TARP Town U S A by D T Pollard

Author:D T Pollard [Pollard, D T]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780982460603
Amazon: 0982460600
Publisher: Book Express
Published: 2009-05-12T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12 _______________________________

♦

It seems class warfare was declared some time ago in various corporate boardrooms and no one informed the blue-collar rank and file workers who actually build things in this country. Think about the difference in attitude and treatment of the American automobile workforce versus Wall Street executives. If you labored on a factory floor for an American automobile company instead of a Wall Street trading floor for an investment firm, then to hell with you. The “to hell with you message” was coming from elected government officials who seemed to be representing companies from foreign countries. The shortsightedness of this approach was stunning. As mentioned earlier in this book, maintaining a significant manufacturing capability is vital to the national security of this country. The only thing apparently vital to the mostly southern lawmakers, whose states had foreign vehicle assembly plants on their soil, was getting re-elected.

The mass psychology of this episode was exposed. Factory workers who represented the one time backbone of the American middle class were portrayed as low-skilled individuals with pay far above what they deserved. How did blue-collar workers become the villains? It was a brilliant piece of spin selling. First spread an outrageous piece of misinformation about the hourly earnings of the automobile worker being over $70 per hour. The second piece was to build up anger against a boogeyman, the United Auto Workers Union. The third and final component was to whip up public anger against the tone-deaf automobile executives who flew into Washington D C on three separate corporate jets. There was almost a demand for the executives of the General Motors and Chrysler to grovel for their government loans while billions were shoveled into the furnaces of banks and financial companies. When did creating real wealth by building tangible products become beneath contempt.

General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler were suffering from a double dose of trouble. The fear of potential car buyers regarding the economy dried up demand and unit sales dropped. Combine the drop in demand with the higher difficulty of those seeking to buy vehicles in obtaining vehicle loans and it was easy to see the severity of the problem for American automobile manufacturers.

Near the end of April 2009, General Motors announced that it would go into a selfinduced coma and shut down 13 assembly plants for up to 11 weeks during the summer of 2009. The purpose of that massive shutdown was to allow inventory levels of vehicles to sell down to manageable levels. In other words, their pipeline was full and it didn’t make economic sense to build additional finished product. There will be a ripple effect as some already weak automobile industry suppliers may not survive the temporary loss of business.

One result of GM’s cutbacks was the decision to send the 73-year-old car brand Pontiac to join Oldsmobile as a relic of their corporate past. Even with steep cutbacks, GM was not able to avoid going into bankruptcy and filed on June 1, 2009.

Chrysler went into chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 30, 2009, and agreed to sell its assets to Italian automaker Fiat.

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