35 miles. GM said it aims to use so-called vehicle-to-vehicle technology to avoid traffic problems and potentially have it navigate itself through city streets.
Write to Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@dowjones.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page B2
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Obama's Gordon Gekko Targets Union Workers
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031431/obamas-gordon-gekko-targets-union-workers-0
Obama's Gordon Gekko Targets Union Workers
By David Sirota
March 31st, 2009
Remember Gordon Gekko from Wall Street? Specifically, remember how Gekko's entire scheme for the airline industry was based on crushing the blue-collar union that Bud Fox's dad (Martin Sheen) was part of? Welcome to a real life version of that story, starring corporate raider Steve Rattner, who President Obama appointed to head the White House team now overseeing the auto industry (and don't say you weren't warned).
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Rattner's strategy is to use the government's leverage to try to specifically crush auto workers and force them to accept even more contract concessions than they've already agreed to:
DETROIT -- President Barack Obama's recovery plan for General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC appears to take aim at union retirees, a usually reliable Democratic constituency. After studying the plight of the companies, the president's auto task force concluded GM and Chrysler's survival is dependent on greater concessions from the United Auto Workers union.
The White House has total leverage over the situation because the UAW knows that if the industry doesn't get the loans it needs, it will be forced into bankruptcy court, where judges will shred labor contracts (somehow, AIG bonus contracts are sacrosanct, but union worker contracts can be shredded in a heartbeat). Indeed, many analysts believe this is the administration's ultimate goal.
IMHO, The most immoral part of this is the specific targeting of retirees.
As opposed to younger workers, retirees often can't get another job or go back to work because of obvious physical limitations. As one retiree said, "What 85-year-old can go out and get another job?"
I'm not saying that the auto industry's legacy costs are sustainable - not at all. But I am saying that when you put Gordon Gekko in control of government policy overseeing an industry, you are inevitably going to get a policy that assumes workers are the big problem. If you had a different kind of team, you may have a policy that says, for instance, we have to create a robust universal health care system before throwing retirees off their existing health care.
Last I checked, we have enough money to create that system just lying around ready to be handed out to Rattner's Wall Street friends. Hell, $8 trillion will get us a damn good universal health care system, won't it? Yes, it will - but it will also buy a lot of yachts for AIG execs, and when you have Gordon Gekko making public policy yachts come before health care.
Obama's Gordon Gekko Targets Union Workers
By David Sirota
March 31st, 2009
Remember Gordon Gekko from Wall Street? Specifically, remember how Gekko's entire scheme for the airline industry was based on crushing the blue-collar union that Bud Fox's dad (Martin Sheen) was part of? Welcome to a real life version of that story, starring corporate raider Steve Rattner, who President Obama appointed to head the White House team now overseeing the auto industry (and don't say you weren't warned).
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Rattner's strategy is to use the government's leverage to try to specifically crush auto workers and force them to accept even more contract concessions than they've already agreed to:
DETROIT -- President Barack Obama's recovery plan for General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC appears to take aim at union retirees, a usually reliable Democratic constituency. After studying the plight of the companies, the president's auto task force concluded GM and Chrysler's survival is dependent on greater concessions from the United Auto Workers union.
The White House has total leverage over the situation because the UAW knows that if the industry doesn't get the loans it needs, it will be forced into bankruptcy court, where judges will shred labor contracts (somehow, AIG bonus contracts are sacrosanct, but union worker contracts can be shredded in a heartbeat). Indeed, many analysts believe this is the administration's ultimate goal.
IMHO, The most immoral part of this is the specific targeting of retirees.
As opposed to younger workers, retirees often can't get another job or go back to work because of obvious physical limitations. As one retiree said, "What 85-year-old can go out and get another job?"
I'm not saying that the auto industry's legacy costs are sustainable - not at all. But I am saying that when you put Gordon Gekko in control of government policy overseeing an industry, you are inevitably going to get a policy that assumes workers are the big problem. If you had a different kind of team, you may have a policy that says, for instance, we have to create a robust universal health care system before throwing retirees off their existing health care.
Last I checked, we have enough money to create that system just lying around ready to be handed out to Rattner's Wall Street friends. Hell, $8 trillion will get us a damn good universal health care system, won't it? Yes, it will - but it will also buy a lot of yachts for AIG execs, and when you have Gordon Gekko making public policy yachts come before health care.
