Free Market Pickup Trucks

The next time someone tells you that the free market will take care of everything, you can always point this article where the following statement is made:

Chrysler announced last November that it will slash production this year, but has insisted it will plow[sic] ahead with a redesign of its Dodge Ram pickup and has not adjusted production to deal with the recent slide in the U.S. market.

Are you watching? Are you paying attention? Gas in the United States is predicted to go to $7. Chrysler is scaling back SUV production. But they're still going ahead with a redesign of a pickup truck.

Why, why, why? They're stuck in the mentality of making lots of money off of giant vehicles. If, they surmise, they could only build an even bigger truck with an even larger engine, then they could save the whole business.

That's why we have governments. That's why governments should be making laws, not just to protect the environment, but to protect the auto worker jobs that we've subsidized and nurtured for so long from the stupidity of the monotone droning of the people who run the auto manufacturing companies.

Recommend this Post

Unions and Goodness

Unions have always been a mixed blessing. Historically, unions of workers have given us a lot of the things we hold dear. Reasonable working hours, weekends, benefits, living wages and worker's rights against abuse are all valuable things. When the rights and wages of the lowest people on the ladder are improved, we get two main benefits. One is that the wages of the rest of us go up. The other is that unions shift wealth toward the poorest which helps fuel our mass consumption driven economy as well as improve the education and health possibilities for those with lower incomes.

It's a much more reliable method of improving things than, say, giving massive tax cuts to corporations and wealthy people and hoping that this magically improves the lives of poor people through some unspecified mechanism (usually given the implication-laden title of "trickle down").

But unions have also used their heft to prevent innovation by mechanization, to help workers do their jobs poorly (thus "dealer prep") and to protect workers who are actually lousy at their jobs.

I read this article today and I found it idiotic.

GM is laying off 2600 workers at its truck and SUV plant and Buzz Hargrove, the super powerful union leader, has declared that he won't let it happen.

Mr. Hargrove insisted the U.S. market could not possibly have declined so sharply in such a short period of time that GM would have to break that agreement.

Is he insane? The market for SUVs and trucks could not have declined? Has he seen the price of gasoline? Of course North Americans are finally getting smarter and realizing that the giant vehicles they drive are expensive and irresponsible.

What is the argument here? That no one saw this coming? What you should have been doing, Mr. Union Leader, is negotiating for the past several years, on behalf of your brothers, to have those factories slowly converted over to efficient passenger cars in advance of this very, very obvious impending crisis.

It's that kind of behaviour that frustrates me. There is a place for the Union concept. Democracy simply can not react quickly enough to protect large numbers of workers from large scale abuse - especially with the penchant corporations have shown for trust violations. A Union or Federation can step in and threaten to halt production in order to extract fairness from the corporation rather than having all of the workers uproot their lives to change jobs.

But this is not it. This is not what the Union should be doing - attempting to stave off the unavoidable tide of change. I'm not too worried though, about the plight of these particular workers. I hear there are autoworking jobs elsewhere:

The dramatic shift in U.S. demand benefits Asian-based auto makers, which have dominated the passenger-car side of the business since the 1990s, when Detroit focused the bulk of its product development and investment on SUVs.

Recommend this Post

Pack of Lies about Haiti

AP can't stop lying about Haiti.

Haiti had a democratic government. The president of Haiti was a man named Jean-Bertrand Aristide who, besides being a priest who had worked with the poor for years, was legitimately elected. (The elections were legitimate according to everyone except the American government.)

By 2004, the Western powers had had enough of Aristide. He was raising corporate taxes, raising minimum wage and building hospitals and schools - especially medical schools - with the tiny amounts of extra taxes. This was unforgivable. It was causing a rise in the cost of Haitian labour and a rise in the cost of sugar. Corporate profits were at stake.

So the Canadian, French and American governments decided to have Aristide overthrown. They called it "Responsibility to Protect", which came with the clever acronym "R2P". R2P says, basically, that some people simply don't know how to run their own countries. R2P says that, when people democratically choose the wrong leaders, who propel them down the "wrong" path, we have the "responsibility" to "protect" them from their bad choices.

