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  • TUESDAY NOVEMBER 18 2008 6:00 AM

Bail The Shit Out Of Detroit

Submitted by FearTheReaper

Edited by nicole_powers

Tags: Automakers, bailout, GM, Republicans, Unions"

It’s time for America to get its bailout on again. Detroit has turned into a giant bag of ass and we need to do something about it. They want 25 billion. I say we give it to them. Why? Because I’m a socialist? Nope. Because we are heading toward a deep, deep recession and the last thing we need is to lose 3 million jobs.

A study just published by the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research (CAR) predicted that three million people would lose their jobs in the first year after such a Big Three meltdown, swelling the ranks of the unemployed by nearly one-third nationally and leading to hundreds of billions of dollars in lost income.



So, we can pay for it with a bailout, or pay for it in unemployment insurance, welfare and an increase in crime.

Oh, I know. The car companies are complete fuck ups. No argument here. While the right wing continues its rant that this is the fault of unions, I’m going to actually go with the facts. The mistakes of the auto companies were made at the top. They were made by throwing their weight behind cars like the Hummer, while Toyota was going with the Prius. While Detroit was cranking out Explorers and Escalades, Japan was whipping out the Civic Hybrid. Most of us crazy liberals just sat back watching the retarded actions of both government and the auto companies with depressed amusement. Yeah, I wrote “government.” Bush is very responsible for the current state of the auto industry because he gave massive tax breaks to people buying Hummers and refused to up standards. What we are seeing now is the result of a fantastically shortsighted and heinous energy policy. But, then, what has Bush touched that has not turned into a flaming pile of shit?

Our retarded Republican friends would like everyone to think the auto companies are in this position because of unions. Uh huh. Right. The workers are at fault for the collapse of the company. That’s usually how it works. Please ignore the facts.

In its contract last year, the UAW made painful concessions, adopting a two-tier wage structure, such that new employees make just $12 to $15 an hour. The move is projected to bring the American manufacturers in line with their Japanese rivals' non-union labor costs in the near future.

In addition, the union has taken responsibility for providing retiree healthcare, thereby eliminating one of the last remaining competitive disadvantages for the American manufacturers' unionized workforce as compared to their Japanese rivals.



The horrible, horrible union has done its part to save the company, so shut the fuck up, you incredible idiots. The estimated cost of health care for each GM car is $1,500. Considering most other countries have universal health care, our auto industry is starting in a hole, which just happens to coincide with the profit difference.



But, the right wing is against health care, so we can’t do that. And we can’t have unions. And we can’t save the car companies with a bail out. Sorry, we just have to let ‘em fold and put 3 million Americans out of work. Then we will not pass an extension for unemployment and they will have to become criminals to survive. Then we will put them in jail where they belong. Fucking criminal assholes.

Automobile companies are in bad shape because they made bad choices. They went for the short sighted big buck, the one that would make them the most in the moment, you know, like all those financial companies we just bailed out. Except, the car company’s actions were stupid instead of criminal. And now they are getting hammered by…right, the credit problem – which was created by a lack of regulation on Wall Street. Companies like GM survive on credit. They need it to pay the companies that produce the parts they use to make cars. With no credit, the whole thing collapses. And it’s the reason we can’t allow GM to declare bankruptcy.

GM won't be able to file Chapter 11.

But GM can't build cars without parts, and it can't get parts without credit. Chapter 11 companies typically get that sort of credit from something called Debtor-in-Possession (DIP) loans. But the same Wall Street meltdown that has dragged down the economy and GM sales has also dried up the DIP money GM would need to operate.

That's why many analysts and scholars believe GM would likely end up in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would entail total liquidation.



Sweet. Total liquidation. That should be awesome for any future wars we have to fight. We don’t need those companies to produce equipment for our forces or anything.

What everyone also seems to be missing are Detroit’s advances. The companies are actually turning the corner, and in some cases possibly moving ahead of Japan.

So far, the results are promising. According to the most recent Harbour Report, the benchmark guide for manufacturing prowess, Chrysler's factories now match Toyota's for the most productive, while both Ford's and GM's are improving. (A Toledo Jeep factory was actually named the nation's most efficient.) Consumer Reports now says Ford's reliability is approaching that of perennial leaders Honda and Toyota, whose ratings actually slipped last year. In late 2010, GM will introduce the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid that can go 40 miles without gas, and the Chevrolet Cruze, a compact that relies solely on gas but that gets 45 miles to the gallon. The Volt would represent a rare leap ahead of the Japanese, who never embraced plug-in technology with the same enthusiasm.