Obama treated autos worse than Wall St
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Workers-say-Obama-treated-apf-14789941.html
Workers say Obama treated autos worse than Wall St
Autoworkers say Obama's 'tough love' more tough than love, they get worse treatment than banks
Jeff Karoub, AP Business Writer
Monday March 30, 2009
DETROIT (AP) -- Many assembly line autoworkers reacted with skepticism and anger Monday to the Obama administration's tough tactics, which stoked long-simmering feelings that the people who put the country on wheels get treated differently than the wizards of Wall Street.
"It's the age-old Wall Street vs. Main Street smackdown again," said Brian Fredline, president of UAW Local 602 at a plant near Lansing. "You have all kinds of funding available to banks that are apparently too big to fail, but they're also too big to be responsible."
"But when it comes to auto manufacturing and middle-class jobs and people that don't matter on Wall Street, there are certainly different standards that we have to meet -- higher standards -- than the financials. That is a double standard that exists and it's unfair," Fredline said.
Many workers -- not generally known for their affection toward executives -- even sympathized with Rick Wagoner, who was forced to step down as chief executive of General Motors Corp. He was by turns called a "sacrificial lamb," "scapegoat" and "fall guy."
"We knew someone was going to have to take the proverbial `bullet,' and it would have made it a lot easier to accept that had the CEOs of the banks also been required to give up their jobs," said Jim Graham, president of a union local in Lordstown, Ohio, where GM produces the Cobalt and Pontiac G5 fuel-efficient cars.
While CEO oustings haven't been widespread among the banking industry, the government did in September reserve the right to remove senior management at American International Group Inc. as part of its agreement to give the insurer $85 billion in emergency aid. AIG Chief Executive Robert Willumstad stepped down as part of that company's bailout package, and the government hand-picked his successor.
Also, banks don't have the union and legacy costs that the automakers do, which make their products more costly versus foreign rivals.
President Barack Obama said he was "absolutely committed" to the survival of a domestic auto industry that can compete internationally. He raised the possibility of controlled bankruptcy for one or both of the troubled automakers.
Obama said the administration will offer GM "adequate working capital" during the next 60 days to produce an acceptable reorganization plan. The government gave Chrysler LLC 30 days to overcome hurdles to a merger with Fiat SpA, the Italian automaker.
Many workers say the government hasn't dictated such terms to insurance giant AIG or the banks in which it's taken an ownership stake. Obama's actions come amid public outrage over bonuses paid to business leaders and AIG executives.
"To see the very people that drove this economy into the ground be rewarded through bonuses while receiving tax dollars is just galling," said Dan Maloney, a machine repairman at auto supplier Delphi Corp.'s plant in Rochester, N.Y., and a union local president. "In light of that, the administration is taking it out, I believe, on the automotive sector."
Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm called Obama's moves "a bit of tough love," yet recognized a disconnect between the financial and auto industries.
"Yes, I do think that there has been a different look at those who manufacture than those who make money by flipping paper and I'm hopeful that the financial industry gets as tough a scrutiny as the auto industry has," she told reporters after an event Monday in Macomb Township, about 20 miles northeast of Detroit.
Despite Granholm's criticism and what many workers saw as the president's unduly harsh treatment, Obama's actions might not have a lasting effect on voters.
"It will be accepted, grudgingly perhaps, but accepted by anybody and everybody with a brain in their heads," said Bill Ballenger, editor of a Michigan political newsletter and a former Republican state lawmaker.
Still, Bill Rustem of Public Sector Consultants, a Lansing-based nonpartisan think tank, said Obama's actions carry some risk.
"I think this could have some impact four years from now if the state's economy doesn't begin to turn around," he said. Michigan's unemployment rate rose to 12 percent in February, marking the eighth straight monthly increase.
Workers watched Obama on large-screen TVs in the lobby bar of a hotel in Detroit's Renaissance Center, home to GM's headquarters. Several wearing GM badges declined to comment afterward, but one man whose fortunes are nearly as tied to GM as its employees expressed hope for the future of the company and industry.
"It's definitely a move in the right direction," said Tony Keros, who owns a restaurant and real estate development firm in the building. "Something has to happen."
In Ohio, Graham agreed that Washington just might get it right -- if only because the stakes are too high to fail.
"They understand that there are literally millions of people who depend on the auto industry -- whether directly or indirectly -- and a ripple effect of eliminating a General Motors, Chrysler or Ford would be devastating to an economy that's already been devastated over the past eight years," he said.
Associated Press writers Ben Leubsdorf in Clinton Township, Tim Martin in Delta Township, Ben Dobbin in Rochester, N.Y., and Thomas J. Sheeran in Cleveland contributed to this report.
