Great article. I couldn't agree more.

I find it breathtaking that at a time of such huge inequalities in the US, so many have the nerve to blame the UAW for the state of Detroit.

They really have the nerve to blame a union that has achieved what ought to be the gold standard for workers in America. Don't forget that most Americans - erroneously BTW - after all believe that they are better off than anyone else in the world!

The tragedy is not that these car workers get too much but that the others get so little! Or that BMW for example will practically never pay any taxes for its plant in Alabama, that was the deal...

Considering the tax breaks for the rich in America, considering the salaries of CEOs, it is just obscene to shift the blame to those who are the most vulnerable and have the least influence, i.e. workers.

And that in a country where employees are so weak that the country doesn't even know annual collective bargaining in all industries.

Thank you, Michael Moore.

According to CBC the big 3 pays $28 per hour plus $26 benefits and $16 legacy costs for a $70 total. The Japanese manufacturers pay $26 an hour plus $20 benefits and $3 legacy costs for a $49 total. Excluding legacy costs the differential is $54/$46.

It seems to me a major problem is paying the legacy costs out of current earnings. Retiree benefits could have been endowed and held in trust at arms length from the company providing retirees with protection against bankruptcy. This is a matter of public policy and government regulation.

Michael, thanks for going to bat for the guys below who need the bailout the most. But let everybody here know for sure that the real numbers on the bailout will be in the $TRILLIONS, not the $Billions the mainstream media want us to believe. The global banksters now count $Billions of dollars like we count dollar bills. See the "The Federal Reserve and the Dot Com Bubble" video here: www.sillyConValley.net

THIS is in fact one example of "SHOCK CAPITALISM" at work:

a MANMADE DISASTER - such as DISASTER ECONOMICS -- is USED as an opportunity to for "shock treatment" - wherein the "Shock solution"

is "reform" -- by "LOWERING WAGES"....

and the argument laid out is "it is the fault of the OVERPAID UNION WORKERS" (which then makes unionism -- or its basic tenets - FAIR , DECENT, LIVEABLE WAGES respectful of LABOR) -- in order to convince americans (those that are not paid that much) to RESENT Unionism - and by extension, without their knowing it ACCEPT PROGRESSIVELY LOWEr and LOWEr and LOWER wages.

it is a VERY clever strategy of these ANIMALS among the GOP and conservatives and whomever that supports these ideas and tactics.

it is THESe people that are the PARASITES of society.

A better title would be
"Senate to corrupt, incompetent, ineffecient morons who make expensive unreliable cars that nobody wants, DROP DEAD"

And good riddance.

Have you seen a pie graft of where our money goes? The amount paid to Congressional benefits/retirement program, et al, is amazing, and for what!? It blows my mind every time I see them allow an airline or some other bankrupt business do away with paying their retirees what they worked so long for. Congress gets a retirement for what 2 or 4 years of doing to the US citizens what they do to us. Scandelous. And they give themselves pay raises to keep up with what white collar upper management get and then talk about how what CEOs get is too much all the while aspiring to the same off the backs of the US citizens. Congress is paid is way to much and then they get that retirement. When they want to get rid of blue collar retiree funds, where do they think those people are going to go to get money to live on. They are retired, ie, too old to work anymore, or too damaged to work anymore. Thank God, the people had enough sense to not let Social Security get put even more into the stock market. I never got a 401K because there was not a one that was not linked to oil or war and then this stock market and world economy crash could be seen back at the millenium. All this money for middle-men/banksters/congress - people producing nothing, well it just could not last anyway and then they got so greedy they blew it up even more with dirivitives and repackaging, making money off nothing but air each time. White collar looters get bailed out and blue collar workers are expected to act as whipping boys. I just do not believe the working people being thrown into this financial crisis we are now in will fall for the Republican media spin any longer. There is a financial tidal wave coming in with big oil waiting on top to burn anyone who comes up for air and our life vests are full of holes. And Congress should get retirement pay for this - H--- No. The blue collar wages are not the problem. Blue collar workers actually make something and it keeps this nation safer.