No bailout means kissing the Volt and possibly its technology good bye.



"Maybe those engineers get rehired, maybe not," says Case Western's Susan Helper. "But you lose those working relationships; you lose all the time invested. ... [People] don't really have a sense of the things that have to get put in motion, when you have ten-year planning horizons for new engines. When you disrupt that, it's very costly."



Sounds awesome. The Volt has been in development for a decade, so let’s toss it out the window. It’s totally what we need with peak oil staring us in the face and companies like Tesla falling apart because of the credit crunch.

Or, you know, we could go with the “free market” plan. Let’s see how that would play out.

1. GM files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy
2. GM's Chinese partner, SAIC, buys much of GM (Buick, Chevy, Cadillac)
3. GM/SAIC starts importing Chinese-made Buicks and Chevys, undercutting Toyota's cost advantages
4. GM/SAIC owns the Volt technology, requiring US firms to lease it if they wanted to use it.



Sweet. There’s your free market at work. I’m sure the right wing would love our car companies and their technology being owned by the Chinese. Right? Hello?

The bailout needs to happen, but unlike the idiotic one we just gave to Wall Street, it should come with strings. First, fire every asshole working at the top of these companies. Get ‘em out. They are idiots and have been fighting against regulation and EPA standards that would have pushed them in the direction of profitability today. Fuck ‘em. Bring in someone who is innovative and has actually made a lot of money, like a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs. Make standards and new regulations part of the bailout deal. We have been at a political standstill for years because of the many lawmakers beholden to automakers and their employees. Now it is time to get what should have been done years ago done.

Of course, the right sees this as a way to destroy one of America’s most powerful unions, so they are against it. You’ll see a lot of the assholes who voted for the Wall Street bailout saying this is a bad idea because they want to kill the union. They are okay losing 3 million jobs for ideology. Meanwhile, they can’t handle the idea of universal healthcare and love spending shitloads of money in Iraq. They are amazing idiots. If you support the Iraq War and all it has cost, yet argue against a bailout, please explain to me why I shouldn’t be able to shit down your throat. Because I don’t see any difference between you and a toilet.

FearTheReaper is a writer, actor and stand up comedian. Check back each Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for more from FearTheReaper and read his blog, Stop All Monsters.

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TheFuckOffKid

TheFuckOffKid

NEWSWIRE

Australia

NOV 29, 2008 11:15 PM

attn_Hussein_ho said:

DevilsReject said:
good god close this thread.



why? Id like to see pete polly reach 20 pages of pointless and contentless rebuttal.


wait, he IS doing this for charity, right?



Everytime petepolly posts, God spares a kitten. (One of the ones he was going to call because someone masturbated.)

So each of pete's posts is equal and opposite to a wank. That seems fitting.

petepolly

petepolly

Antarctica
August 2008

NOV 29, 2008 11:29 PM

Stiles said:

petepolly said:

Stiles said:


I've already covered the airline and trucking industry numbers.



By loud assertions w/o any hard facts backing them other than that they got subsidies. That they got subsidies does not prove they cannot operate w/o them.



Again, with feeling:

The airline industry has been loss-making for most of the last 30 years. Lots of US airlines have gone tits-up in that time, far more than have survived. You can count the number of years when the entire yearly industry profit exceeded the dollar value of annual Federal subsidies on one hand, and the losses from 2001-3 more than obliterated the entire industry's profit since 1947, and the industry only survived thanks to a $15 billion bailout. Remember that?

The current level of Federal subsidies exceed $3 billion/year, on top of all taxes and fees paid by passengers and airlines. That is a fixed cost, no matter if ten thousand planes fly or two thousand planes fly. Jacking up the cost of tickets reduces the number of customers and the percentage of fixed costs assigned to each remaining customer goes up as the number of customers dwindle.

Everyone else seems to understand this just fine. Your failure of comprehension knows no bounds, apparently. Why bother replying to me if you have me on ignore, anyway?



You never bothered to address what I brought up about alternative technologies.

minimalism

minimalism

Argentina
OLD SKOOL

NOV 30, 2008 05:30 AM

petepolly said:

Stiles said:

petepolly said:

Stiles said:


I've already covered the airline and trucking industry numbers.



By loud assertions w/o any hard facts backing them other than that they got subsidies. That they got subsidies does not prove they cannot operate w/o them.



