Not to throw the UAW under the bus. But why bother. Since the US would have nothing in the car game as it were. We could just tax the car to death. We could stop building roads and start building mass transit systems all over the country. We could reverse suburban sprawl the same way we put it up, encentives. Sure a lot of people who bought into the suburban dream would be hurt but who cares. Full speed ahead outlaw the Car.

Hahaha! Hallefuckinglujah!! Ain't it great? The rotten, no-good, corrupt suburban middle class is finally swirling down its own bourgeois toilet ...yaaayyy! Justice is finally arriving! God answers prayer! :D :D :D


Finally! So many Americans are so SICK of this ONE dominating class, its shallow romance with itself, and its endless masturbating about it's own whole STUPID developed nostalgia ...about nothing more than shitty looking, tree-bare neighborhoods of curvy streets, cable television, and, the ritual of spoiled kids who get into trouble with their overpaid parents' money. Oh, and let's not forget their fixation for commercial sports, rather than the science which powers so much of their lifestyle. These people are, more often than not, just the same old backward, ignoramuses, and trash, that you find in third world countries, or areas of the inner city, except for their propensity for consumer commodities which lend them a more sophisticated civilized veneer, that belies the utter dolts who sport and wear all of this cute shit.

Now, the next shoe needs to drop on the marketing and business school graduate, pseudo-professional, corporate classes, with all of their middleman white collar non-productivity, which contributes approximately nothing to the economy, overall. I think we need to send those motherfuckers all back to Golgafrincham on a giant space ark.

I can't wait to see the health care field really take it, with all of it's unqualified half-trained females who weigh it down and misdiagnose people, left and right, and then scream "unionize!", on top of it. It's hilarious that so many of them were given their shot to play General Hospital, IRL, thanks to the corporatizing of medicine which brought about task-managed care, but now they really belief in their own professional merits and don't believe how easily replaced they are. Bitches: Stole jobs from Men, gave back less, ruined every market they've touched and STILL expect to be supported at every turn. That's why their labor has been worth only $0.75 on the dollar (barely).


Corporate power may have destroyed the precious "middle class", but this class has been a decadent form of dead weight in our our society for a long time. They're backward turds who are in the way of progressive ideals. Phuque them, one and all. In principle, they should have been preserved, but no more than anyone else. But, in practice, they selfishly screwed our society over with their endless, voracious consumption and their self-adulation. The UAW is a good example of a large group of overpaid white (and black) trash who fit this bill. For settling their hash, alone, we salute the corporate empire! We blow you kisses!


....Mmmmmwaaahhh!!!

Lmao

I crunched some numbers after I read the New York Times article today about the failure of the Auto Bailout and how the UAW's unwillingness to make salary concessions was central to the GOP opposition. It turns out that the average UAW employee makes 4.18 times more than the median income in Buffalo. In case you're wondering, that's $114,400.00 yearly, if you're using the following equation (no overtime calculated) $55. per hour X 40 hours X 52 weeks. What they're making a stink about, in case you were wondering, was a reduction to $93,600.00 a year. Last time I checked, you were fairly well off with an income like that in either Buffalo or Detroit. So this may not surpise you, but I am about ready to say good riddance to the lot of 'em: workers and CEOS and all. Unions were created to advocate for the lesser among us. The UAW no longer constitutes that. They are now the sort of ungrateful elite they originally were born to challenge. I think it's a touch disturbing.

From Private Jet Planes, to tearing down many cities urban fabrics for SURFACE PARKING LOTS, I say "Good Bye" Auto Industry. Bring back the Street Rail, CLEAN AIR and Urban Cores back to America.

LOL! Too true! The Golgafrinchams had the same idiot problem and they didn't solve it by putting upper management in charge while screwing the lower middle. They sent the whole bunch away.

anti union scumbags need a bullet ito the head. just sayin....

Neocons are little cowards hiding behind computers and phonies who always play both sides because they have no true country of their own anymore. They like to pretend to believe that they have everyone down as stupid sloganeers. Fortunately that's really only themselves and they've now lost their last pots to piss in. With our new multicultural, U.N. leaning,liberal, half-Muslim president to implement our globalist agenda, we're now ready to really starting inserting the bits in their mouths. Thank you neocon Republican George Bush for giving us the power to snoop into their privacy to identify them. Thank YOU neocons for supporting it. :)

It just all goes to show that individual greed does not work together collectively to a society's good. It's time to pay the bill and tax waste. The poor should be used as the yardstick for determining what's waste.