These humans in the Southern states of America are the real dregs of human society, they encouraged slavery and slave labor in every thing they do, They will always, find devious ways to legally enslave , abuse and exploit their fellow humans for profit.
They discourage their neighbors in Mexico from uplifting their peoples so that they can have a sustainable pool of cheap exploitable labor
Europeans in Europe found ways to compete without exploiting their citizens or their neighbors
China Japan Korea and the Eastern European block countries are working like beavers to uplift their masses, not devising devious ways to keep them poor and uneducated
The closest to these diminutive of moral peoples from the south is the cast system of India
The American people is waking up !!!! Sigmund Freudian and Edward Bernaise’s Psychological “Mind manipulation practices has been used on the American masses for decades by the Repugnants Thankfully it is painfully slowly being exposed “FREE THE USA” “FREE THE WORKING CLASS”

map light - here today - on big3contributions to reps voting yes..
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/12/12-3

Don't know how much more Appalachia can drop any deader than it already is. See the prosperity http://www.wisecountyissues.com on Main Street Pound and Main Street Appalachia, Wise County, Virginia. Our environment and health care are already THIRD WORLD AMERICA....

Senator Corker's remark re the UAW's refusal to bring union wages down and in line with those paid to non-union autoworkers just about says it all. What's next? An attempt to bring our workers' earnings down to those of fruit packers in China? How 'bout making them comparable to the pennies earned by the rag pickers of India? And all the while the soft-handed members of our bloated corporate bureaucracies walk away with most of the profit thanks to a Federal tax structure which no longer compels companies to reinvest in order to lower their tax liability. Billions of dollars of previously taxed profit now line the pockets of these corporate screw-ups.

When union wages fall, everyone's wages go in the dumper. Unions set the wages and benefits for the rest of America. Without them American workers are doomed. It's a shame that Americans never learned about the atrocities committed on American workers that led to the formation of unions and the liberation of working America (including children). Union workers and their families stood and often died asking (and later demanding) that the dignity of their persons and of their work be recognized. Their history is being repeated today in the Latin countries and Africa where the harassment and/or murder of workers' representatives is a daily occurance. How detached have we become from each other and from the rest of the world that we no longer care?

Busque la verdad!

The folks who blame the Republicans are basically right. I still have a few Republican relatives who lived through the depression, and they never forgave Roosevelt for giving the riff-raff work, spoiling the qued up dollar-a-day workforce. Some of my late relatives would never buy a Ford, because they believed Henry Ford was some sort of closet socialist.

It seems pretty clear to me the great unions (AFL-CIO, UAW, teamsters...) and the progresive policies of the Roosevelt administrations... saved this country from an eventual communist revolution. Maybe the pendulum has gone a lttle too far, though?

Flash forward 60 years, and the Dems have been duped and seduced buy Reaganomics and globalization, and have helped surrender our sovereignty to big business and the WTO. The race to the bottom has been going for some time, and finally caught up with the Big Three.

We need the full package to rescue the auto industry, not just a pile of money and a toothless energy czar. Everything should be on the table. Tariffs on imports to green cars to UAW AND management givebacks, and a team of experienced bankruptcy judges should have the power to make things happen.

Just as a reminder: The International Labour Organization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Labour_Organization) has adopted so-called "core labour standards" over the decades. The fundamental rights concern freedom of association and collective bargaining, discrimination, forced labour, and child labour. The USA have been active participants in the ILO ever since it was founded.

One of these core labour standards is rooted in the 1949(!!) Convention concerning the "Application of the Principles of the Right to Organise and to Bargain Collectively", see http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/cgi-lex/convde.pl?C098

Now look who DID NOT ratify that one: http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/cgi-lex/ratifce.pl?C098

Yeah, if you find the USA on the list of the 159 who did ratify it, please tell me, because I couldn't.