Again, with feeling:

The airline industry has been loss-making for most of the last 30 years. Lots of US airlines have gone tits-up in that time, far more than have survived. You can count the number of years when the entire yearly industry profit exceeded the dollar value of annual Federal subsidies on one hand, and the losses from 2001-3 more than obliterated the entire industry's profit since 1947, and the industry only survived thanks to a $15 billion bailout. Remember that?

The current level of Federal subsidies exceed $3 billion/year, on top of all taxes and fees paid by passengers and airlines. That is a fixed cost, no matter if ten thousand planes fly or two thousand planes fly. Jacking up the cost of tickets reduces the number of customers and the percentage of fixed costs assigned to each remaining customer goes up as the number of customers dwindle.

Everyone else seems to understand this just fine. Your failure of comprehension knows no bounds, apparently. Why bother replying to me if you have me on ignore, anyway?



You never bothered to address what I brought up about alternative technologies.



You never bothered to address reality.

Stiles

Stiles

Oakland, CA
November 2002

NOV 30, 2008 07:27 AM

petepolly said:

You never bothered to address what I brought up about alternative technologies.



Shift those goalposts as fast as you can and admit nothing, eh Petey?


Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about? You referenced an experimental World War two single person prop-engined fighter plane, which I didn't address because, practically speaking, flying cars are fucking irrelevant.

Looking forward to your protest that I didn't debunk monkeys flying out of your butt as a potential alternate flight technology.

petepolly

petepolly

Antarctica
August 2008

NOV 30, 2008 12:05 PM

Stiles said:

petepolly said:

You never bothered to address what I brought up about alternative technologies.



Shift those goalposts as fast as you can and admit nothing, eh Petey?



Who is shifting goalposts? I think you are by assuming that only one technology will work and that being the one that is easier for the feds to control.

The technology of big expensive airports with very long very expensive runways was assumed by federal regulators. For ~ 20 + years federal regulators assigned routes and airports to airlines and allowed essentially no competition, even now the amount of red tape you would have to cut through to build one tiny STOL airport is monumental.

Those are real costs CAUSED by federal regulations. We are being prevented from having good inexpensive modern air transportation BY FEDERAL REGULATION.

A free market system would use a vastly larger number of small airfields much more diffused around the country, not the small number of airports that require long drives to get to and long delays we see now.


Stiles said:

Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about? You referenced an experimental World War two single person prop-engined fighter plane, which I didn't address because, practically speaking, flying cars are fucking irrelevant.

Looking forward to your protest that I didn't debunk monkeys flying out of your butt as a potential alternate flight technology.



reference



The V-173 was a wood-and-fabric ship, single place, with 16-foot, three-bladed propellers powered by two 75-hp. engines. In its tests it flew as slowly as 20 mph. and as fast as 100 mph., and could land at a 45 degree angle at a speed under 20 mph. Its propellers turned over at about 600 rpm. at take-off and 450 rpm. at cruising speed; compare these with the take-off speed of 2,300 rpm. or more and cruising speed of 2,100 rpm. in conventional aircraft. It carried long, fixed landing gear which, no doubt, held down its top speed. The extreme length of the gear was necessary to hold the propeller tips clear of the ground, however. This explains the high angle at which the Flapjack has to hold her nose on take-off and landing.

The blue XF5U-1 is similar in design to the V-173, but with 19-foot, four-bladed propellers. It is all-metal with fully retractable landing gear and two Pratt-and-Whitney R-200-2, 1,800-hp. engines, so geared that one engine can turn both propellers in the event of failure of the other. Its reported speed range is from 40 mph. to 425 mph.; with water injection its top speed is said to reach almost 500 mph. In the future it is planned to install a single gas turbine in a nacelle behind the pilot’s cabin. With this single power plant operating both propellers, it should be possible for the Flapjack to hover at 0 speed and reach well over 500 mph.




Note that this aircraft is very different in concept from other aircraft of it's day, or of modern jets, and could be scaled up very well to make an airliner with passenger capacity like that of a small modern jet, say 100 passengers.

Given a take-off speed of 40 mph, and those huge props and the airflow over the wings driven by the big counter rotating props that do not allow the wing tip vortex losses seen in all other aircraft, jets and props alike, she can land and lift off on very, very short runways fully loaded at low speeds (safety improved as well), then fly at cruising speeds of ~450 to 500 mph to her next stop and let some passengers off and more on.

Who needs your monster big airports with all the subsidies? It would be much more convenient to the flying public to be picked up and delivered much closer to where they actually want to go, not to the location of some federal bureaucrat's choosing.





