Republican Car Crash
How do you know when the congressional Republican Party has reached its ultimate, historical dead end?
Answer: when it gets outflanked on the left by none other than George W. Bush.
Or, put more simply: when a bunch of blow-dried, ideologically drink and not-too-bright Republican Senators would rather risk a devastating depression in order to demonize and pursue a vendetta against organized labor.
The L.A. Times has a good piece out tonight that lays it right on the line:
Antipathy toward unions was an undercurrent throughout the weeks of wrangling that culminated in Thursday's failed Senate vote. For Republicans -- including many from right-to-work states across the South -- undercutting the once-mighty United Auto Workers was seen as a way to undercut unions in general. "If the UAW, which is perceived as one of the strongest unions in the country, can be put under control, that may send a message across the whole country," said Michigan State University professor Richard Block, a labor relations expert. Handing a defeat to labor and its Democratic allies in Congress was also seen as a preemptive strike in what is expected to be a major legislative battle when the new Congress convenes in January: the unions' bid for a so-called "card check" law that would make it easier for them to organize workers, potentially reversing decades of declining power. The measure is strongly opposed by business groups.This is really a mind-blowing moment. The entire economy, and with it the welfare of tens of millions of American families, and the Republicans have found the enemy: Unionized auto workers! The fairy tale about UAW line workers making $73 is exactly that. The New York Times took apart the numbers and found that when all the B.S. is cleared up, an average UAW worker might make a grand total of about $10 an hour more than his non-union peers working in foreign-owned car plants in the American south. And even that figure is inflated, as much of that small difference resides not in cash salary but in benefit differentials. The real pay difference is more like $3 an hour. The fabulous part about all this is that these same Republicans have done nothing for eight years except shovel loads of pork precisely to the richest 1% of Americans without as much as issuing a hiccup. These are the same jokesters who have spent hundreds of billions to a completely corrupt and unaccountable regime in Iraq (and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan). These are the same blowhards who makes no demands for salary reductions on Wall Street nor on the very same auto CEO's who packed up their industry in a squadron of Hummers and drove it all into a ditch. The bridge loan to the auto industry was killed in the Senate thanks directly to the no votes cast by the bloc of Republican senators from Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama -- four states that are, by the way, protecting their non-union car plants. I have some news from them: neither they, those plants, nor their constituents are going to much benefit from an economy that goes limp because of the collapse of the Big Three. I never thought I'd live to see the day when George Bush actually does something smart. In this case of going around congress to provide funding for Chrysler and GM. I'm sure it owed much more to expediency -- the American business class knows very well the importance of an emergency lifeline to the last link in the American manufacturing base and they're not about to entrust to a bunch of ideological fools in the Senate.
December 13th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Well said, Marc.
On another subject… Marc, do you know why the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians are runing non-stop TV commercials up here in northern California?
Usually, when they’re running ads, they’re trying to pull some sort of fast one on us. Are they gearing up for some sort of ballot measure?
December 13th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Hmm. We have a fincial crisis because of loans to people without the means to pay them back. I think that calls for more loans to people who cannot pay them back.
We’re opposed to Corporate Welfare, excepts when we are not.
Bankruptcy is not the end of the world, you know. Ask Continental Airlines.
December 13th, 2008 at 8:57 am
The New York Times may have belatedly “taken apart” the bogus $73 an hour figure that’s been bandied about by numerous faux-journalists and anti-union “pundits”, but not before they had published the fake figure themselves.
http://tinyurl.com/5fulnh
December 13th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Well said. The nightly news had a clip of Sen Shelby of Alabama in all his ugly (and he really looks ugly — what’s with the deformed cheek?) and angry ranting. The Democrats should run that clip against every Republican running for Senate in 2010, pointing out that this is the real Republican party, not some moderate from Maine.