Workers say Obama treated autos worse than Wall St
Autoworkers say Obama's 'tough love' more tough than love, they get worse treatment than banks
Jeff Karoub, AP Business Writer
Monday March 30, 2009
DETROIT (AP) -- Many assembly line autoworkers reacted with skepticism and anger Monday to the Obama administration's tough tactics, which stoked long-simmering feelings that the people who put the country on wheels get treated differently than the wizards of Wall Street.
"It's the age-old Wall Street vs. Main Street smackdown again," said Brian Fredline, president of UAW Local 602 at a plant near Lansing. "You have all kinds of funding available to banks that are apparently too big to fail, but they're also too big to be responsible."
"But when it comes to auto manufacturing and middle-class jobs and people that don't matter on Wall Street, there are certainly different standards that we have to meet -- higher standards -- than the financials. That is a double standard that exists and it's unfair," Fredline said.
Many workers -- not generally known for their affection toward executives -- even sympathized with Rick Wagoner, who was forced to step down as chief executive of General Motors Corp. He was by turns called a "sacrificial lamb," "scapegoat" and "fall guy."
"We knew someone was going to have to take the proverbial `bullet,' and it would have made it a lot easier to accept that had the CEOs of the banks also been required to give up their jobs," said Jim Graham, president of a union local in Lordstown, Ohio, where GM produces the Cobalt and Pontiac G5 fuel-efficient cars.
While CEO oustings haven't been widespread among the banking industry, the government did in September reserve the right to remove senior management at American International Group Inc. as part of its agreement to give the insurer $85 billion in emergency aid. AIG Chief Executive Robert Willumstad stepped down as part of that company's bailout package, and the government hand-picked his successor.
Also, banks don't have the union and legacy costs that the automakers do, which make their products more costly versus foreign rivals.
President Barack Obama said he was "absolutely committed" to the survival of a domestic auto industry that can compete internationally. He raised the possibility of controlled bankruptcy for one or both of the troubled automakers.
Obama said the administration will offer GM "adequate working capital" during the next 60 days to produce an acceptable reorganization plan. The government gave Chrysler LLC 30 days to overcome hurdles to a merger with Fiat SpA, the Italian automaker.
Many workers say the government hasn't dictated such terms to insurance giant AIG or the banks in which it's taken an ownership stake. Obama's actions come amid public outrage over bonuses paid to business leaders and AIG executives.
"To see the very people that drove this economy into the ground be rewarded through bonuses while receiving tax dollars is just galling," said Dan Maloney, a machine repairman at auto supplier Delphi Corp.'s plant in Rochester, N.Y., and a union local president. "In light of that, the administration is taking it out, I believe, on the automotive sector."
Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm called Obama's moves "a bit of tough love," yet recognized a disconnect between the financial and auto industries.
"Yes, I do think that there has been a different look at those who manufacture than those who make money by flipping paper and I'm hopeful that the financial industry gets as tough a scrutiny as the auto industry has," she told reporters after an event Monday in Macomb Township, about 20 miles northeast of Detroit.
Despite Granholm's criticism and what many workers saw as the president's unduly harsh treatment, Obama's actions might not have a lasting effect on voters.
"It will be accepted, grudgingly perhaps, but accepted by anybody and everybody with a brain in their heads," said Bill Ballenger, editor of a Michigan political newsletter and a former Republican state lawmaker.
Still, Bill Rustem of Public Sector Consultants, a Lansing-based nonpartisan think tank, said Obama's actions carry some risk.
"I think this could have some impact four years from now if the state's economy doesn't begin to turn around," he said. Michigan's unemployment rate rose to 12 percent in February, marking the eighth straight monthly increase.
Workers watched Obama on large-screen TVs in the lobby bar of a hotel in Detroit's Renaissance Center, home to GM's headquarters. Several wearing GM badges declined to comment afterward, but one man whose fortunes are nearly as tied to GM as its employees expressed hope for the future of the company and industry.
"It's definitely a move in the right direction," said Tony Keros, who owns a restaurant and real estate development firm in the building. "Something has to happen."
In Ohio, Graham agreed that Washington just might get it right -- if only because the stakes are too high to fail.
"They understand that there are literally millions of people who depend on the auto industry -- whether directly or indirectly -- and a ripple effect of eliminating a General Motors, Chrysler or Ford would be devastating to an economy that's already been devastated over the past eight years," he said.
Associated Press writers Ben Leubsdorf in Clinton Township, Tim Martin in Delta Township, Ben Dobbin in Rochester, N.Y., and Thomas J. Sheeran in Cleveland contributed to this report.
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