Would You Buy a Car from Chrysler?

Huh??? The more absurd the UAW workers salary is then the more the
purchaser pays for the end product. It does make a difference.

 

And by the same token, you think the local garage and dealership that
you pay $80/hour for labor puts all that in the mechanic's pocket?

 

Examples of where I created a troll thread? There are none.

Except I don't do any of that - if I did, you'd be supplying examples,
and the fact is that without lieing, you can't provide examples.

So let's discuss the issues instead of using Nathan Thurm diversions.

Pick a recent subject and tell me where I'm wrong. Choose from the
following:

(1) Did I lie when I said that union rules won't let GM implement cost
savings with their suppliers if such cost savings would involve
eliminating workers from GM or Delphi's assembly lines?

(2) Will cap and trade not drive much of remaining manufacturing jobs
overseas and/or just eliminate those jobs?

(3) Is card check (someone standing over the worker while he fills out
his card) not an abomination to freedom for workers freely and without
coercion and without implied threats of retaliation making a decision on
whether to unionize?

(4) Are union leaders (for steel workers in particular) not selling
their workers down the river by their helping campaign for cap and trade
(which will actually lose jobs for union and non-union alike) as payment
to Obama for him pushing thru card check?

Or pick another valid topic. (Key word *valid*. For example, the topic
of comparing what a dealer charges for putting a part on vs. what a
union worker gets paid at the plant for the same procedure is not a
valid topic - that's a slam dunk in that your an idiot for equating the
two - and for doing so more than once.)

BTW - yes, peter pan/jiff - I know who the troll is here (nice try,
calling *me* the troll, but that is one of the trolling tactics, is it
not?), but I'll play along for a little bit.

 

When did you ever stop trolling?

 

Since UAW ends up with 55% ownership of GM after the last deal,
I'll call bullshit on anything you have to say from this point on regarding
GM and it's Unions. At the current time, GM is essentially an ESOP
and if it continues to lose money then UAW only has UAW to blame.

cap and trade won't work unless the entire world participates, everyone
knows that. Because of this, it's nothing more than a political football.

Multiple studies have been done that prove pretty conclusively that
the so-called "secret ballots" that are done to vote on unionization are
secret in name only. Employees can alway use a variety of means to
"de-unionize" if they want under the NLRB.

The fact of the matter is that unionization fights are dirty on both the
side of the unionizers and the side of the employers opposing unionization.
The current system for creating a union is very easy for management to
undermine and the penalties for firing employees involved in unionization
efforts are hand-slaps only. Card Check pushes
more power back to the unionizers but keep in mind that the SINGLE
MOST POWERFUL THING the employer can do to defeat unionization
efforts is to simply raise salaries.

Furthermore the largest sector to be affected
by unionization drives is RETAIL not manufacturing. Retail generates no
products and is, in fact, more of a drain on the economy than you would
think - a large part of the cost of a product you buy in retail has gone to
pay the lease on the building (which is then used to pay a mortgage on
the building by the building owner) and is effectively being sent to those
very same banks which caused the recession to start with. The more
wages are raised in retail the quicker people will turn to online buying
and the quicker that the strip-malls and mega-malls will turn into dinosaurs
and disappear. If anything, it would help the US economy greatly to have
the retail sector shrink and the money and labor currently being dumped
into retail, be dumped into manufacturing and creating actual products, not
just moving them around.

The gap between the highest-compensated members of a company these
days and the peons is the largest it's been in the last 50 years. That
alone
should tell you something.

cap and trade is like abortion with the Republican party, it is used to
stir up the party faithful but nobody running things has any serious intent
to do anything about it.

OK, I will. Please explain the cause of the 2008 depression and why it
was a good thing that George Bush attempted to solve it with 2 separate
stimulus
measures, the first the "stimulus checks" mailed out to every taxpayer last
year,
the second the stimulus bill that he dragged congress back to sign right
before the election last year - and why it's a bad thing that Obama is doing
essentially the same thing this year.

Oh I forgot Putney's Rule: if a Republican does it, it's a GOOD thing, if a
Democrat does the exact same thing, it's a BAD thing.

Ted

 

I don't know what the future agreements will be. I was speaking
accurately of the past and the present.