On another note, somewhat removed from this: I looked up Balter’s blog and find him defending Marx’s labor theory of value, a moronic view at best. There is no need for me to resurrect rebuttals and economic arguments that have been around for half a century and more, but this is really a bit of kool-aid time. Even ignoring formal economics, it is obvious (from the standpoint of the modern environmentalist understanding) that a lot of the “value” of modern industry and production stems from the extraction of unsustainable fuels from the earth. In this sense, the surplus value is stolen not from peoples’ labor, but from the earth itself, in the form of coal and oil. It is coal and oil that provided the surplus energy (beyond that of our own muscles) that drove the industrial revolution and continues to drive the current industrial civilization. We have added uranium (and to a certain extent sunlight) to the coal and oil, but it is clear that we as humans are currently enjoying the luxury of expending hundreds of times the energy that we could personally produce through our own muscle power. The link to a Wikipedia article on the surplus value theory yields up a nearly incomprehensible stew of words used without meaning and illogical attempts at logic.
There are lots of other objections to this old theory, wrong in its creation and thoroughly debunked nowadays, so I wonder how it is that we should take anything else by this commenter seriously.
December 13th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Excellent post Marc.
The anti-UAW/anti-union plank of the (mostly southern) Republicans was laid totally bare in the past couple weeks of congressional hearings concerning the bridge loan. And folks in Michigan will not soon forget what has just transpired. The GOP can forget about MI in 2010, 2012 and beyond. How ironic that GWB is probably the only Republican that won’t be booed out of the state in near future.
Any lukewarm, or apprehensive sentiments my Fox-news-viewing relatives might have had towards Obama are now out the window. They’re all huge supporters now.
I think that my pa, uncle Don, uncle Ray, uncle Dean, uncle Charlie, and aunt Bootsy earned every damn dollar they ever got from GM. Ever work in factory? Hardly a picnic. My pa had no less than 10 of his line mates drop dead on the factory floor due to cancers, hypertension, and high blood pressures. Those factories can give you some things you can’t give back. On two different contract negotiation cycles he manned picket lines. Our household had what it had in terms material wealth because we were organized. We’re all sons and daughters of Walter Reuther and the UAW.
Enjoying the weekend, courtesy of organized labor.
December 13th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
So what in your estimation should the UAW offer up in order to attempt to save a failed and bankrupt entity Marc?
Is it not irresponsible to offer nothing in hopes others will maintain non-competitive wages from their own wages(taxes) in order to keep the failure resuscitated for just awhile longer?
Is it not responsible for at least someone to try to be realistic and insist on a workable and sustainable entity in order to save more jobs for more workers over the long term, especially if other workers are being asked, no forced, to invest in the outcome?
December 13th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
I love that the Republicans in the Senate did this. First, the help the car industry needs will happen no matter what–they simply cannot fail right now (even as screwed as the industry happens to be), but second, it means that any lesson learning from the recent election hasn’t taken hold at all. I guess we can look forward to +58/59 for the Dems in 2010.
December 13th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
I don’t want to argue Marx, because I’m not an expert and don’t much care, but I do know that Marx did not claim that labor was the sole source of value to the exclusion of natural resources, as implied by Bob G. In fact he explicitly argued against any such notions. His labor theory of value is not as lacking in common sense as it’s characterized above. Also, prior to Marx Adam Smith held to the labor theory of value and an equivalent of “surplus value” theory in the context of “labor embodied” vs. “labor commanded”, accounting for the profit extracted from production. No doubt there are more sophisticated versions of economic theory extant these days, but the counter-explanations I’ve read by free-market types are often simply distortions of Marx. My point is that this casual dismissal of Michael B as some moron because he makes reference to the concept of surplus value betrays a certain ignorance of the subject. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if it wasn’t bandied as evidence that someone else is supposed to be some sort of idiot. I’m not an economist and don’t follow the contemporary arguments, but often the popular “refutations” of Marx’s economic theories are at least as ideological and over-simplified as the theories they aim to refute.
December 13th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Well, okay, if the current legacy costs shouldn’t be factored into current pay calculations, then we can conclude that union workers in the past have been grossly overpaid.