But I have never heard of any political moves in the US to actually ratify that convention. Which would be beneficial to US workers since international law supersedes national law.

But then again, the ILO Convention banning child labour was never ratified by Somalia and the USA either..as the only ones in the world.

It's all very well to keep aloof of and oblivous to what's going on in the rest of the world, as Americans like to do. But international conventions are a powerful tool to use against union-busting governments, and you've had a lot of those in the US.

I find it a major mistake of the American Left that the lack of US ratification of internationally agreed labour standards - while Europe keeps ratifiying them and has BTW still remained fairly competitive - has never been made a major political issue in the US.

Class war against us workers has always existed. The natural result of unregulated capitalism is class war by those who have (too much) against those of us who don't have (enough). The only thing that changes this occasionally is when we workers get organized and unite to fight. It's happening again and the courageous Republic workers have shown us the way. It's past time for us to stand together and say NO MORE! We do the work and we should share in the profits. Who says CEOs and shareholders should get what rightfully belongs to those of us who produce and do the work? WE SAY NO! Now it's up to us to become a power in this country once again. The wealth we produce belongs to everyone and it's past time for the hyper-wealthy who have, with few exceptions, stolen our lives from us, to give it back.

all this blaming of the 'auto industry' is ridiculous.

what has CONGRESS done in the last 30 years to keep the industry viable (e.g., fuel standards, classification of suv's, etc.)? i know lobbying & all that from the auto industry is a big part of that problem, but all this pious hand-wringing and lecturing by congresscritters is disgusting.

let's restructure those bastards too while we are at it.

Wake up people! The republicans have been stridently consistent when it comes to enacting legislation in accordance to whom and what they serve. Those who didn't get it have been ignoring the facts or not been paying attention. Now that they have little to lose, why should we expect them to behave differently? They know they are on the way out--let's just hope it's for good.

Apples and Oranges. Wall Street, a cess-pool, and Detroit, an utter failure on every measurable level.

Detroit has built garbage for decades. I know from personal experience. And those lucky folks making this trash always 'earned' around forty bucks an hour plus retirement, medical, sick-leave, grievance procedures, paid breaks, paid holidays, dental-oh yeah-it goes up from forty.

i saw an indignant family of UAW workers on the Today Show. Three generations of them-wow, that crew made more than my family ever did-but they were on the inside, grandpa got dad the job who got the indignant third generation "I'm entitled" little guy his little cash-cow.

I've laughed about this for decades. Well, we reap what we sow. We DON'T need unions-we must have a livable minimum wage-around $14.00 an hour-God help us the slaves slhould take home $400.00 a week and be able to eat something besides dog-food. The UAW can go where it belongs. If it had been a champion of the common man it would not be being head-shot now-it would have support, empathy. Ha Ha.

Michael,

If you friends in Flint or Detroit think things will change on January 20, please think again.

No, it is not just Republicans. Democrats are union busters too.

This attempt at government-directed busting of the right of collective bargaining and even the "sacred right of contract" (the capitalists' have fought wars over it in other situations) is EXACTLY what our liberal Democrat County Executive, Dan Onorato, tried to do to ATU local 95, our transit union. He withheld public transit funding and was on the verge of shutting down a major city's transit system to bust the union.

With intervention from the head ATU boss, Onorato finally accepted deep concessions from the Union and released the money. But at least they have a contract and survive to fight another day.

---USAn---

as a writer in an article said about the ELITES coming from the fancy schools and think tanks, to become the lord and masters - with their banks and systems and structures:

"These elites, and the corporate system they serve, have ruined the country. These elite cannot solve our problems. They have been trained to find "solutions," such as the trillion-dollar bailout of banks and financial firms, that sustain the system. They will feed the beast until it dies. Don’t expect them to save us.

They don’t know how.

And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes, and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, they will be exposed as being as helpless, and as stupid, as the rest of us."

