Posted on 06/03/2008 7:45:18 AM PDT by tobyhill
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — General Motors is closing four truck and SUV plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico as surging fuel prices hasten a dramatic shift to smaller vehicles.
CEO Rick Wagoner said Tuesday before the automaker's annual meeting in Delaware the plants to be closed are in Oshawa, Ontario; Moraine, Ohio; Janesville, Wis.; and Toluca, Mexico. He also said the iconic Hummer brand will be reviewed and potentially sold or revamped.
Wagoner said the GM board has approved production of a new small Chevrolet car at a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in mid-2010 and the Chevy Volt electric vehicle in Detroit.
Wagoner announced the moves in response to slumping sales of pickups and SUVs brought on by high oil prices. He said a market shift to smaller vehicles is permanent.
GM shares rose 25 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $17.69 in morning trading.
The cuts will affect about 2,500 workers at each of the four facilities, although Wagoner did not know exact numbers. Many will be able to take openings created when 19,000 more U.S. hourly workers leave later this year through early retirement and buyout offers.
He said the company has no plans to allocate products to the four plants in the future.
"We really would not foresee the likely prospect of new products in the plants that we're announcing today that we'll cease production in," he told a Moraine, Ohio, city official who asked a question in a telephone conference call.
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.google.com ...
High gas prices, yes. Global Warming, uh, no.
Won’t need those axles after all. Hang on to that old Silverado.
Umm... maybe it's $4.25 / gallon gas that's causing people to not buy 12 mpg trucks.
Al Gore is determined to destroy America.
I would say the plants are closing because of globull warming. It is the current energy environment that is begining to make structural changes to our society and economy.
Though the Global Warming is still b s as well.
The high price of a tank full of gas is the only thing killing these jobs.
**wouldn't**
Rather closed minded thinking for a CEO.
FM: GM
TO: Moraine Employees
Subj: Loyal Service
HASTA LA VISTA BABY!
But the UAW goons still stick to the tired old leftist politics of their dem comrades.
This has nothing to do with global warming, and everything to do with high gas prices.
I'd say it's $4 a gallon gas rather than global warming that's killing the lines.
Read this and I think you will agree the oil industry has already been Nationalized in the US;
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”
Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”
Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”
As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”
“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”
“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”
Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”
“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”
Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”
In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”
In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
Here is the link for this article:
I just paid $78 to fill up my tank this morning. THAT's painful.
Your headline, “(Global Warming BS already killing jobs)”, is ridiculous.
$4 a gallon gas, a product mix far too heavily weighted towards SUVs and trucks, a too expensive workforce, and clueless management, is what is killing GM jobs.
What do you drive? You may have nobody to blame but yourself...
Once Detroit can figure out a way to get SUV’s and Pick-up trucks that get 20-30+ mpg, then the streets will be flooded with them once again...Unfortunately, our buying habits changed a lot quicker that Detroits Research/Production habits.
I paid $92.31 to fill my half ton Chevy. I paid $134.09 for my diesel.
My local Dodge dealer has just started to refuse to take in larger SUV's on trade. Can't even get rid of them at the large auto auctions.
Democrat anti-drilling policies are causing the loss of Democrat union jobs. Cue the violins.
Why do you think gas is $4 a gallon when we have 112 billion barrels of oil here at home?
Gee, I wonder why gas is $4 a gallon?
Since some people by trucks for fashin rather than for need, and since some people are no longer buying trucks for fashion, there is a reduced demand.
Some people are always gonna need trucks, though.
Thanks the futures market and the AFL-CIO for this.
I don’t care if it gets to $10 a gallon, I will always own a truck. Not a 12mpg truck, mind you, but still a full-sized truck.
If this CEO had made a move like this after Katrina, GM would in a much stronger position today.
The local refinery [Foothills] is for sale. The State is thinking about buying it, which is probably an ill-advised idea from the Republican faction currently out of power [not the Palin faction]. The refinery is not making money although they have 175 employees and process 200,000 bpd. Big chance for the right owner.
Sounds like a PCI / Sarbanes-Oxley Audit compliance check.
You're correct, but algore is just a piece of the puzzle.