On the other hand, shouldn’t we factor in the future legacy costs for the current workers, which will probably be worse? So, it at best evens out.
Quit playing games with numbers and accept the reality…the Big 3 are not competitive because the labor union have extracted too much in pay and benefits that American consumers don’t want to subsidize–either through higher car prices, lower quality cars, and/or taxpayer subsidies.
However, may we honestly conclude that workers who sit around doing nothing through the jobs bank program are overpaid versus non-union workers who aren’t allowed to sit there picking their noses?
The American auto manufacturers should declare bankruptcy, get rid of the outrageous union contracts in the process, and actually restructure versus postponing the inevitable with government handouts, that won’t be repaid because only cosmetic changes would occur with that situation.
Oh, and if Michigan has any sense, it would become a right-to-work state to become competitive with http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20081118/NEWS/81024034“>auto plants in the Deep South.
December 13th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
I can’t believe an “accountant” could be this stupid about the issue of relative legacy costs for mature companies.
Oh wait a minute. We’re talking Woody.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:09 am
The big 3 are not competitive because they don’t have the vast network of acquiescent suppliers — from steelmakers to tire companies, partsmakers and glass suppliers –that Japanese and Korean automakers do.
It’s no accident that Japanese steelmaker profits started to dive about 6-9 months before Toyota’s did in the past couple of months.
That’s because steelmakers were there to take the hit when demand for cars started to come off a bit, even as materials costs — such as iron ore, coking coal and manganese — were at record highs. The mills demanded price hikes for steel, and Toyota just said no, for the most part.
This didn’t happen with U.S. steelmakers. Their profits stayed strong well into the actual recession because they refused to swallow any margin. When their materials costs rose, they simply passed them onto automakers, who really had no choice but to agree.
Meanwhile, while there are lay-offs of part-timers at some Japanese automakers, much of the slack will be taken up by the hundreds of parts makers, who will have to cut costs even more to serve the automakers’ interests.
The problems with the U.S. auto industry aren’t class related. It isn’t that the CEO makes too much and is out of touch, or certainly that the line workers make too much and are lazy.
It’s that there isn’t the kind of rational, deliberate industrial planning in America that you have in Asia.
Not that industrial planning is without its own faults. It may even be worse.
Look back 10 years. GM was rescuing Suzuki, Isuzu and others, while Ford was bailing out Mazda, taking a huge equity stake.
Renault bought Nissan when that automaker, Japan’s second-biggest at the time, was teetering on the brink, much like GM is today.
So it’s not like Japanese carmakers have some magic formula and Americans are incorrigible losers. But they Americans, in my view, have a lot to learn from the Japanese when it comes to making cars.
December 14th, 2008 at 6:43 am
I don’t have a problem with Reg pointing out a historical thread in economic thinking. I just have a problem with sticking with an outmoded theory that fails to explain or predict, when there is a better one available. Even as far back as the time I was in college, Paul Samuelson gave credit to Marx for sociological insight while pointing out his failure to crack the major questions of economics, not the least of which were marginal cost and marginal income. And by the way, it is Balter who links to the Wikipedia discussion of the labor theory of value.
Prior to 1950 or so, biologists understood that there was some physical basis for heredity, and many felt that the best candidate was the proteins. It’s not that DNA wasn’t known about, it’s just that its critical role in the hereditary process wasn’t recognized because the critical experiments hadn’t been completed. To continue to ignore the role of marginal costs and marginal income is to place oneself by analogy with a present day biologist who refuses to accept DNA as the hereditary molecule. (Hint: I know of no such biologists.)
December 14th, 2008 at 6:54 am
reg, calling me “stupid” about my comment, rather than discussing why you think it’s wrong, makes you look stupid.
December 14th, 2008 at 9:04 am
“Balter who links to the Wikipedia discussion of the labor theory of value.”
Ho hum, as usual, I anticipated and had posted a link or made the point about Schumacher’s elegant treatise on Buddhist Economics–in much earlier thread.