Niman...what a waste of paper and ink! You're a left-wingNUT moron!

Nice comment, Turin. Liberalism is a construct by and for the market. So is feminism. Only guys between 5'5" and 6' believe Stalin had anything to do with unions or Gloria Steinem. Most debate these days is monopolized by stupid cold war slogans that have nothing to do with anything that is going on in this country. I feel the pain of UAW but I believe they are just as much greedy bastards as the auto companies. The faster we send the whole lot to Golgafrincham the faster we shall reclaim sanity.

This Niman installment suffers from the same malady as the others. Granted the usual players of Marxism, glibness, and overly hyperbolic description always rear their ugly faces, but the one flaw that characterizes all of Dr. Niman's writings is glaring above all else yet again: namely the fascinatingly myopic belief that challenges to his viewpoint are not rational, and hence are beneath rational discussion for refutation.

Case in point. Dr. Niman's glaringly simplistic logic proceeds as follows in the above article: Republicans = evil, Republicans support X, X must be evil. No matter how much Dr. Niman must narrow his view, he is willing to do so to justify this principle. It could never be the case that Republicans simply approach problem solving from a different perspective than Democrats. Oh no, that would granting the world of politics some shades of grey. Instead we are forced to stumble through a clumsy, one-sided account of a phenomenon without any dignity being granted to the arguments that fall on the side of those opposing the Big-3 Bailout.

Now let me begin by reminding folks that I am not a supporter of the Republican Party. My purpose here in refuting Dr. Niman's article is not to support the Republican Party in any way. Moreover, I, unlike Dr. Niman, will not speculate on the potential hidden motivations governing politicians. This is an endless game of trying to undermine arguments with the "appeal to motive" logically fallacy. One could easily observe that, since Democrats are vastly greater recipients of UAW campaign contributions, their support of the bailout is simply a returned gift to the UAW for aiding them in obtaining power. Because this is not an argument that is directed to the substance of the issue, however, it does no good to consider it. Likewise, any serious reader ought to reject any of Dr. Niman's reasoning that relies on this same fallacy, which, honestly, is most of it.

But on to the substance. Dr. Niman makes the suggestion that there is an incongruity in the positions held by Republicans that sends the strong message that the prosperity of the unions is the basis of the Republican opposition to the bailout. This is false. Dr. Niman cites, as evidence, that Republicans "have always stepped up to whore for the auto industry when it came to combating safety regulations and environmental safeguards like fuel mileage standards." Now, as Dr. Niman reasons, because some Republicans are opposed to a massive government handout to the automakers, this stands in direct conflict to the previously understood actions of "whoring out," as he calls it. But this position is not incongruous, as I will demonstrate.

Safety regulations are regulations. More to the point, safety regulations constitute government interference into the affairs of the automakers. This interference is done will clearly good intention; however, there are some who believe that the government ought to minimize its interference into the actions of citizens. Now let me be clear: I’m not asking anyone agree with this perspective; I am only asking that a conscientious reader recognize that such a perspective is held to such an extent that representatives in congress uphold this perspective and argue on its behalf. Likewise, one can see that "environmental safeguards" are a similar twist on the exact same phenomenon.

Dr. Niman interprets these arguments to be manifestations of a business vs. average Joe dichotomy. Under this formulation, he would be correct to consider opposition to the bailout to be incongruous with these previous perspectives. However from the perspective of minimal government interference into private affairs, opposing a massive government handout would fit the previously mentioned positions equally well. This leaves us with, at best, a stalemate. The only thing that can carry Dr. Niman to the conclusion he reaches is the fundamentally assumed "Republicans = evil." Dr. Niman completely ignores a potentially fruitful area of discussion (big government versus small government, what powers ought to be afforded to the state, the tenability of lemon-socialism, etcetera, etcetera) in favor of an argument that so strongly rests upon the mindless, unchallenging agreement of the reader as to literally constitute a waste of paper.

