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GM Gets To Dump Its Polluted Sites
ParticleGirl writes with this excerpt from the Detroit Free Press:
"GM's unusual, government-engineered bankruptcy allowed the Detroit automaker to emerge as a new company — and to shed billions in liabilities, including claims that governments had against GM for polluting. Environmental liabilities estimated at $530 million were left with the old GM, which has only $1.2 billion to wind down. Administrative fees and other claims will soak up that money, and state and local officials told the Free Press they fear the cleanups will be shortchanged. ... The New York Attorney General's Office, seeking to protect environmental claims for cleanup at Massena and other sites, argued that federal and state regulatory requirements should not be eliminated by a bankruptcy sale. ... But [US Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber] ruled otherwise."
Both GM ans Chrysler were let off the hook on the 10's (or it is hundreds) of billions that they owed. Then we forced Chrysler to be sold to Fiat for next to nothing. Fiat Will keep it open for th next 2 years and then close all American plants (unless some are newer than theirs) after absorbing the IP. GM is currently forcing their partners to move operations to China, rather than keep them here. Chinese gov. is insisting on it (jingoism at its best). Worse, we are STILL subsidizing them with loans as well as CARS garbage. What should have happened is that GM and Chrysler SHOULD have been broken up into multiple companies and than allowed to compete. The problem with both of these was BAD CEOS. OTH, if you break them up, then you have multiple CEOs, which is likely to leave at least several of them doing OK to great. As it is, these companies will be gone within 5 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Heads you alone win, tails you and everyone else loses.
You sure are getting things done.
As radio announcer Thom Hartmann says, corporations want to privatize the profit and dump the liabilities on the commons. That's the ticket.
is paved with good intentions. Notice to government officials and their supporters: QUIT TRYING TO FIX STUFF, YOU ONLY MAKE IT WORSE.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
They have no money to pay for it. Even if the government didn't excuse the debt, it wouldn't ever be paid.
So if the government is willing to do this for a company that is going into bankruptcy, imagine what they are doing for industries and companies that turn a profit.
This is just another tell tale sign that our government has been bought and paid for.
However, because Americans allowed Washington (and Barack Hussein Obama) to effectively nationalize GM, Americans received the worst of all worlds. Washington poured billions of dollars into the company, and that money comes from future taxpayers. GM retains its rotten management although some talking heads at the very top of the pyramid were replaced: that management misread the market and failed to steer research and development toward highly efficiently small cars when gas prices were skyrocketing. Unions with their gold-plated medical insurance (now paid by the government) retain a stranglehold on the company, now literally owning part of GM.
Worst of all, we discover that the "new" GM will not be paying the costs of cleaning up the environmental pollution that the "old" GM caused.
We could have avoided all these problems if either Toyota or Renault had purchased the relevant bits of GM. Why do Americans "fear" working for a Japanese or French boss so much they are willing to nationalize a car company?
They declared bankruptcy.. the company failed and went into bankruptcy protection in an attempt to salvage something.
Their shareholders (owners) lost billions of dollars, and the GM of old is no more.
Yes, it's important to recognize the responsibilities of old-GM that are not being addressed now that they are gone. But, this should not be surprising, and it's not that unusual either.
come one come all, everything must go! pretty soon the only thing left inside the usa will be weapons and software and not the software i will let on my PC because it comes from a convicted monopolist in Redmond Wa.
While the bankrupcy itself was unusual, it's not unusual at all for corporations to receive relief on environmental cleanup and associated fines during bankruptcy. State and Federal governments ends up with the tab for the cleanup.
And since when does the federal government own up to things?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
welcome to life in the Third World, muhfukkas!
Hopefully the EPA will not let GM slide this time around. Mandatory vigorous enforcement at all their current sites. So that when GM declares bankruptcy again they won't be leaving as big a mess.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Wall Street, instead of having to wait for Reagan's tax breaks to make money found a new comer who accelerated the plan buy just paying them the money upfront.
GM and Chrysler were bailed out for Wall Street and the Unions. Though don't confuse Unions with the rank and file, I am talking about the leadership who decides where the money is spent and offer muscle to intimidate anyone the administration doesn't like (see AFL-CIO's new leader who thinks murder and violence are fine if you can get away with it - or pay it off).