Its time has come. Tipping point like here…
Also had earlier mentioned Bernstein’s constipated memoir Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir that rips the lid off the Mc Carthy era. It was alllllll about union busting. It started with government workers in DC (where Bernstein’s father worked) and intimidating them. The kicker is at the end of the book when, finally, CB meets with a big politico whose name escapes me. But he confesses the whole charade was about union busting.
Our entire foreign policy is built on the same principal. We identify a region with resources and proceed to undermine democratically elected leaders; install corrupt fuckers who then allow the corporations to operate completely unregulated.
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK CHINA IS ALL ABOUT?
Shut down manufacturing HERE where workers might demand a real wage and benefits and go to where operations can proceed unfettered.
It was this horror show revealing itself as a global nightmare that induced Marx to make a few comments. Never mind he didn’t work out how to create a workable economic paradigm. What he did, as pointed out, was to POINT OUT the real cost of this type of mad lust to create a consumer driven economy.
There was an obscure article not long ago. A Wal Mart in some Canadian back water was under threat of a successful union coup! Yes, a feisty worker got it together and raised hell. Rather than let one WAL Mart become unionized they closed the store!
December 14th, 2008 at 9:13 am
PS on Charlie Rose, in 06, was a fantastic guy who has been monitoring and reporting on the whole phenom of corporations making egregious profits yet the American worker’s wages and benefits have stagnated.
Where are all the email calls to action from the myriad of progressive advocacy groups demanding a march? Sending out the email templates you can deluge congress with.
Nada. Nothing. Only during the election when the first bail out was up for grabs were emails being sent out and asking people to call their representatives.
This is the hugest fuck fest in the history of this country. And its in plain sight. The auto works should be put up for grabs in a competition to elicit the visionary responses on how to re tool the plants and start churning out, first of all, a first generation set of low cost, green cars to break the back of the oil dependency and stop the polluting and to break out plans for clean mass transit.
Those auto workers will have no trouble being employed and THEY are the ones who should be bailed out during the transition.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:09 am
The Other American Auto Industry
Plenty of car makers make a go of it in this country–they’re just non-union and not headquartered in Detroit.
by Fred Barnes
December 14th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Here’s the kicker. Good Jobs First did the #s and found that the foreign transplants have received at least $3.6 billion in recent years from state and local govts for locating their plants, mostly in southern states. This is money, unlike the bridge loan that Congressional blowhards torpedoed, that will NEVER be repaid! Between that and the likes of Sen. Corker offering to negotiate with Big 3 workers directly, this is the free market at work? Corker, McConnell, et al can keep talking out of both sides of their cynical, parochial mouths…
December 14th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Bob G – you “explained” why Marx was wrong by claiming something wrong with the theory that he didn’t believe – i.e. that labor was the sole source of value – but in fact criticized. Struck me as a sloppy way to criticize someone else’s base knowledge. I have my doubts that Paul Samuelson has “cracked” the major questions of economics either. The economics profession isn’t looking very credible these days.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Reg and others: I simply referred to Balter’s blog. Read it if you like, and see whether I misinterpreted his remarks. I don’t pretend to expertise on Marxism, but I do think it is useful to consider the results of modern scientific approaches to major questions, approaches which have incorporated a large amount of peer review, cross checking, and careful analysis. Modern science has gotten way past the sorts of introspective, speculative, non-experimental stuff that passed for knowledge a hundred years ago — chiropractic, naturopathic, homeopathic etc etc — and has replaced it with a more analytic approach. The problem for journalists is that it is a harder nut to crack in terms of understanding; just trying to read one research paper on intermediary metabolism requires a fairly sophisticated knowledge of lots of difficult subjects, from organic chemistry to genetics to protein structure and function. I would imagine that reading the economics literature would be equally hard, except that it requires even more mathematical knowledge. I differentiate modern economics from current day economic Marxists in the same way I differentiate a physical-organic chemist from an alchemist.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Best comment on David Vitter who’s busy opposing the auto bailout:
Ouch!
