White House to GM - Prepare for Bankruptcy

Source: Huffington Post/ Washington Post

U.S. to Steer GM Toward Bankruptcy
Filing Expected as Chrysler Set to Emerge

By David Cho, Peter Whoriskey and Kendra Marr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 22, 2009

Under the GM draft bankruptcy plan, the company would receive just short of $30 billion in additional federal loans, a source said. A cash injection that large would boost the total U.S. investment in GM to nearly $45 billion. (By David Zalubowski -- Associated Press)


The Obama administration is preparing to send General Motors into bankruptcy next week under a plan that would give the automaker tens of billions of dollars more in public financing as the company seeks to shrink and reemerge as a global competitor, sources familiar with the discussions said


Also at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052104467.html?nav=rss_email/components

and all at our expense. Ain't life grand? :sarcasm:

what else is new?

Q3JR4

Buicks for China---Love it.

</sarcasm>

50% of a company that can't turn a profit?

If GM was anything but a horrible investment, private investors would be buying it up.


This will not end well.

There are lesser considerations as well but this is really about giving the unions the shaft.

The greed of the unions helped bring the company down!

GM wasn't brought down by unions, it was brought down by management who made poor decisions for decades.

Management basically stopped being "car guys" a long time ago and became "bean counters" who basically knew little about the product and cared less, a recipe for disaster in business.

The unions got nothing that management did not agree to in the first place. Management certainly looks out for itself (eg Golden Parachutes), why should labor not look out for itself also?

Do you work for less than you can get just out of the goodness of your heart and a warm feeling about the company you work for?

They stood by the management that fired their members and outsourced their jobs. There seem to be two possibilities to me.

One, they were immensely stupid in thinking that a grateful GM management would keep jobs in the US because the UAW supported the bosses in their hour of need. That's the kind explanation.

Or two, UAW's leaders wanted some measure of control of the company, a seat at the eventual ownership of the company, and to hell with the jobs of their union brothers.

Either way, the rank and file lost.

...as was designing and building a bunch of cars that nobody would buy.


The only employee issue that helped bring GM down was its pension costs...and that's only because GM raided pension money instead of fully funding pensions.

Do you realize that if it wasn't for unions, you wouldn't have a 40 hour week, vacation time, overtime, health benefits or any other labor right. People died fighting greedy corporations go get most all Americans those rights whether they belong to a union or not. Let them bust the unions and guess who'll be next in line for exploitation by their companies?

Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912...

--excerpt--
That evening, independent of the earlier demonstration, Anna LoPizzo, a woman striker, was killed when police tried to break up a picket line. The strikers said she was shot by a Lawrence police officer. Nevertheless, Ettor and Giovannitti, who were three miles away talking to a meeting of German workers, were arrested as "accessories to the murder" and charged with inciting and provoking the violence. They were refused bail and imprisoned for eight months without trial. In April, Joseph Caruso, an Italian striker, was arrested and jailed in an attempt by Lawrence police to find the man who had fire the fatal shot.

Martial law was enforced following the arrest of the two I.W.W. strike leaders. City officials declared all public meetings illegal, and Lawrence authorities called out twenty-two more militia companies to patrol the streets. A militiaman's bayonet killed a fifteen-year old Syrian boy in another clash between strikers and police.

The arrest of Ettor and Ciovannitti was aimed at disrupting the strike. However, the I.W.W. sent Bill Haywood to Lawrence, and with him came I.W.W. organizers William Trautmann, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and, later, Carlo Tresca, an Italian anarchist. More than 15,000 strikers met Haywood at the railroad station and carried him down Essex Street to the Lawrence Common, where he addressed a group of 25,000 strikers. Group by group, they sang the "Internationale" for him in their various tongues. Looking down from the speaker's stand and seeing the young strikers in the crowd, Haywood roared in his foghorn voice: "Those kids should be in school instead of slaving in the mills."

Throughout the strike, Haywood urged strikers to maintain an attitude of passive resistance. But this took many forms. One innovation in strike technique was an endless chain picket line of thousands of strikers who marched through the mill districts wearing white arm bands which read, "Don't be a scab." Large groups locked arms on the sidewalks and passed along the business streets. When this tactic was disrupted by the police, huge crowds of mill workers would move in and out of stores, not buying anything. As the acting head of the police later testified in Washington, "They had our shopkeepers in a state of terror; it was a question whether or not they would shut up their shops."

By far the most dramatic episode of the strike involved sending the strikers' children to sympathetic families in other cities, a measure of strike relief which bad been used in Europe by French and Italian workers. About 120 children left Lawrence on February 10 and were met at the station in New York City by 5000 members of the Italian Socialist Federation and the Socialist Party singing the "Internationale" and "The Marsaillaise." The youngsters were placed in homes which had been selected by a women's committee of New York sympathizers. Margaret Sanger, later famous for her work in birth control, was one of the nurses who accompanied the children on the train to New York City. She testified before a congressional committee in March: "Out of the 119 children, only four had underwear on ... their outerwear was almost in rags . . . their coats were simply torn to shreds ... and it was the bitterest weather we have had this winter."