GM had the ultimate sweet heart deal of the two rescues. Not only did they get out of cleaning up all their pollution they also got a tax bump by keeping the tax write offs from bad GM to prop up new GM. Hence companies which play by the book and make sensible deals like Ford get doubly screwed.
Send Washington a message, avoid GM and Chrysler products. We are being run over by the goons in Washington and since our vote counts for very little the next year the only fight we have left is our pocketbooks
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The profitability of the 'new' GM requires no explanation. $533M in environmental cleanup is a negligible expense by comparison to the value of the brands GM has developed globally. If the government was willing to buy out GM entirely, obviously they would be willing to absorb the clean-up costs to facilitate GM's survival under other ownership. The costs were inevitably going to fall on taxpayers no matter who bought GM, but only by buying out GM do taxpayers stand to get anything back. Anyone wishing a company that has employed millions of Americans through to retirement to be sold to a foreign corporation over some messy dump sites has a tainted sense of patriotism. Even critics of the Obama administration should praise them for keeping GM American.
And the term "Barack Hussein Obama" is the undisputed flag of politically bigoted. Please continue using it to openly declare your ignorance and irrational paranoia.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
The fundamental basis of Chicago economics (which we've been using for the past 40 years) is that people and thus businesses are rational actors and make decisions that are best for their own interests.
That's pernicious fucking bullshit. People and companies make irrational decisions all the time. Consider the EPA cleanup mess: according to the idea of rational expectations, the prospect of having to pay for an EPA cleanup would be a strong deterrent to polluting. In reality, nobody cares, because the person who decides whether to pollute will be gone by the time the consequences of a decision to pollute become apparent. Thus, the company as a whole makes a rather irrational decision to pollute regardless.
You need proactive enforcement to stop these kinds of violations. Generally, trying t stop a given behavior by threatening companies (or people) with consequences over a time horizon of a few years is completely ineffective in stopping that behavior.
From Wikipedia's General Motors:
Owner(s): United States Treasury (61%) Government of Canada/Ontario (11.7%) United Auto Workers (17.5%)
Lesson: industry can ultimately escape enviros by failing into the arms of government and its labor/union constituents.
Today only federal level politicians can still trump enviros in the US; everyone else has to move to China.
"If we let them, they would lower wages to nothing"
That ship has sailed. All those jobs will be moved to China anyway. Paying a few billion to prop up GM is a drop in the bucket compared with the massive economic & political forces at work to ensure this happens.
After that, I suspect the unions will look for direct government subsidies without all the legal niceties of running the subsidies through the legal fiction of a car company called GM.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Or whatever it's called.The US people are now completely crispy fried when it comes to our debt. At this point I just laugh and cry a little every time I hear about a new 'program' or 'bill' or 'solution' that comes out of the administration's or Congress's mouth.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
U.S. Presidents are routinely called by their full name, or at least their first & last plus initials
George W Bush (an initial, but still)
Dwight D Eisenhower (another initial)
George Herbert Walker Bush
William Jefferson Clinton
Richard Milhouse Nixon
It's neither common nor uncommon to call presidents by their full name. I think you're just being sensitive, really.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
And I thought at reading the headline "GM Gets To Dump Its Polluted Sites" that their web servers are compromised beyond repair ...
Why the hell else do you think he's being so helpful to GM and Chrysler?
You don't really think a politician who publicly opens a Stasi-inspired snitch line (flag@whitehouse.gov) so you can inform about anyone opposed to a massive government power grab over the US health care industry (gee, just like the power grabs in finance and automotive industries....) doesn't expect to get SOMETHING out of saving the executives of those companies billions of dollars worth of bacon?
Why are you so ashamed of our president and his middle name?
Seriously, you have issues.
This is a classic example of externalities being dumped onto the community. No matter what happens the taxpayer will bare the burden of cleaning the toxicity of GM's effluent be it a federal or state government. What's worse is I doubt there are any obligations on the "new GM" to improve their practices to avoid the exact same scenario in the future.
Clearly our (international) systems of corporate governance is so outdated that requires significant review and improvement to bring it into the 21st century.
This is not capitalism any more it's corporatism, if it was capitalism you wouldn't hear phrases "Too big to fail" you would be hearing "You should have managed your business better". What I don't understand is why individual welfare that mitigates social problems such as preventing people from falling into crime is discouraged and corporate welfare that encourages white collar crime is applauded(???).