December 14th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
ari, if a state invests $200 million in infrastructure, roads, technical schools, land improvements, and tax incentives to snag a manufacturing company that will provide thousands of new jobs for “working people”, create local supporting industries, and result in a billion dollars of growth and taxes from the companies, then it’s pretty smart. If that’s not being “repaid,” then someone is cooking the books.
However, it’s not like they threw out the money to losing businesses with no hope of recouping the funds. It’s states competing against each other, and Michigan is rarely in the game.
December 14th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I see the other shoe has dropped in Iraq. Do you think that reporter went to the Annenberg Journalism School?
December 14th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
To Bob G:
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
And re your throwing out baby with bath water approach to viewing the value of anecdotal evidence and over valuation of the mechanistic paradigm (and Jung has some pretty choice things to say on the subject) (And your lumping Naturopathic, Homeopathic and Chiropractic all in a heap is showing a need for some serious lessons in differentiation–not to mention the sweeping statistical evidence that demonstrates how many people are turning to traditional healing modalities and how the move in allopathic medicine is to INTEGRATE. There are endless clinical trials that verify the benefits of “natural” remedies and traditional treatments and there has also been considerable academic argument made against the value of the “scientific method” in determining the value of certain treatments. I happened to have worked for the prestigious Research Council for Complementery Medicine in London. They began the world’s most comprehensive database on alternative therapies; one of their former research directors–Cambridge Phd– went on to head up a department at Sloan Kettering.:
RD Laing:
” Science as it is practised today, has no way of
dealing with consciousness, or with experience, values
ethics or anything referring to quality. This
situation derives from something that happened in
European consciousness at the time of Galileo and
Giordano Bruno. These two men epitomise two
paradigms–Bruno who was tortured and burned for
saying there were infinite worlds (and theoretical
physics has now come to the same conclusion); and
Galileo who said that the scientific method was to
study this world as if there were no consciousness and
no living creatures it it. Galileo made the statement
that only quantifiable phenomena were admitted to the
domain of science–he said whatever cannot be measured
and quantified is not scientific and in post Galilean
science this came to mean whatever cannot be
quantified is not real.This has been the most profound
corruption from the Greek view of nature as physics;
which is alive, always in transformation and not
divorced from us. Galileo’s program offers us a dead
world: out go sight, sound, taste, touch and smell,
along with them have since gone aesthetic and ethical
sensibility, values, quality, soul, consciousness,
spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of
scientific discourse.
Hardly anything has changed our world more during the
past 400 years than Galileo’s audacious program. We
had to destroy the world in theory before we could
destroy it in practice”
December 14th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
If the shoe fits, wear it:
http://michael-balter.blogspot.com/2008/12/if-shoe-fits-wear-it.html
December 14th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Ah, I just came on to post that but wondered why my ears were turning red. It’s because Bob G has been dissing Marx’s theory of surplus value, and in an entirely ignorant way–especially when he says that the value is coming out of the earth. Nothing in the earth has value until labor is applied to get it out. If Bob G thinks the theory has been debunked, he should cite some references as we can’t just take his word for it.
December 14th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Just an afterthought: As I said on my blog (link below), Marx got a lot of things wrong but he got the most important thing right: Capitalism is a system of exploitation. It may be the only option right now, but that doesn’t change its basic nature.
http://michael-balter.blogspot.com/2008/12/time-to-make-money-old-fashioned-way.html
December 14th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
An orthodoz Marxist myself, I reply to the notion that Marx got this or that wrong with this quote from George Lukacs:
“Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.”