Yep. And China, for one, has already stated that it will not
participate in cap and trade. And it has been a dismal failure (duh!)
everywhere in Europe it has been and is being tried. But the powers
that be will not let the facts stand in their way of redistribution of
wealth/socialism.

Secret in name only? I don't think so. You're saying that they can
look at a ballot and tell whose it is? Please provide proof. AND - if
that is the case, then why do they need to have card check if the effect
is already in place? IOW - let's say you're right about that - then
let's keep it the way it is - no need t\for legislation to force the
employee to inform the union of how he/she voted. OR - even better, fix
the, if what you're saying is true, corrupt system so the ballot is
truly secret. There's a principle involved here.

Whatever problems may or may not exist with the current system, two
wrongs don't make a right. If there are problems, fix them. But don't
introduce a gross injustice in the name of fixing an existing problem.

Would you be in favor of having someone look over your shoulder while
you are voting in public elections? Like I said, there's a principle
involved.

But what does it have to do with queering the voting process?

You're saying that Obama and his associates have no intent of passing
cap and trade? I don't buy that at all. Can you explain why the union
leaders are jazzing the union workers up to push for cap and trade to be
passed?

That's never been my rule. Both were seriously wrong. There are several
things that GWB was wrong on. That was one of them. And I've been
saying that Arlen Spector (a "Republican" up until last week) was a
snake for years - that became clear to me when I read some of his
conduct following the OK City bombing.

 

Are you still an alcoholic, and do you still beat your wife?

 

By the way Bill do some research on average wages of UAW versus Non UAW. It
not the amount per hour its the other thingls like benefits and retirement
that makes the difference.

As far as union and non union jobs around here the non union locations get
paid more then the union locations and have the same benefits. Why to keep
the union out. Big difference is the union locations have better safety
records. I can't be forced to paint lines in the parking lot because the
plant is not running for schedule maintenace.

One reason that OSHA is in business is because workers unionized and
demanded safety.

 

I understand the benefits and retirement part of it. I think some
people feel that that's part of the problem. Do you have some links to
union vs. non-union wages in apples-to-apples jobs. I would be
interested in seeing that.

Different people would argue whether that's good or bad.

I didn't quite understand where you said "I can't be forced to paint
lines in the parking lot because the plant is not running for schedule
maintenance". Can you explain that? Are you union or non-union? But
still, I didn't quite understand what you're saying there.

Thanks.

 

You know it really sounds to me like you don't know a thing about
the current card check legislation.

Under current rules if over 30% of employees sign cards in favor of a
union a secret ballot is automatically triggered.

Under current card check legislation, the only difference is that if
the union organizers get 50% signatures on the cards, the union is
automatically formed.

If after a year of unionization the employees find they don't like the
union, current law permits a de-unionization drive - and all that's needed
to trigger another election is 30% signatures of employees who want to
get rid of the union. Card check does not affect that at all.

To claim that your going to get 50% of the employees in a workplace
to sign a card saying they want a union when they really don't want one -
AND their employer doesn't want one - is preposterous.

If a secret ballot election is held the empoyer conducts it, they can force
all employees to attend anti-union presentations, and they routinely
claim that if the plant unionizes that they will shut it down and lay
everyone off. This is particularly prevalent in big-box retail like your
Walmarts, for example when the meat cutters in Texas Walmart unionized
back in 2000, Walmart closed it's meatcutting in ALL of it's 180 Texas
Walmart stores.

The employer is doing this in these NLRB elections. When the employer
puts one of these elections on at 4:00pm in the afternoon, and requires
all employees to attend a 7 hour presentation starting at 8:00am where
they spend the entire time dragging up example after example of why
unions are bad, then finishes it off by telling the employees that if they
vote for the union they will shut down and fire everyone, it should be
illegal but it's not.

If that happened in federal elections there would be a riot.

Incidentally, I'm not in a union now, I was in one for a year about 20
years ago. If there is one criticism that is worthwhile to make about
unions is that today's AFL-CIO is fat and lazy. They should be out there
funding union drives in the very shit industries - like retail - that
exploit
workers today the same way that industries which are unionized now
exploited workers back in the 30's. But I am also not stupid and I know
perfectly well that if there had never been unionization in the US that the
middle class wouldn't exist today.