A few weeks later, ninety-two more children arrived in New York City and, before going to their temporary foster homes, paraded with banners down Fifth Avenue. Alarmed at the publicity this exodus was receiving, the Lawrence authorities ordered that no more children could leave the city. On February 24 when a group of 150 more children made ready to leave for Philadelphia, fifty policemen and two militia companies surrounded the Lawrence railroad station. They tore children away from their parents, threw women and children into a waiting patrol wagon, and detained thirty of them in jail. A member of the Philadelphia Women's Committee testified under oath:

When the time came to depart, the children, arranged in a long line, two by two in an orderly procession with the parents near at hand, were about to make their way to the train when the police . . . closed in on us with their clubs, beating right and left with no thought of the children who then were in desperate danger of being trampled to death. The mothers and the children were thus hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck and even then clubbed, irrespective of the cries of the panic-stricken mothers and children. We can scarcely find words with which to describe this display of brutality.

We're gonna lose money. For me, it is part of my livelihood in retirement. I hope people understand that little people can be bondholders. We're not all big money guys...

It may be a horrible investment in a business sence, but it is necessary for national defense in my opinion.

Seriously...if GM fails, demand for vehicles will exceed supply and somebody will increase capacity (and hire workers) to build them.

GM is NOT vital to national defense.

equipment should we get into a real war?

Or do you think that Honda and Toyota will oblige?

Or maybe the Chinese?

...whether by GM or Ford or Toyota.

Do you really think that another company wouldn't step in to fill the demand?

It's been obvious that bankruptcy was going to happen and yet they insisted on the two month "we might be able to avoid it" charade. The sooner they're in bankruptcy, the sooner they can get out.

an outsider, staring to look at the books,
will need time to decide if GM (or anything else)
is viable

with that said,
I urge bankruptcy to move quickly

your preferred stock for 1 share of common stock. They have to get 90% of us bondholders to agree to it andhave a deadline of May 26. No way will they get the 90%. It is ridiculous. We're better off before a bankruptcy judge.

I think they were just trying to impress the Obama Administration with how zealously they are trying to get rid of their debt. I can't believe that Obama would want bondholders to get so royally screwed. He said a few months ago that everyone would have to take a "haircut" and he specifically included bondholders in that statement. But this deal ain't no haircut. More like a beheading...

No other words to describe this.

we can subsidize both ends of this -- manufacture and purchase --

Let's go --

Break the alliance between the car manufacturer and the oil industry -- !!1

makes so damn much sense. NOT>

Lots of good people worked and and still work for GM.

AIG is just a huge corporate donor.

Which one gets bailed?

I don't feel too warm and fuzzy over either AIG or GM.

into this country when they're closing plants and laying off workers in the U.S.? In any case, you might find the article at this link interesting.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/5323274/GM-plans-to-export-cars-from-China-to-the-US.html

"A plan to shift a greater proportion of the struggling car-maker's production overseas is still being negotiated with US politicians, who have already lent GM $15.4bn (£10.18bn) in order to keep it afloat and safeguard its 90,000 US workers.

However, a spokesman for GM in Shanghai said it was "only a matter of time" before vehicles made in China are imported into the company's home market, in another blow to the US car industry."

Because our crappy trade policies give companies the incentive to build overseas. When Obama told GM to become competitive with foreign companies, everyone, including him, knew what the meant (cut benefits/wages to unions and ship production out of the US). Our local news was recently discussing that GM is currently selling small vehicles at a loss just of meet fuel efficiency standards. If we changed our trade policies so GM could afford to build these smaller vehicles here, it would help fix the problem. Until then, GM is doing actually what the Obama administration has asked of them.

GM isn't importing cars from China.

BTW, the Chinese are having huge issues with unemployment.

in the article - will soon be importing cars to the U.S. from China. And where do you think many of the car parts come from? As for Chinese unemployment, that's because our economy has tanked and even we can't afford their super cheap stuff. I don't know why you aren't bothered that millions and millions of manufacturing jobs are long gone and now U.S. carmakers are following the herd after getting taxpayer money. IMHO, it's immoral. We're becoming a nation of burger flippers.

If you had bothered to read my comment, you would've realized I was advocating for the same position as you. I was pointing out that as a country, we are telling companies, automotive and non-automotive, to move manufacturing out of the US. We make it cheap for companies to build products overseas and then ship them back here. Obama, as well as many other progressives, are complaining that GM needs to be competitive with foreign companies. This involves the very things you (and I) are unhappy about, such as shipping jobs overseas. If we change our trade/economic policies to give GM the incentive to build all their vehicles here, maybe GM won't build cars in China that are meant for the US market.


I'm very bothered "that millions and millions of manufacturing jobs are long gone." My state has been devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Our economy has been in recession for over 8 years and we have lost almost as many jobs as Louisiana did after Hurricane Katrina (except we didn't get federal aid).

Let's screw the older people, that's the ticket.

They vote Republican, right?

NOT.

I was simply stating that GM is doing exactly what we're asking them to do. If we want to change this race to the bottom, it will require more than telling GM to "become competitive."

What's more, upthread someone commented on the "bean counters" ruining GM. Was that you?

From what I've read, Obama has put a media-company investment banker plus a bunch of management consultants to manage GM.

It seems that no one who knows autos or heavy manufacturing is involved.

That's a recipe for disaster.

I'm extremely disappointed.

There's a lot of reasons as to why GM is in trouble: trade policies, the burden of provide health care, GM being late to produce hybrids and over-reliance on SUV sales, for example. I'm not sure anyone knows what they are doing which is scary.

but Wagner was a finance guy, and I think that some of the bad decisions on which vehicles to manufacture rest on his shoulders.

I agree with you on trade policies and health care.

:hi:

Make that three

Enough with these fucking bailouts. Tax payer money should not be used to bailout businesses.

But $30 Billion to GM is where you draw the line? Transparent. :hi:

all my life I'd been dreaming of the day I could finally get a Corvette...Some dreams die harder than others...