December 14th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Ah, well. Not to be too picky, but do you really want to make an argument that includes the statement, ” Nothing in the earth has value until labor is applied to get it out.” Let’s consider a hillside in Pennsylvania a little more than a century ago. It’s oozing black stuff that turns out to be petroleum; it’s a substance that will replace whale oil (now that required a lot of labor to be sure), it will lubricate machinery, and it will power the more mobile part of the industrial revolution. Today, we identify a value associated with every 55 gallon volume (ie: one barrel) of the stuff, and our worldwide economy follows that valuation with anticipation and dread. Our government collects money from major corporations just for the future right to spend their own money to drill into the earth. In that sense, the current economy assigns value to something that is still in the earth, because it has the potential to be extracted. This is a commonplace notion to people all over the world, so you have to work pretty hard intellectually to avoid that concept.
So unless you wish to use the word “value” in a sense entirely different from the more commonly used one, there is a value associated with stuff that is in the ground. Some of it is harder to get at (deep coal seams) than others and has more labor costs, but that is a different question from the market valuation of a ton of coal delivered to the railhead.
I realize that I just used the term “market valuation” in my comments, and that this concept may be at odds with the way valuation is conceived of in classical Marxian theory. My argument would be that in this sense, modern economic theory is superior, because it describes what actually exists in human civilization — people are willing to pay a certain amount for a certain product (a ton of coal or a pound of meat) without regard to whether the seller had a hard time or an easy time in digging it up or hunting it down. I’m not trying to be trite or to diss on the huge task Marx assigned for himself in trying to understand the problems with the system he lived under (and to come up with a workable alternative). I’m just saying that in a post-Keynesian age, we have superior tools to understand what was going on in Marx’s day and to remedy some of the problems.
One modest suggestion for those not already wedded to a particular economic ideology: Since every economic and social system ever used by mankind has been exploitative at some level, whether it was a tribe of hunter-gatherers, modern capitalism, or the Soviet Union in the 1930s, perhaps we should simply assign this deficit to human nature rather than to the way we assign monetary value to seashells or gold ingots.
Re comments by Anna Churchill about homeopathy et al: Well, homeopathy is the theory that predicts that if somebody drops an aspirin tablet into the China Sea, and I drink a teaspoon of water from the California coast, then I will develop a raging fever as a result of that aspirin tablet and its dilution. In this sense, Marx comes out ahead, because homeopathy is magnitudes more moronic. Also, notice that Anna C resorts to the standard approach of the fringies (not unlike the creationists), which is to refer to some highly educated, degreed “expert” who studied at a fine old English university, ends up at a fine American institution, and views Chinese folk remedies with an open mind. The problem with this argument is that there is nothing wrong with viewing folk remedies with an open mind (some are quite effective and turn out to be understandable in western biochemical terms); the problem is with viewing anti-science arguments and approaches with an open mind. In a sense, this is the same argument Marc has been making, namely that we shouldn’t be treating Cuban totalitarianism as if it is equally as ethical as a free democratic society. Just as there are limits to scientific relativism, there are limits to cultural relativism.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:46 am
[...] Marc Cooper » Blog Archive » Republican Car Crash [...]
December 15th, 2008 at 10:57 am
The automotive sector is down across the board not just the Big 3 in America. It would be one thing if the imports haven’t seen double digit declines in sales, they have. Ford claims that they are fine but want to get special loans too if it needs them. The others just can’t get financing in the current climate – they need a loan from somewhere. This doesn’t sound like it should be so hard. (Chrysler is owned by a holding company with plenty of $$. The gov’t should either buy it outright or make a loan to the UAW to do it.)
Recommendation for republicans:
In addition to to wanting to cause the loss of 3 million jobs for ideological purity, consider calling for the elimination of public libraries. I saw a report that their use has increased dramatically. Something the public appreciates and serves the common good must be anathema to the puritans.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Bob G. I said you were guilty of lumping 3 wildly different alternative therapies together.
And understanding nothing about holistic modalities.
So called “folk remedies” are being clinically trialed like mad and have been integrated into alloapthic treatment.
I was not defending homeoepathy which I see as a fairly daft Western attempt at a traditional modality.
You might want to educate yourself on Tibetan, Ayurvedic , Chinese medicine and other indigenous herbal remedies. The major pharmaceutical companies have and are making money off them.