Those with the gold make the rules and the CEO's of these companies -
who are the same people responsible for ruining the economy - are the
ones with the gold. If they had not been so greedy then the US population
would still trust these people and the Republicans would still be running
the show.

You are going to see card check legislation passed, along with a whole host
of other what you call "socialist" legislation. You can blame the greed of
these people - all of them members of the Republican party and heavy
donors to it - for squeezing the general population in the US to the point
that people have snapped, and now are reacting by going left.

The conservatives, Bill - YOUR PEOPLE - have done FAR FAR more to
push the US population into the liberals arms than ANYTHING that WE could
have done to attract people. I thank you for doing this. Hopefully, the
conservatives will eventually understand this, and clean house. The US
could
use you - if you get rid of the stinky houseguests like the evangelical
Christians
who have used and abused you. If you don't, well then expect a 3rd party
to arise.

Yes, just like they have no intent on prosecuting Bush for torture, and
they have no intent to get rid of the Bush tax cut like they promised he
would
do on the election circuit. (at least, not anytime soon) and no intent on
revoking federal wiretapping laws or immunity for telcos that illegally
spied on American citizens.

Us educated Democrats understand that when we voted for Obama that
we wern't going to get everything we wanted. But we definitely were
going to get more of what we wanted than from McCain. I don't claim
to speak for the ignorant Democrats.

I don't even believe that has happened at all. Historically the Democrats
used the cap and trade flag to get money and political support from the
greenies. More recently they used it to get support from the anti-Bush
crowd
because Bush pulled us from Kyoto which was a cap and trade deal.

The ultra-left Greenies generally don't want cap and trade and would
prefer unilateral caps on pollution. But most people who think they
are environmentalists really aren't willing to walk the walk, and they
secretly think cap and trade will let them continue to pollute while forcing
the other guy to stop polluting. That's why cap and trade resonates with
so many people, even though a moment's thought reveals the impossibility
of the solution. The only real way to reduce pollution is to simply do it
yourself,
not try paying someone else to do it.

The only reason any union people would be pushing cap and trade is
possibly the thinking it would somehow force everyone to buy electric
cars and thus jazz up the big 3 - but even that is a stretch.

Joe Lieberman is a similar snake and I suppose that we got Specter in
exchange for Lieberman's betrayal of us and going with you guys.

I would have preferred that Spector be ousted in his primary then the
Republican that the GOP put up would have been very easy to defeat
and get a young, dynamic Democrat in that seat. In the long run we would
be a lot better off.

Unfortunately, Spector is well-liked in PA and the PA voters will almost
certainly put him in office again. But he really has absolutely no honor at
all.

Spector stood up to be counted among the Republicans during the last
8 years and he didn't even stand with McCain to help block Hastert's
movement to get rid of the ability to fillibuster US Supreme Court
nominees, when filibustering is about the only thing left that is a
moderating
influence on the Court. Spector put his chips with the Republicans and if
he had any honor at all he would have stayed with them to the end.

All I hope for now is for him to be defeated in the Democratic 2010 primary.

Ted

 

Bill wrote: "I understand the benefits and retirement part of it. I think
some people feel that that's part of the problem. Do you have some links to
union vs. non-union wages in apples-to-apples jobs. I would be interested
in seeing that."


Here is one look

http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2008/12/13/299179.html

"I didn't quite understand where you said "I can't be forced to paint lines
in the parking lot because the plant is not running for schedule
maintenance". Can you explain that? Are you union or non-union? But
still, I didn't quite understand what you're saying there."

I am Union. I have a job description and if the company wants to change it,
it has to be negotiated. Having just went through negotiations and as a
member of the negotiating committee, all we heard was how poor the company
was doing and they want us to give up 17 union jobs. Such jobs as painter,
insulator, warehouse clerk, and fugitive emissions inspector.

Yet the very first company proposal on their list of demands was give up to
1.50 more per position if you know multiple jobs in an operating unit. This
directly cost the company a couple of million dollars. The second proposal
was to give recognition pay up to 8 percent of one's base pay, and the last
thing was to eliminate 17 jobs.

All this after the gave us a hour long poor financial outlook for the
company and plant.

