Auto Bailout, yea or nea?

[LeMansX5]

Anybody thinks there is a good reason Ford should have Mercury brand?

2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan.....same engines etc. but different look.

[FSETH]

Originally Posted by LeMansX5

Anybody thinks there is a good reason Ford should have Mercury brand?

2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan.....same engines etc. but different look.

Nope. There is no need for GMC trucks either.

I think Mercury, GMC, Hummer and Chrysler need to go the way of the Dodo. They are all irrelevant, IMO.

[AzNMpower32]

There's a lot of accounting behind the decision whether to axe a brand. As we learned in Accounting class, if GM or any one of the three simply eliminates an unprofitable brand, the fixed costs and overhead end up being reallocated to other remaining brands because they are unavoidable and must be paid out. As a result, a Death Spiral begins as the remaining brands shoulder a greater share of the costs, leading to losses, which then tempts another brand cut, reallocates fixed costs to remaining brands, etc....

[Wagner]

Multiple and similar brands are 10% of the problem, the other 90% is spelled United Auto Workers.

Mitt Romney had the best comments I heard so far:

"Chapter 11 would allow them to restructure their labor deals"


Brand reduction is definitely a step in the right direction, but until build costs are lowered the "Big 3" can not compete. It is impossible. It simply costs them more to build a car than it does a foreign company. And you don't have to graduate from "Warren Buffet's Econ Course 101" to understand that is a major problem.

[Krimson X]

Originally Posted by LeMansX5

Anybody thinks there is a good reason Ford should have Mercury brand?

2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan.....same engines etc. but different look.

I've always felt that Mercury was a wasted brand. Never understood the targetr market. The only thing good from Mercury was the '67 Coug.

everything else was a rebadge of existing Ford models.

[FSETH]

Originally Posted by Eric5273

As for the union, they have nothing to do with the problems the domestic automakers are having.

How can you seriously say that?

[LeMansX5]

Originally Posted by FSETH

How can you seriously say that?

His buddies are at UAW.

[blondboinsd]

Michael Moore On The Issue At Hand: I typically dislike him but I think he has many great points in this interview.


(CNN) -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reversed plans Wednesday to hold a test vote on an automakers' bailout bill on Thursday. Reid had planned to move on legislation that would have taken $25 billion from the $700 billion already approved for Wall Street and diverted it to the big three automakers.


Filmmaker Michael Moore says the collapse of General Motors could mean the loss of millions of jobs.

CNN's Larry King talked Wednesday with Michael Moore, a filmmaker with deep ties to the auto industry. Moore's father worked for General Motors for 35 years.

In 1989, Moore became an international figure for his film, "Roger and Me," which centered on the declining auto industry in his hometown of Flint, Michigan and the ripple effect on the town's residents.

The following is an edited version of the interview.

Larry King: Michael, was (the movie) prophetic?

Michael Moore: When I made that film, there were still 50,000 people working at General Motors in Flint. I mean they had eliminated 30,000 jobs, but there were still some jobs there.

Today, I think there's less than 12,000 working in the area, so it has devastated Flint. Flint was one of the first towns to go. When I made that movie almost 20 years ago, I hoped that the film would be a warning to other cities that this corporation was intent upon removing jobs from this country and taking them to Mexico and Brazil and other places.

When I made that movie that year, General Motors made a profit of over $4 billion, and they were still laying off people simply to make a bit more money, the people who helped to build the company, the workers in their hometown of Flint, Michigan, they just forgot about them and took the money and ran.

King: Since the principle was, 'We'll have the cars built elsewhere and many of the cars are built elsewhere now,' what went wrong if they were paying less out of the country to build them?


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Moore: Well, what really went wrong is that General Motors has had this philosophy from the beginning that what's good for General Motors is good for the country. So, their attitude was we'll build it and you buy it. We'll tell you what to buy. You just buy it.

Eventually, the consumer got smart and said, 'You know what, I'd like a car that gets a little better gas mileage. I'd like a car that's safer on the road,' so they started to buy other cars. General Motors still wouldn't change. They still kept building the wrong cars, and more and more people stopped buying them. Watch how Moore feels about auto bailout »

At a certain point, you know, General Motors lost such a large part of the market share that there probably was a point of no return.