Class World War

In retrospect, what seemed to have made America great and relatively unique throughout the world after the last Depression was the size of its middle class, the opportunity at least to move upward despite more humble beginnings, and the relatively benign treatment of those who remained in lower classes (at least in comparison to most countries) and the rough parity between the competing groups. Class warfare has always been going on to a certain extent, but it was muted and with all three classes each having some genuine power and the ability to weld it after the Depression, the situation evolved a rough set of checks and balances which tended to hold down the avariciousness of any one particular class. Two against one prevented excesses of any single group like the uber rich held back during the Robber Baron Age for most of the late 1800s.

Unfortunately, since Reagan’s time, the uber rich have secretly redeclared the class war while simultaneously attacking anyone who points out the obvious by declaring them as trying to “instigate class war.” Sadly, the uber rich have pretty much won. While few were looking, they not only regained control of much of the government most of the time thereby emaciating the opposition, they also tightened control over what was left of the independent media as well. The balance of power was throughly shattered.

A key component of that warfare by the uber rich was to emaciate or destroy the unions through new laws restricting unionization, bankruptcy courts killing contracts, diverting pension funds, abusive tactics against organizers, shipping jobs elsewhere and PR campaigns vilifying the very concept of collective bargaining to redress economic disadvantages. Unions were the prime voice for the lower class. The only other spokesperson for the poor was churches, but the upper class managed to completely distract the ministry from their earlier mission of helping the less fortunate. Now apparently, the sole interest of the clergy is the gender mix in bedrooms and conflating birth control into murder. So much for any effective voice for the lower class. Keeping them ignorant of what was going on and fearful of speaking up for themselves succeeded, probably beyond the uber rich’s fondest dream. Although the uber rich are few in number (and want to keep it that way), they made up for it with money and staying power.

The uber rich war against the middle class has been succeeding too and the current economic crisis is merely one more tool to accomplish the end of reducing the middle class. The tactics there seem to be maintaining ignorance, cutting off avenues of upward mobility especially education, eliminating the good jobs that made them middle class, turning them against the lower classes and playing on fear. Fear not only of the lower classes, but fear of damned near everything starting with “terrorists,” including so-called eco-terrorists (i.e. anyone who opposes pollution) and racketeers (i.e. any labor union official).

Whether the latest meltdown of the economy was a deliberate class war strategy or merely inadvertent due to the massive move of middle class taxes and other resources into the hands of the already uber rich makes no difference. The result was the same. Our large middle class is an endangered species. Downward mobility is a distinct possibility and already on the way. Those who are left as middle class have been convinced by PR that the fault is of the lower class wanting a living wage (as opposed to the uber rich wanting obscene amounts to add to what they already cannot spend). Cleverly done.

It also helped to have a cynical bought off journalism corp that no longer believed in quaint journalistic ethics like independence and fairness or traditional investigative reporting. Once the uber rich controlled the hiring and editorial policies, it was a foregone conclusion of how things would turn out. Of course, the perversion of the punditry was greatly helped by the laziness, greediness, and cowardice of those being hired to “report.” The capture of the media was complete when the on-screen “talent” was paid so much, they had hopes of being uber rich themselves.

Prognosis: Poor, like what many more of the population will likely soon be.

Signed: Lawlessone [for more irreverence, see resistence-is-possible.blogspot.com]

I believe that the Senate could've been more understanding in handing out 'emergency loans' to Wall Street and to the auto industry, but I have said for years that the auto-maker unions are the ones causing the exhorbitant price of automobiles and I have said that it would eventually be the downfall of that industry. No other labor group in this country is guaranteed 95% of their wages when laid off or when the factory is shut down. Allowing that to happen seems like an extremely bad executive decision as well as a monumentally bad use of corporate profits, if you ask me.

The Senate should force the car makers to build within the realm of economic common sense. No one in their right mind needs a hummer anyway.