Basically, the UAW benefited from years of a profitable auto industry. The
UAW negotiated what they thought was their fare share of the profits. The
workers only wanted their share of the pie just like the CEO. Since the
auto industry woes have started the UAW has renegotiated their contracts
giving up concessions so that the wages plus benefits would come closer to
the non union plants.

By the way not all union members back the democratic party despite what
upper union management pushes.

 

Even buying online has one layer too many. E.g., if I buy something from
amazon or buy.com, they take my money, pass on an order to Ingram Micro
or some other distributor/wholesaler, who ships the item to me from
their nearest warehouse with the amazon or buy.com name and address as
the shipper. Amazon and buy.com never even see the item they are
"selling" me. I have sometimes thought of buying things in bulk and
reselling them at a profit on eBay, but then it occurs to me that this
is fundamentally immoral. What service am I providing the end users that
entitles me to financial compensation? I think I am beginning to
understand why a few centuries ago "trade" -- as distinct from
craftsmanship, as in producing something -- was something to be looked
down on.

How did we arrive at these multilayer distribution chains: manufacturer
-> distributor -> wholesaler -> retailer -> end user? What service
deserving compensation do most of these entities provide?

Perce

 

Yes - And the workers are thereby denied a secret ballot. It sounds
like I did know a thing about proposed card check legislation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check

"In other words, the current threshold to have a secret ballot election
is signatures from 30% of employees. The EFCA would keep that threshold,
but make a new threshold of signatures from 50% + 1 of employees to
bypass the secret ballot election and automatically be unionized.
Therefore a petition signature would have the same weight as a 'yes'
vote in a secret ballot election."

"According to a 2004 Zogby survey conducted for the Michigan-based
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 78% of union members support keeping
the current secret ballot system."

"Many business organizations, including The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
opposes the implementation of card check. From its website:
"'Under the existing law today, workers have a chance to vote for or
against unionization in a private-ballot election that is federally
supervised. Under Card Check, if more than 50% of workers at a facility
sign a card, the government would have to certify the union, and a
private ballot election would be prohibited--even if workers want one.
By forcing workers to sign a card in public - instead of vote in private
- card check opens the door to intimidation and coercion. Over 70% of
voters agree that a private election is better than card check.'"

Except they were denied a secret ballot if the non-secret vote exceeded
50% for unionization. So they were, as I said, denied secret ballot in
their voting.

Why? What if 2 of the 50 would have voted the other way had their vote
been secret? Not preposterous at all. I'm just sayin'.

You sure about that? From the wikipedia article: "The current method
for workers to win recognition of their union in the United States is a
sign-up then an election process. In that, a petition or an
authorization card with the signatures of at least 30% of the employees
requesting a union is submitted to the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB), who then verifies and orders a secret ballot election."

You are claiming the the employer conducts the election that is ordered
by the NLRB? I've never worked in a union environment, thank God, but
don't think so.

So they told the employees ahead of time what the prudent business
decision would be if business had to be done under new, less profitable
conditions, and they did it. Good for them. If business conditions
change, someone should hold a gun to the employer's head and say they
have to keep that part of the business open? I don't think so.

I agree - that's unreasonable - those employees should quit and go to
work somewhere else. (actually they do have the right to do that)

Seriously - telling the truth should be illegal? Sounds like to me that
they are being prudent in telling them the business decision that will
result if the conditions under which business has to be conducted are
changed. You look at it as a threat. I look at it as telling them the
facts of life.

I see it as no different than an employer telling me that if such and
such a contract is lost, we will be laying off x% of our employees. I
would appreciate the heads up. In fact, in the early 90's, an aerospace
company I used to work for warned its employees of an upcoming downturn
so that they could start looking for other jobs. I appreciated that.
Should that company have been required to keep everyone employed (and
end up going out of business) when business conditions that they had no
control of changed? Unionization has the same kind of impact on the
profitability of a business - more cost - less (income generating) output.

Just like GM not being able to implement cost savings if it meant
eliminating requirements for the number of people on the line.

I'm not following you there. If *what* happened in federal elections?
If you mean there are consequences of the results of federal elections,
there are. My grand children and great grandchildren will be paying for
these last elections. What you want is people to vote in a union
environment and not have to deal with the consequences of their choices
(i.e., jobs being lost). Their problem is they want their cake and eat
it too. And that's their problem.

