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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."
As radio announcer Thom Hartmann says, corporations want to privatize the profit and dump the liabilities on the commons. That's the ticket.
They have no money to pay for it. Even if the government didn't excuse the debt, it wouldn't ever be paid.
No, no, and no.
GM and Chrysler should have been left to die. Period. They're businesses sucked and so did they're products.
The only thing the government bailouts did was keep these bloated poorly run companies alive for a few more years - at the taxpayer's expense. In the meantime, the execs and union members have a few more years of being over paid - at the taxpayer's expense. A few years from now, they'll be back exactly where they were a few months ago and we'll be a few hundred billion dollars poorer.
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?
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.
It's funny how companies talk about free-market and ask the government not to regulate their market when the economy is good. But then when the economy goes bad, they put their tails between theirs legs and they ask for government help.
This is no longer a free-market A government owned car compagny? It feels like communism.
Votator.com implements a fair voting scheme (free
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.
Yes, in business, it's cruel to be kind in so many ways.
If they would have been left to normal bankruptcy, GM could have done the right thing, dropped it's union contracts, reshaped it dealers, etc.
Instead, the bankruptcy was railroaded through as quickly as possible to have the smallest impact on the unions. Ironically, this will be worse for the workers in the long run and worse for GM. Definitely worse for taxpayers as we're fleeced to shut down these companies rather than let nature take it's course.
What we're doing is the equivalent of feeding an injured deer in the winter. The deer still isn't going to survive and you wasted a lot of good food that could be used to feed more viable animals.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Actually, what's been accomplished is worse than that. What US and Canadian taxpayers have done is essentially underwrite the inevitable move of manufacturing vehicles by Chrysler and GM to China and Mexico. I guarantee you, in ten years they won't be running any plants in the US. There will probably be more Japanese cars being made here than American cars.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The money that the government used to save those "10's of thousands" of jobs didn't just magically appear. It was sucked out of the private-sector economy. Therefore, that money will not be spent on other goods and services, so other people lose their jobs. The jobs saved are easily identifiable and politically connected, while the compensating jobs lost are not. The vast majority of the jobs saved will probably be lost in a few years, so the net is a huge loss.