Bio physicists have found remarkable properties in herbal remedies used by Tibetan healers.
Integrated medicine is HERE. You are just ignorant of it.
The case for it has been made elegantly and eloquently over and over. Its a done deal.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
I understand Bob’s point about “human nature”…its profoundly pessimistic. It is as if to say we shouldn’t try to cure disease.
On labour, he’s wrong. That hillside with oil requires human labour to extract it, thus creating value.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
JC points out that the hillside containing oil requires human labor to extract it. Well, yes. But this is like saying that a tank of gasoline buried underground at a service station has no value until somebody pumps some of it into a car’s tank. If Marxian thought wants to insist that there is no “value” per se in that substance until human labor is expended on it, then go ahead, but the rest of us are following a different definition.
As to Anna Churchill’s patronizing remarks, I will have to admit that there are entire libraries full of books that I haven’t read, and journals full of peer reviewed articles that I haven’t seen. On the other hand, I do have a feel for what science is actually about, having done it and published in some of those journals, and I do have some (albeit modest) knowledge of nutrition and the healthy lifestyle. Still, I guess I beg to differ with the radio infomercial guys who want to talk us into coffee enemas (true; I’m not kidding) and every kind of nonsensical but expensive remedy for nonexistent ailments such as those mysterious buildups on the walls of the intestines.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Marc:
While in your ever so enlightened “progressive” mindset profess your solidarity with the “oppressed” workers, and believe that the majority of the blame for the failure of the Big 3 lays with the management, the actual facts say otherwise.
Yes, the actual hourly rate (according to the NYT chart you reference) is only slightly higher for US automakers, than the Japanese counterparts, you DO see a big difference in other forms of compensation – vacation pay, sick time, overtime, etc. Then the whole issue of the health care legacy costs are absolutely crippling.
Then to ignore the impact that the unions and their leadership have had on stifling innovation and improving efficiency, is to ignore reality – actual documented, historic cases that undermine a cost-competitive company.
Go go Rand Simberg’s article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/detroits-downturn-its-the-productivity-stupid/ where he details not only his own experiences working in an auto factory; but those of other workers as well. Instances that no sane individual (liberal, apolitical, or conservatie) would tolerate from their own employees if they ran a business; but are routinely defended by the union leadership. Absolute insanity.
Even Mickey Kaus (no conservative) lambasts the union work rules over at Slate (no Republican cheering section). Simberg points to a post by a former UAW supervisor who experienced firsthand the stupid behaviour that undermines productivity: http://www.regularfolksunited.com/index.php?tab=article_view&article_id=561
While I have never worked in an auto plant, I have worked in union environments and have seen the need, so to speak, for them. Stupid management, an adversarial atmosphere, etc. Yet I also saw first hand the laziness (no other term applies) of some of the union employees. One summer, while on a contract job on a field crew at a munitions production plant in southwest Virginia, I was assigned for the day to work with one of the plant employees (union). He actually drove to a remote part of the plant, parked under some trees, and napped. Meanwhile, I sat there and wondered if I’d get fired or not if we were caught. We were not. Being in no position to argue otherwise, I obviously could do nothing.
So, go on and discuss among yourselves how the workers are mistreated and oppressed. Pontificate about what Marx or Engels would have to say, etc, etc. Continue to believe how the unions have had nothing at all to do with the Big 3s’ continual lagging behind their Japanese counterparts. Deny the documented abuses of the union leadership and membership all you want. It would have done them no good in the unemployment line. Yet with the incoming administration, which will not hold the UAW’s feet to the fire, the impending collapse of Detroit will only be delayed. At the cost of how many billions??
But the facts show plainly that a large majority of the American public, from recent polls, say blame lays on both management and the unions. Polls show a large chunk of the public DO NOT want the unions to have more and more power.
Ah yes, but power to the worker trumps being competitive doesn’t it? Guess being ideologically correct beats everything.
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