So - you want those who don't know how to succeed in business to run the
show?

You mean like the hearings in which the Republicans were demanding
proper oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the demonratic
leaders pulled the race card and said they were trying to lynch Raines,
who cooked the books at the proper time to take in personal bonuses of
over 90 million dollars in 6 years? Those Republicans and those
Democrats? You know who Barney Frank is?

Truth is the federal government threatened the lending institutions with
all kinds of business-ending penalties if they didn't throw prudent
business practices out the window and loan money to people to buy houses
they couldn't afford. The lenders had no way to fight that.

Socialist programs like CRA are what caused it. So socialism caused the
problem, and the answer is more socialism? I see. Again - Republicans
tried to get proper oversight over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the
Democrats stopped that in the hearings. Certainly you've seen the
youtube compilation of those hearings. Very eye-opening.

No - the people that did it were not conservatives. Many of them may
have been Republicans, but they were not conservatives. (Some talk
radio personalities refer to them as RINO's - Republicans In Name Only.)

Why do you single out "evangelical Christians"? What's that got to do
with it. Nancy Pelosi, Barak Obama, and Barney Frank are not
evangelical Christians. Funny you choose to throw that term out like
you did.

And "we" are counting on socialists to overplay their hand in this
election cycle and put true conservatives in power - if we can find some.

In all honesty, I agree that "Republicans" are as much to blame. I
attended a tea party, and in spite of what the news media said, they
were not anti-Obama or anti-Democrat. They were anti-big government and
anti-socialism. My two signs said "Two Words: Term Limits" and "End
Piracy in Washington D.C.". I happen to believe that our progeny for
many generations will be paying for the "stimulationg stupidity" acts
done by the government (Bush, Obama, and Congress) in the last few months.

Speaking of which - I couldn't believe Obama's stupid remarks regarding
that recently. He commented that maybe there were alternative methods
that could have been used to get the guy to talk. Well - as the
President, he's either dishonest or plain stupid. The "alternative
techniques" take weeks or months to work. The only problem is that the
guy told the interrogators that he had set the wheels in motion for his
plan and they would know what that was in one or two days (IOW - after
many people died), but that he wasn't going to tell them what it was or
where it was going to be. So they had less than a day to get it out of
him. Certainly Obama knew that - and if not then he's an idiot for not
knowing - being that he's the President. He's done irreparable damage
to our nation in what he did regarding that.

McCain is one of the reasons Republicans lost. He is not a
conservative. As the common expression goes "we held our noses and
voted for him".

Then read this:
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/...d=news_view&newsId=20070711005775&newsLang=en

Or as a tit-for-tat to get card check passed - helping pass something
that will hurt the unions in order to get something they really want.
But I agree that it is really foolish (suicide).

I never thought of that, but I see the similarities. I don't trust
either of them.

 

Nope, but if the shop has to pay lug nut turners $25/hr then I'd pay
more than $80/hr shop labor.

 

That happens at some companies and is why many employees vote against
unions. Mostly in states where unions aren't strong such as Arizona.

But even in heavy union areas the lowest paid unskilled union worker
makes FAR more on average than the same at a non-union shop. It's even
worse when you add in all the perks and benefits.

 

Which isn't always a good thing. Salary shouldn't be based on how much
a company makes. You want that then buy some shares of the company.
Salary should be based on what the work done is worth. Furthermore, I
don't hear unions voluntarily taking massive pay cuts when a company
loses money but they'll yell loud in an up year.

Now I do agree with companies that have a profit sharing program that
gives out bonuses etc. Especially if its tied to a workers
contributions and not across the board.

 

You'd be providing the service of sparing the purchaser the need of
buying 10,000 widgets to only get one.

Each layer provides the layer below with the opportunity to purchase
smaller quantities than the layer above, and the layer above with the
opportunity to deal with fewer customers than the layer below. The
retailer may also provide the end user with extra information regarding
manufacturers (and you'll notice there is a correlation between not
offering this extra information and offering a lower price).

The wholesaler doesn't want to deal with my purchase of a single welding
hood. I don't want to buy a gross of them and be stuck with 143 that I
don't want.