For there to be future sustainable business models they must go beyond environmental sustainability, which is the entry point. We are going to have to see business models emerge that are fiscally sustainable, socially sustainable and have agencies with enough teeth to re-write or revoke corporate charters if business does not behave like a good corporate citizen. I don't just mean the veneer of 'corporate responsibility' but measurable responsibility as in 'how much waste was re-processed' and liability that reaches right back into those who made and funded the type of decisions that leave communities hundreds of millions of dollars of externalities to contend with. In essence that is converting taxpayer money into shareholder dividends by forcing those externalities onto the taxpayer.
If we don't we are going to find ourselves in a real depression when the real costs of these externalities are realised, capitalism a spent economic force and corporatism too big to sustain.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
A lot of excellent researcher aren't best with English grammar and spelling, because it is not their primary language to begin with, and you can only go so far with tool automatic grammar and spelling correction, and bad spelled but existing word aren't always detected (like the infamous your for you're). That said really sloppy spelling (missing vowel ; word which don't exists and would be signalled by a spell checker) is not excusable.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
And yes, Toyota or any other car company can be put in the exact same situation if their unions get the kind of control they had over GM.
Well no, because in other countries the taxpayers pick up the cost of health care and old age retirement. Every taxpayer pays for it. In the USA, only big corporations with unions pay for health care.
This is my sig.
Horseshit. The unions were much more complicit in the downfall of GM and Chrysler
If unions are so terrible, then why is it that the heavily unionized blue states continue to subsidize the non-union red states? If you wanted to actually look at facts, you would find that the state of Michigan has been paying out far more in federal taxes than it receives in benefits, and that's all so states like Alabama can turn around and build Japanese car plants. Bottom line is, the real traitors aren't the guys in the union, but the assholes that buy Japanese cars and throw other people's tax money on the table to accelerate the foreign occupation of the USA. I don't get how red states that are so against immigration have no problem watching every domestic industry go belly up. I guess the south must just want to be a bunch of useless white only morons.
This is my sig.
"why do you brain-dead morons keep making such a big deal about his name? "
The irony of this statement is rich and deep, like the soil in an Iowa cornfield.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need that, pay for it.
>The purchaser would have assumed all of GM's liabilities.
No, it wouldn't. That's just plain *wrong* and has no basis in the real world.
You're not as far off with:
>Of course, the sale price would have been set to reflect the costs of these liabilities.
Without the government intervention, GM would have been liquidated, probably in Chapter 11, but possibly in 7. The assets would have been purchased for the best price that could have been obtained, and the creditors (including environmental cleanup) paid pro rata. Some claims (priority claims) would be paid before others.
When a third party bought an asset, whether it be an engine patent or a manufacturing plant, it would take it *without* being liable for GM's liabilities. Whether the assets were sold individually or as a lot would depend upon which way the better total price could be obtained.
Let's face it, with assets of $1T and liabilities of $2T (made up figures), noone would buy it, not even for $1 (goodwill & future sales based upon the past are included in assets here). You just couldn't sell it, and the creditors would receive nothing. They're better off with the assets being sold for what could be obtained.
The real screwy part here is that the pension plans come out smelling like roses. They'd have received nothing in a liquidation, but with this plan they're getting pretty much everything they're owed, unlike the rest of the creditors, who get pennies on the dollar. The secured creditors, those whose loans were backed by assets, are getting quarters on the dollar, whereas the shareholders--the ones who owned GM--have been completely wiped out (as they should be).
hawk, esq.
It doesn't matter if you "accept" people using his middle name:
IT'S A LEGAL FACT.
Sheesh. You're like the guys claiming that Microsoft isn't a monopoly. THEY ARE LEGALLY A MONOPOLY.
Bush may not have been a good president, but he had a thick skin. People like you are accomplishing the impossible: You're making me feel nostalgic for Bush. You're amazing.
Or, corruption.
Sorry, this oft-heard argument is, actually, quite retarded. "Keeping people employed" is not the goal. "Keeping people doing something useful" is what we ought to aim for... There is a fine distinction here, which is not well-known to people, because it only appears, when the government begins to meddle with capitalism — we are blessed with such situations being fairly rare. Private businesses are unlikely to keep employing useless workers, which is why we tend to think, "employed" and "productive" are equivalent — they aren't...
In this case, even the most famous example of the government paying one person to fill up holes dug by another person paid to dig them would've been less useless (and less damaging to all, including environment), than keeping GM alive.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
.....Volkswagen?