People in the auto industries are overpaid? Excuse me, but how about these bank executives who got that $160 million bailout at AIG? If that’s not overpaid,I don’t know what the hell is. And just so Sarah knows, a college degree is just a piece of paper that shows that you have acquired enough credits and studied hard enough to graduate from college—it dosen’t make automatically smarter or better than anyone else who dosen’t have one. It also dosen’t mean that you’re automatically going to get a job in the field you studied in,either. Sarah, who are YOU decide who should be making what according to their level of education? That IS elitist as hell. Just so you know Bill Gates dropped out of college, and he’s one of the richest men on the planet today,so that blows holes in what you said big-time. Bottom line—if the big 3 go under,so does the State of Michigan. Also,a hell of a lot of autoworkers have already seen their wages cut by half and have had to give up their benefits throught the past year. The plants are going down because of the Big 3’s unwillingness to be innovative and change with the times,not because health care costs for workers are too high. SO I guess if your job decided to cut your health benefits off completely just to save themselves, you’d be A-okay with it? I don’t think so. And BTW, SOMEBODY had to put together that car you drive—last time I looked ,cars didn’t make themselves–they HAVE to be built by someone–hello!

BTW, I’m with a group called Moratorium Now Coalition here in Detroit–we’re been fighting for a bill to halt all foreclosures and evictions here in the state of Michigan—Detroit, in fact has the seventh largest foreclosure rate in the country, as well as the highest unemployment rate, so we’re been getting hit with a double whammy here. Anyone who’d like to find out more about what we do can go to our site here:

http://www.moratorium-mi.org

So many untruths circulating about UAW wages and benefits, GM, Ford and Chrysler – If people took the time like I did to watch the Senate and Congressional hearings many of these MYTHS were de-bunked. Knowledge and Truth and Doing Your Homework to be informed about the issue would help the American people support OUR Detroit auto makers, dealers and suppliers!

Check out my recent post on today’s developing story on the auto industry bail out:

http://askpatty.typepad.com/ask_patty_/2008/12/good-news-this-morning-dems-agree-to-auto-industry-bailout.html

Jody DeVere
CEO/President – Ask Patty, Inc.
http://www.askpatty.com
http://www.carblabber.com

I am all in favor of Tesla. Their product sounds awesome. I would like for them to make it so they can get into the mass production phase and get prices down. But I think if the idea is to make the market safer for green innovation (which I think is one of the things GM/Ford/Chrysler, even Toyota and Honda, have been struggling with–it’s not all willful evilness, it would have been pretty risky in many ways for them to start pushing electric cars or super-fuel-efficient models on a consumers who still had cheap gas, viewed their cars as status symbols, and would have changed loyalties pretty quick if they couldn’t get the high-performance gas-guzzlers they wanted) then hopefully there are other things that can be done than letting GM fail and putting our hope in a series of start-ups, some of whom are bound to have bad business models too and/or experience a safety disaster and/or produce products that consumers don’t want. The idea proposed on the segment of putting a lower-limit cap on gas prices to keep up demand for green vehicles would hurt families. The only thing I can think of is the original idea of granting the $25B for green R&D and production. Does anyone who’s smarter than I am have other ideas for pushing fuel-efficiency and/or getting rid of the internal combustion engine without letting the Big 3 fail?

I swear I’m not a shill for the industry and I am as disgusted as anyone else with some of its practices over the years, but we have the Prius and the various Honda hybrids and the Chevy Volt coming out and so on. The industry has been too slow to change, but some good things are happening.

To add to Lauren@77 re: new tech, our plant expects to be turning out electric minivans by 2010. Change is happening slowly, but it IS happening.

See Also: Can you resist financial globalization?, Income Distribution Animation, A Modest Proposal, Great News!, What Populism Is Not, We shouldn’t bail out the Big Three, and Bailout Fallout.
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