 

But in the case of my order to buy.com for one "Super Whiz-Bang Gizmo,"
Ingram Micro (or whoever) ships just one of them to me. Buy.com gets a
special price not because of the quantity they are buying but because
they are buy.com and I am just me.

Or suppose I go to Barnes & Noble (the "bricks and mortar" store)
looking for a book. They buy pallet-loads of some titles, but I have
peculiar reading tastes and they don't have in stock what I want, so
they special-order it for me -- and still get their discount of 40% or
so. In addition, they get paid up front and they don't have to provide
shelf space while they wait for customers to buy out the pallet-load of
some other title.

Perce

 

So you ARE arguing with a straight face that a unionization drive
will get 50% signatures on cards when the employees and the
employer don't want a union.

You really have a problem with your paranoia. Get help!

Consider that the employees who publically state they don't want a
union are going to get 100% support from their management and the
ones saying they want a union will be blacklisted, it IS preposterous
to make the claim that an employee who really doesen't want a union
is going to remain silent. He has NOTHING to gain by remaining
silent, and an ENORMOUS amount to gain by speaking out against
the union.

The reality is that in a secret ballot system the results always have MORE
people voting in support of the union than were willing to publically
sign cards saying they were in support of one.

Yes they do, read the rules, Bill. A number of companies have been
sued in the past by failing to carry out the election even after being
ordered to do so by the NLRB. Foot dragging on holding the election
is one of the primary tools to fight unionization drives.

Do you know how much money the CEO of Walmart makes? How much
the Walton family makes? It is nothing but a pack of lies to claim that the
company would lose money if it was unionized. They would still make
money, just slightly less of it. And in exchange wages would rise for their
employees which have a beneficial effect on the community the businesses
are in.

Don't you understand why it is that so many people are pissed at Walmart
for coming into communities and destroying all the ma-and-pa stores? Why
so many communities have fought to keep them out? It is because they
come in, undercut the small stores, the small stores go out of business,
and all their employees come to work for Walmart at minimum wage.
Then tax revenue goes down in the community and the community goes
to hell.

Then people cannot understand why it is that 10 years later nobody in the
country can afford to buy cars or homes anymore and the car makers are
failing and there's tons of foreclosed homes all over the place.

When manufacturing leaves the United States because
of cheap Asian imports, retail is about all a lot of these communities have
left to provide jobs. And if the retail is paying minimum wage, the
communities
get bled dry. That's why cities like Buffalo NY, and Flint MI are such
hell-holes
today and many have entire communities of homes that have sat abandonded
for two decades. Essentially the entire community ends up full of poor
bluehairs surviving off their social security checks, and Medicade-funded
hospitals with a small crust of rich doctors in the community.

If the CEO and owners of the businesses are working alongside the
employees and making a REASONABLE amount of money - I'll
be generous and say, 20 times what the average peon makes - then
I have no problem with that. And you know something Bill? If you
read the case studies of companies where the workers succesfully
de-unionized, that's exactly what you find.

Card check legislation isn't going to affect these companies.

The companies it's going to affect are the ones where the CEO's and
owners are making 250 times the amount a line worker makes, and have
golden parachutes that guarentee them tens to hundreds of millions of
dollars
EVEN IF the company loses money.

GM and the Big 3 and the UAW are a special case, and do not represent
most unions and union employees in the country. And at any rate,
GM is UAW's problem now. Frankly, it's been many years since
the last of the founding owners of GM died, and GM as a corporation
has made the argument "what's good for GM is good for America"
so many times in the past, while sticking it's snout into the public
trough, that the company should have been handed over to the UAW
20 years ago. Let the UAW fight amongst themselves to figure
out how to sell cars profitably and make wages they are happy with.
I won't shed any tears for them. In any case, card check isn't going
to do squat for UAW anyway since they are fully unionized. Card check
will help the rest of the unions who don't have penetration in their
industries.

If a candidate for the incumbent was allowed to closet up all the voters
for 6 hours before the election lecturing them about the advantage of voting
to keep things the way they are.

There you go, forgetting about Bush's 2 stimulus handouts. So, your
grandchildren are gonna only be paying for Obama's handouts? Did the
magic money fairy pay for Bush's handouts? Drop those Republican
talking points for a moment and use your mind.