It is socialism that is determined to destroy the US ... which should be taken as a personal assault because it is we, the people that make America.
They learned very early on how to get and control the freedom of the press(es).
It all looks and sounds so righteous, so American ... but if all the outlets are examined .. print, radio and TV ... the percentage of "reports" that promote America is so very small.
You are right about the fashion statment. Never could figure why people buy a pickup for regular communting use (not for hauling or job use). They can rent a pickup from Lowes for $19.99 per day of they neeed one to haul their lumber home for their DIY project.
The futures market could actually correct itself if the long term speculators had confidence that we were in the future going after our own supplies.
Huh??? Why should I blame myself for $4 a gallon gas? What's the difference what I drive? A twenty gallon tank on an SUV costs as much to fill as a twenty gallon tank on econobox.
It's not ridiculous. Those expensive additives to lower "greenhouse emissions" mandated by the envirowacko brigade, as well as those massive gas taxes which out state legislatures ALSO continually mandate; yeah, they're the same - in part, the excuse often runs, to find cleaner fuel alternatives and always to help pay union workers to continually come back and fix their bad maintenance jobs "for the children" if part of the reason our fuel prices are so high.
Growing demand, shrinking supply. Why do YOU think it’s $4/gallon? Hint: It’s not “global warming” or “big oil”.
ANY company with any sense would HAVE to do something about the parasitic Unions feeding off them.. Probably mostly why american industry has gone overseas..
The truth "IS"......... its the UNIONS costing all the jobs.. American UNIONS including the Government Workers Union are VAMPIRES.. sucking the life out of a company..
The Government Workers Union(s) and the other Unions FEED off the economy thru socialism.. Right to work STates are a last ditch effort to combat the UNIONS... I am surpassed it took GM and Ford this long to be forced into survival mode..
WIll the UNIONS be blamed for the job loss?.. Probably NOT.. But thats what needs to happen.. Little wonder the Unions and the democrat party are allies.. They are both VAMPIRES.. YES your democrat old gramma is a political VAMPIRE.. THERE now I said it.,. its true..
We can argue till we are blue in the face about global warning and how it is influencing oil prices...but the reality is that whatever happens in the future regarding future supplies/opening new oil fields/extraction, etc., we are still dealing with China, India, etc. buying up everything else we don’t buy (Market Supply). Also, policy change will take eons to occur...
Prices will remain high, and people will simply quick buying SUV’s & Trucks unless they can afford to pay for the gas...I have a huge SUV, and it is hitting my pocket book ($130 per fill up). Unless I feel confident that prices will go down and stay down in the long term, I will never buy such a large vehicle again. I have just paid it off and have thought of ways to sell or get rid of it..Paid $35K - can only get $12K for it now-—I can’t justify buying a new vehicle at this time to get the payback needed within a reasonable time. I will keep it for the foreseable future and use our other car to do most of the local commuting. Many are in the same position I’m in, but I’m not looking for a government hand-out, or a government solution. I made a bad choice and will have to live with it...
Um...SUV’s already average 20 MPG....
The GW BS has created a political environment, where high gas prices are not only tolerated — they're celebrated (in secret, in the ante-rooms for the show trials for the oil industry).
Spending over $40 to fill up my Corolla twice a week hurts.
Politicians, both Republican and Democrat, have fought oil drilling since long before global warming was ever heard of. They still are.
You laid 2 cause out, supply and demand. Of the two cause one of them is strictly confined by global warming, SUPPLY.
LOL! You're dreaming. They'll blame Big Industry and the Bush\Cheney\Halliburton oil "conspiracy".
That’s about where I am...I have a ‘96 Ram 1500 half-ton with a 26-gallon tank. 11 mpg around town. Fortunately I only have to drive it one or two days a week now, mostly I drive my wife’s little Focus (23-25 mpg) and she stays at home. But still, in a few weeks, when I do finally have to refill the tank, I’m looking at $80 minimum.
}:-)4
but Global Warming is their latest excuse to prohibit drilling even at the expense of $4.25 a gallon.
Right. Blame the global warmists for forcing the polar bear to be listed under the Endangered Species Act, thus SCREWING the oil exploration leases coming up for sale inland and off the coast of Alaska, too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.