Bad choices include, especially, any intent to use tax money to improve the lot of citizens.

A generation or two ago, "R2P" was simply called "The White Man's Burden". All these silly, illiterate black and brown folk need us to take over their countries and show them how to be exploited ... er ... how to run their economies.

So the Americans exiled Aristide, closed the hospitals and took over the university as their barracks. We helped. So did the French. The people rioted when we tried to impose the rulership of the pro-business party, a party that had 5% of the vote in the last election. The rioting was put down by U.N. "peacekeepers" who declared that these were the vicious human-rights violating leftovers of the Aristide "regime". In actuality, they were the poor people who, after a century of Spanish and American occupation, had finally seen hope in Aristide.

Now look at the lies that the Associated Press continues to churn out. These people are eating dirt. Why? We subsidize our grain and tell them they can't subsidize their production. Then we sell our grain on their market and tell them they can't use tariffs. Free trade, y'know? So they can't make any money and what they do get leaves their country. And they eat dirt.

But AP would have you believe that "world food shortages" are the problem. What a ridiculous lie!

The protesters demand that the 9000 "peacekeepers" leave because they are blamed "in part" for the food shortage. They should be blamed in whole! Those peacekeepers, whom AP tells us "helped usher in a democratic transition", actually hold the status quo of starvation over the Haitian people. AP would have us believe that the protesters are a bunch of ignorant negro villagers lashing out in a stupid fashion when, in reality, they know exactly who is killing them: the international force that overrode - not "ushered in" - their democracy.

The article goes on to discuss Guy Phillipe, formerly Washington's hero in the "liberation" of Haiti, who is now wanted on drug charges. Oh, how fast Eurasia and Eastasia can be confused!

And, oh yes, the Western world "have focused too much on political stability without helping to alleviate poverty".

No. They've focused right where they wanted - on making Haiti in to a miserable, cheap labour market. Who cares how many people starve, as long as North Americans can buy three dollar t-shirts and gorge themselves on sugar until we're all obese diabetics.

Recommend this Post

Kyoto, CN Strike, Attack Ads

So many things are happening.

I've overjoyed at the sudden swing the Conservatives have taken toward environmental concerns. It's not something that they wanted to do, but rather something we forced them to do with strong public opinion. Suddenly, they discover, cutting emissions in half by 2050 doesn't seem to be satisfying enough. Of course, we'll have to continue to keep an eye on them to make sure they follow through. Rest assured that this is not a desirable outcome for the party of the rich, wealthy and oil-invested.

On another note, there is a strike going on of all the CN rail workers. If you were to read only the news, you would think that the cause for this strike is that workers, who earn an "average" (look that word up, you don't actually know what it means) of $75k, want a 4% raise. However, if you look more closely, the 4% is only a response to the management's offer of 3%. The problem? Management's offer also includes clauses which allow them to overwork their employees. Would you want to ride a train operated by a guy who works 12 hours, gets 8 hours off, then is required to work 12 more hours? Not I.

I caught a couple of the Conservative attack ads on television. Mostly they're highlighting how the Liberals never really did anything for the environment. I suppose we're supposed to believe that the Conservatives will.

I don't believe any of them. As a citizen, I believe that I have a duty to avoid believing them, just as I have a duty to keep an eye on them.

They are politicians. They care about looking good, raising funds and getting reelected. They do not care about any of the actual issues in their platforms. If you start your analysis of politics from this angle, it makes much more sense. When did the Conservatives suddenly become environmentalists? When we forced the issue. Politicians will only do what we want if he hammer it down their throats and, even then, they will try to get out of it. They'll make laws with loopholes. They'll underfund programs.

NAFTA is probably the best example. The PCs implied that it meant duty-free cross border shopping, when it really meant forcing Canadian workers to compete with sweatshops in third world countries. The plan went ahead, the corporate field were sown with our money, and our elected officials reaped the rewards when they left office.

That's their plan - sneak in to office with some "platform", rig the financial game for their friends, escape to a life of luxury. The only way to stop them is to pay more attention.

Recommend this Post