Since McCain voted for the Bush stimulus I highly doubt that he would
NOT have done another stimulus after he was elected. Conservatives
just need to face the facts that we tried 28 years of trickle-down starting
with RayGun and the economists have universally concluded that it
is an utter failure. Trickle-down is voodo economics, even Bush Sr. knew
that.

I'm not saying the stimulus is perfect. But this idea that we are going to
just toss all regulations on every business is utterly foolish and is the
real problem.

No not at all. What I want is for if the majority of workers in an industry
want to be unionized that they get to be.

The only reason that Walmart could get away with shedding all the
meatpackers in the Texas example is that Walmart successfully intimidated
the rest of the employees and the entire store and chain didn't unionize.
If it had, Walmart would have been forced to work things out. And
if the rest of the retail sector had unionized at the same time then
customers
would not be able to go run down the street to some undercutting
competitor and put Walmart out of business.

I don't mind it if employees get paid minimum wage IF the prices of
stuff in the economy that they need to buy are low. If bread cost 25 cents
a
loaf and milk 50 cents a bottle, and everything else was similarly priced,
then I'd agree that the unions don't have any place anymore.

But instead what I'm seeing is entire communities where the majority
of jobs in the community ONLY PAY min. wage, or a few cents above
it, and everyone in those communities is living in hell-holes. Not every
commuity is like that, of course, but way more than should be. And in
the meantime the owners of these companies are literally rolling in
money.

If you read the wikipedia entry for card check you have read all
the pro and con arguments so there's no point in rehashing them here.
I will merely point out that when a professor points out that rising
wages are a good thing for the economy, HE is tenured and HE
has nothing to gain or lose either way. By contrast when the head of
Walmart makes claims that unions are bad, he's motivated by his own
personal self interest. So I don't really put any stock in that.

You wanna argue economic theory, go ahead. I'll argue with you.
But you better use logic to support your points, not quotes from
some chamber of commerce.

That's not how modern business works and you know it, Bill. If all or even
most consumers out there were educated consumers and spent wisely,
then companies would be forced to compete with each other on the basis
of how good their products were, not on how well they are marketed. But
instead the business world is saturated with examples of inferior products
putting companies that make superior products out of business due to
the snowball effect of marketing dollars. That drags down the quality of
life for everyone, even for the minority of educated consumers.

The people on top of things are largely there from luck. You cannot
seriously
argue that people like Nardelli know how to run Chrysler, hell -I- could do
a better job than he did, hell YOU could do a better job than he did. Geze,
Home Depot fired his ass as far as they could
when he screwed them over, the guys flat out incompetent. He was
probably screwing the sister of one of the Cerebus board members to be
put on Chrysler.

No I mean the Republicans like Phill Gramm who inserted a 250 page
rider into the 11,000 page "Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000"
two days after Bush was elected, on the very day Congress was recessing
for the holidays. That rider was later dubbed the "Enron Loophole"
and it allowed the unregulated trading of subprime mortage packages,
which fired off the economic collapse we have now.

You see, Bill, Freddie and Fannie WERE regulated until Republicans
convinced Bush for the first time in history to use the federal
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to pre-empt all of
the state lending laws that had outlawed predatory lending by these
banks. All 50 state banking superintendents fought these rules but
Bush prevailed.

No, that is not the truth. It is a Republican talking point that is a big
lie.

The Community Reinvestment Act didn't cause the housing meltdown,
what caused it was the large number of ARMS issued that adjusted upwards
after the housing market start to go south.

You understand the concept of a snowball dolling downhill, or the
concept of a vicious circle, don't you?

What we had is a classic bubble of people in the early 2000's who were
jumping into home-flipping in a huge way. The typical scenario was buy
a decent family home for $200K and add a bunch of fripperies then
resell it for $400K to some empty-nester who was selling their $200K
home. The flipper used zero-percent loans to hold on to the home and
that worked as long as the housing market was hot.

