Everyone should be boycotting those cars anyway. The workers should all be looking for a totally new kind of management with a totally new kind of management structure and a totally new kind of car.

Despair should definitely NOT be the operative word here. The international community is looking for ways to save the North American investments (The market itself) from the hair brained schemes of it’s corporate elite.

Bet on it.

The last thing the world wants/needs is for the US “elite” to paint themselves into a corner and then freak out like a cornered rat — which is exactly what they ARE doing.

In the United States we have lots of unemployed, highly trained, engineers.

Our automobile prototypes, on the other hand, have reverted back to the 60s.

Ask around ask around ask around. You should be able to pull this off in 6 months or less NO PROBLEM.

By the same token, I’d expect certain parties in Europe to suddenly be getting pretty psyched. Everyone’s going to want to get rid of their 9 mpgs. The barriers to entry are ecstatically low. The trick is to deliver wtf more than anyone could possibly imagine.

Got that?

To estimate the size of the market, look at how many of those babies they’ve sold. Not just in the US. The Automobiles were developed to subsidize Big Oil. Don’t forget to factor in ALL the attending cost benefit variables.

All that being said, keep track of how poorly Commercial Papers are doing. Those Car Loans are not getting paid off.

This is actually a REALLY interesting “problem”. Don’tyouthink?

Kind of lends new meaning to the term “highway robbery”.

The UAW should make a bid for a takeover. Public offer to shareholders.

ah, this is what one of my bosses meant when he said “at least our company is doing better than gm”...heh, always best to shoot high I suppose.

Isn’t the UAW badly “infected” with counterrevolutionaries?

Perhaps the death rattles of GM will make room for Tesla Motors and other companies that refuse to throw their innovations down the black hole of the big 3 auto companies. EV-1 anyone?

That said, it is sad that the media doesn’t cover this story. Let’s hope there are resources to retrain or reuse the skills of displaced workers in other industries. Many manufacturing expertise will be wasted if we can’t turn these tens of thousands into solar panel makers, high efficiency engines, micro-power technologies, light-weight materials, etc.

These are skilled people. Give them work they can believe in! Seriously, with all the trained people there, Michigan should be the center of the new manufacturing universe. GM just stands in the way of that. They need to die.

“Many manufacturing expertise will be wasted if we can’t turn these tens of thousands into solar panel makers, high efficiency engines, micro-power technologies, light-weight materials, etc.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a new sort of FDR style New Deal where people were given jobs where those sorts of technologies were the focus…yeah, I know…

The plan for GM was to OFFER the buyouts to 70k workers. The plan is that some predictable percentage of them will accept and forfeit their jobs. Just because they’re offering buyouts to 70k employees doesn’t mean that they want 70k employees gone.

Post much, microdot?

OPEN QUOTE

General Motors, the world’s largest car maker, SAID yesterday IT WAS PLANNING to make 74,000 US workers redundant after it made a $38.7bn (£19.7bn) loss in 2007.

END OF QUOTE

Their business models, including the profit margins to which they and their shareholders have grown accustomed, are what’s really in trouble.

Are they planning to cut production, because the market is flooded and no one can pay for the GMCs they already have (except for Private Security Consultants) — or are they planning to port all the jobs to one of South America’s Feudal States?

OPEN QUOTE

worldwide vehicle sales had risen to 9.4m in 2007, the second best performance in the company’s 100-year history.

But its part-owned finance operation was caught up in the fallout from the sub-prime lending crisis.

END OF QUOTE

They’re using the so-called sub-prime lending crisis as an excuse to slaughter the cost of labor.

The real question is, what’s this going to do to the cost of a Private Security Consultant?

with this situation, general motors employees are complicit. they have seen where this was going for literally decades. but the money was too good. did they go to night school to reeducate themselves? did they research and seek alternative employment with a company that had better business practices and built a better product? naw.

now its too late to jump out of the car which is heading into the brick wall. not without serious injury.

so who’s fault is it? is it just the fault of the greedy CEO’s ?
or maybe, just maybe, everyone can stick a little blame in their pocket.

we can keep spilling scalding coffee in our crotch and blaming the person who sold it to us… but its still our crotch.

Night school indeed.

What about GM’s legacy costs for workers that have spent their careers dedicated to GM? Do you fault as well those trying to reach this goal?

Maybe the problem lies with the unfounded idea that the 70K that’ll be offered buyouts or early retirement are all uneducated and unskilled and incapable of alternative employment.

The “blame” certainly does not lie with those that accepted the employment offered them and performed their jobs according to the prevailing standards set by their employers for the wages and benefits they were promised.

Peace,