Now, here we are on the verge of this collapse. If General Motors collapses, then there goes hundreds of thousands of jobs, if not millions of jobs of the ripple effect of this.

King: And the same is true of Ford and Chrysler?

Moore: Absolutely. I'll tell you, it was hilarious just watching these CEOs there (Tuesday) and (Wednesday) testifying in Congress, saying that, you know, that the problem wasn't theirs, you know, the cars they were building. It was the financial situation that we're in now. Watch automakers get grilled on Capitol Hill »

The problem is the cars they've been building. They've never listened to the consumers. They've just gone about it their own wrong way. I'll tell you, you know, I'm of mixed mind about this bailout, Larry, because I don't think these companies, with these management people, should be given a dime, because that's just going to be money going up in smoke or off to other countries.

GM is currently building a $300 million factory in Russia right now to build SUVs, right outside of St. Petersburg. That's where your money's going to go, no matter what they say.

King: Why (do you have) mixed feelings?

Moore: Well, because we can't let all these people lose their jobs because of the bad decisions, the stupid decisions made by the management of these auto companies. I think what has to happen here is that Congress needs to pass some legislation, and our president-elect needs to do what Roosevelt did.

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When Roosevelt came in and when World War II faced the country, Roosevelt said to General Motors and Ford, you're not going to build cars anymore. You're going to build airplanes and tanks and guns and the things that we need for this war because we have a national crisis. General Motors had to do what Roosevelt told them they had to do.

King: What do you want them to do now?

Moore: President-Elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we're going to use this money to save these jobs, but we're not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer.

We're going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reigns on these companies. They're to build mass transit. They're to build hybrid cars. They're to build cars that use little or no gasoline. iReport.com: New emissions standards, other improvements needed



We're facing a national crisis, not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of the polar ice caps are melting. There's only so much oil left under the Earth. We're going to run out of that, if not in our children's time, our grandchildren's time.

There's got to be a plan set out to find other ways to transport ourselves in other ways than using fossil fuels

[blondboinsd]

Originally Posted by LeMansX5

His buddies are at UAW.

Is Erik totally blind or something? I mean c'mon Erik, I'd say UAW is 50% of the problem and then stubborn down right stupid companies are 50% of the problem.

You don't deserve 70.00 a F*cking hour to put on a bumper PLUS a golden parachute

Sorry, welcome to reality!

[realchef]

Originally Posted by Wagner

Multiple and similar brands are 10% of the problem, the other 90% is spelled United Auto Workers.

Mitt Romney had the best comments I heard so far:

"Chapter 11 would allow them to restructure their labor deals"


Brand reduction is definitely a step in the right direction, but until build costs are lowered the "Big 3" can not compete. It is impossible. It simply costs them more to build a car than it does a foreign company. And you don't have to graduate from "Warren Buffet's Econ Course 101" to understand that is a major problem.

The Union's had their day. They have become a parasite and the hosts are almost dead(auto maker's incompetence aside). UAW, UFCW and even the teacher's union is ruining our educational system.

We have maintained an overall high standard of living. When our corporations are allowed to offshore manufacturing the only logical result is the inevitable reduction of our own standards.

The global economy is going to find a level amongst it's players. We delved in whole heartedly in search of immediate higher profits without consideration of the long term effect. For instance, our trade imbalance with China is absurb. We export the trash from our once booming industries to fuel their industries and import back the final goods ("now with free mercury") It's stripping our economy of the basic engine needed to grow, production and workers with earings to spend. How much garbage can we really buy from Wal-Mart? Their negative returns are now well documented. The auto industry should be a wake up call for us on all economic fronts. Buy American should be our goal not our shame.

The auto industry needs to bankrupt and re-organise, but the gubment needs to begin looking at our overall trade deficit and offshoring of business. We derive only a top tier profit from the out of country jobs and lose the benefits of workers participating in the economic engine. For once, a little isolationism might not be bad.