Then prices went up too far, and the supply of ignorant/lazy/uneducated
empty nesters with money burning holes in their pocket got used up,
and the prices started to fall. The second they did, the flippers caught
out
on the floor when this musical chairs game stopped were all underwater
and they all walked away from their so-called "investments" so the banks
took them back and wrote them off and themselves collapsed. And
since these ARMS were all bundled up in securites, the investors that
financed this nonsense saw their portfolios heading for the toilet and
they paniced and pulled what money they had into commodities
speculation. That drove gas prices to 4 a gallon as well as food prices
and killed consumer spending, and another related whammy was
all these idiots buying these overpriced homes were using home equity
loans to finance cars, furniture and other nonsense and when the value
of their home dropped, the equity lines all were shut down by the banks,
and consumer spending ended up starved.

Do you actually know what the 2007 default rate of loans made in, let's see,
massasschuetts banks that were under the CRA was? I'l tell you. ONE POINT
EIGHT
PERCENT. compared to FIVE percent for all other types of loans.

The scapgoating of the CRA was a desperate attempt by supply-siders
to cover the real reason for the crash - the lack of regulation of financial
institutions. Thank God that we didn't elect McCain, we now have a
chance to put some regulation on the banks.

The idea that the Democrats were somehow anti-regulation of banks
is a myth.

define "socialism" other than the definition your using here
which is "everything I don't like and don't understand"

The Social Security Administration is a socialist government bureau.
Wanna get rid of it? I'm young, Bill, I'm still working and I got
another 30 years at least of paying into the damn thing. I'll be more
than happy to stop doing that now and send the money into a
401K

Then why did Bush styme all the states from regulating their banks?

The states know better than some dumb bureaucrat in Foggy Bottom
what scams the banks are engaged in, they should regulate them.

I've seen the youtube vid your referring to and it's lifted out of context.
Unless your willing to spell out all of the connections like I did here,
all your doing is throwing biased talking points around.

I'll give you that one. But, I didn't see conservatives voting against
Bush or other Republicans in large numbers for the 200 or 2004
elections. They chose to stand with the RINO's and that's what matters.

Now that they are out of power the "real" conservatives that you
seem to think aren't Republicans can have a chance to clean up
the Republican party. Go to it! You can start with Rush aka Addict
Limbaugh.

the evangelicals that want to violate the constitutional separation
of church and state are just one of the many stinky fish in the
Republican party. I personally feel that they are the worst, however,
far in excess of the compromised RINOs.

I'm sure you are. I think that Obama is well aware of that danger,
though. I certainly will freely admit that not all of his people are.
We will have to see what happens here.

Yup, anti-regulation. as in no regulations on the banks. Good, good.

They would pay either way. If no stimulus was done the depression would
be far worse. Did you know that for a while there they were talking about
letting money markets collapse but at the last minute the government stepped
in and stopped that? That would have been rich. money markets are the
only accounts in most 401K's that specifically have NO risk. I guess
someone realized at the last minute that if we allow all the 401K's to be
completely defaulted then we might as well put everyone on the dole.

Read up on the Great Depression. It wasn't until the government
pumped a lot of stimulus money into the economy that the economy
started to recover. WWII completed the recovery, but today, we don't
have the luxury of starting another war.

Equating torture of a single guy over a period of a few days, who has
a small amount of easily verifyable information to the
systematic torturing that was going on for months and years at Girab
and Gitmo and other CIA secret prisons we don't know about is
rediculous. Espically when so many of them were never charged
and let go after they figured out that they didn't know anything.

Don't kid yourselves. If McCain hadn't selected a bimbo for a running
mate he would have won. He nearly did. You don't realize how many
people are out there who voted against Obama simply because he is
black.

If it had been an old white guy up against McCain, then McCain could
have promised everyone free ice cream and he still would have lost.

Ah, OK that one I see. Basically what we have here is wanting to create
an excuse we can use to apply tariffs to cheap Chinese steel. They don't
give
a rip about the environment, they just want a way to block free trade.

Ted

 

So just buy it from Ingram Micro for the buy.com price. Oh, ingram
micro would rather have a relationship with buy.com and ship to whoever
buy.com says than set up an order page on their web site and deal with
the individual orders? That's the service buy.com is providing.

So buy straight from the publisher. Oh, the publisher would rather send
an occasional onesy-twosy order to a store that buys by the pallet-load
than deal with the end customer on all their sales? See above.

I'd be very surprised if B&N makes any money on the special orders.
That's a service they provide to keep your business; they make their
money on the pallet-loads of books.