Stiles

Stiles

Oakland, CA
November 2002

NOV 30, 2008 12:21 PM

petepolly said:


Note that this aircraft is very different in concept from other aircraft of it's day, or of modern jets, and could be scaled up very well to make an airliner with passenger capacity like that of a small modern jet, say 100 passengers.




Now you're an aircraft engineer! Who knew?

You're shifting the goalposts, again, when your positions get sunk, again. You again diverge into some fantasyland in response, completely ignoring the implications of what you say.

Come on, fail better next time, because you've been firmly into the ridiculous for some time now.


petepolly

petepolly

Antarctica
August 2008

NOV 30, 2008 08:32 PM

Stiles said:

petepolly said:


Note that this aircraft is very different in concept from other aircraft of it's day, or of modern jets, and could be scaled up very well to make an airliner with passenger capacity like that of a small modern jet, say 100 passengers.




Now you're an aircraft engineer! Who knew?

You're shifting the goalposts, again, when your positions get sunk, again.




No babe, your shifting the goal posts by pretending that technology is irrelevant.

So now you claiming that lawyers who win popularity contests should decide which types of aircraft should be built, not aeronautical engineers?

On what possible rational basis do you think such lawyers are qualified to make technical decisions about which technology is better on railroads, automobile manufacture, or aircraft, or any technical subject?

Yet under your scheme of doing things that is how it is done all the time, some crooked lawyer with a hatfull of ignorance about mathematics or physics or real world building experience, writes a law against the public interest that gets people who contribute to his political campaign juicy government contracts to build things the public does not need.

Like airports with 10,000 foot runways, when STOL aircraft could be built for about as much per aircraft, that could use the taxi aprons of a such a field instead.

Like massive federal highway systems that put vast amounts of tax money into the hands of contractors who contributed to the "right" political campaigns, where the public was better served by private railroads that already existed.

Like bailouts for corrupt and incompetent car makers when the public is better served by allowing more imports of foreign made, largely technically superior, and more reliable autos.

Yours is the failure sir.




DevilsReject

DevilsReject

Cleveland, OH
February 2007

NOV 30, 2008 10:48 PM

Stiles said:

petepolly said:


Note that this aircraft is very different in concept from other aircraft of it's day, or of modern jets, and could be scaled up very well to make an airliner with passenger capacity like that of a small modern jet, say 100 passengers.




Now you're an aircraft engineer! Who knew?

You're shifting the goalposts, again, when your positions get sunk, again. You again diverge into some fantasyland in response, completely ignoring the implications of what you say.

Come on, fail better next time, because you've been firmly into the ridiculous for some time now.





no no no! We're supposed to build mini-airports every mile or so throughout the city. That way all the overburdened Air Traffic Controllers can become even more insanely overburdened with a jet or small plane taking off from sixty little locations rather than one large one. Fuck you and your governmental control with the Federal Aviation Administration, they're just trying to do silly things like keeping you from dying by having regulations for the Airline Industry. Fucking safety inspections for jets, who they fuck do they think they are? It's my jet, i will let it go unmaintained and crash into a highly populated area if i want!!!11!!!

then we can do away with those stupid skyscrapers because they would just get in the way of the airports. Also we'll need to do away with overhead powerlines and bury everything. Those cell phone towers? Get rid of them, they're in the way of my mini-airport.

That park at the end of my street, the one with all the trees and the one that just keeps sucking up government dollars to maintain? Do away with it, it's blocking my personal airport!!!

You have a lot of audacity Stiles, agreeing with noise ordinances set by the city upon airports. Who the hell cares if you want a good nights sleep and can't get one because planes are taking off and landing every ten seconds around your house, it's the libertarian way!! It's their property, they can do whatever they want with it! Fuck your city ordinances and corrupt city laws!!!

Petepolly knows what i fucking want in a car, he doesn't even have to ask me. I've bought Ford cars and trucks for the last 18 years or so, i am obviously fucking stupid for having liked Ford, i should have gone with a foreign made car because he says that's what is good for me! Fuck my personal tastes! Libertarians say whats good for me, and i take their word for it!

Don't forget he's a bearing expert/metallurgist and a biological chemist and an economist he knows all about labor relations and an expert when it comes to picking out real news as opposed to satire!, included in that is his vast knowledge in civil/structural/mechanical/electrical/all engineering.

How dare you question his authority! He knows all, he sees all, he is Superlibertarian, with answers to everything!

Shal

Shal

Los Angeles, CA
October 2002

NOV 30, 2008 11:11 PM

Oh my fucking god.


surreal

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