So to recap briefly, Dr. Niman has simply refused to acknowledge that there exists a free-market advocacy position in this discussion, and has instead pared the conversation down to mercantilists and socialists, where the former involves helping business at the expense of workers. Never mind that this zero-sum, bourgeois vs. proletariat thinking is largely baseless rabblerousing, let us stick to the issue at hand: unions.

First and foremost, please consider what a union is. In the labor market, which is the market place wherein workers seek buyers of their labor power for the sake of some good in exchange, sellers of labor hope to attract buyers. Think of it like a mall, where workers each have a shop and hope that potential customers will come in and buy something. A union is a system of collusion between sellers to form a price-setting cartel. Again, think of a mall where all the stores agreed to come together and charge twice as much for their goods than they could hope to charge if they were forced to compete with one another. The process of price fixing by collusion of suppliers within the labor market is called a union.

Let me be clear on this, I am not making any value judgments about this activity; I am only describing it in economic terms so that we might begin to understand what effects such a configuration might have generally. Since wages are rendered higher by a price fixed above the clearing point of the market, two things will occur. First of all, firms will scale back on production. This will happen for the same reason that people drove less when gasoline was $4 per gallon; people buy fewer goods when prices goes up. The same applies to labor. This sends a stake through the heart of both business, which will be less likely to hold up to competition against competitors with lower labor costs, and labor, which will be demanded less and leave more people unemployed.

In the case of the Big Three, union contracts make reducing labor costs an impossibility. Beyond this, the increase in the cost of medical technology coupled with the consequent increase in retired workers' lifespans make the projected effect of the original 60's and 70's agreements to be more costly than perhaps anyone could have foreseen. Since labor costs were either static or growing, Detroit would be forced to cut back on other expenses. By putting less funding to R&D, for example, the big three could be less nimble in the marketplace, and would be more likely to suffer at the hands of suddenly increasing gas prices.

I'm guessing on this last part, and I'm sure the clowns running these companies played a huge role in their collapse. But Dr. Niman does everyone a disservice by pretending that the only objection that anyone has to the current UAW union configuration is that they just hate seeing workers buying nice things.

Oh, and don't listen to Dr. Niman’s attempt to sweep this $70 per hour number under the rug. His incredulity does not constitute a refutation, and the notable absence of an explanation of the way in which it is flawed is suspect. If Dr. Niman had taken the few moments necessary to research the doubts he has about this number, he could have found this: http:// finance (dot) yahoo (dot) com/news/UAW-GM-say-new-pact-makes-apf-13624940 (dot) html . In it, he would read the following paragraph:

"But GM, which negotiated the four-year deal that serves as a template for UAW deals with Chrysler and Ford, says its total hourly labor costs dropped 6 percent this year from pre-contract levels, from $73.26 in 2006 to around $69 per hour. The new cost includes laborers' wages of $29.78 per hour, plus benefits, pensions and the cost of providing health care to more than 432,000 GM retirees, GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said."

From the perspective of the employers, labor costs are labor costs, and, if the total cost of labor per each employee is nearly double that of competitors, sustainability becomes an issue. But these complications are neatly resolved by Dr. Niman; pity he doesn’t share them with us here.

Oh, and one last thing. Objections of this sort go unaddressed and are relegated to the internet version of Artvoice because of the conspicuous absence of the printed "Letters to Artvoice" section. How odd.

If this smarmy layman, who plainly fears debate, weren't such a partisan Republican then he might not be going to such transparent lengths trying to stack a debate with his meaningless rants about simplistic caricatures, while loudly whining that no one will play ball with him in a game where he's bought the field, both teams and the ump. One more pleb who voted McCain/Palin. Marxism is the only ideology that casts an impartial light on economics, whether it be communistic socialism or crony capitalism. Time to cancel your journal subscriptions and enroll for your first college course, little boy.

Arthur,

You are falling into the exact same trap as Dr. Niman. Are you not human? Rational? If so, save the petty ad hominems for the simplistic brute who is persuaded by such nonsense and actually do the hard work of justifying your beliefs. You say I am wrong. Well, hows abouts you actually prove it?

But I think it would be valuable to go through your response just to see how vapid and illogical your retort really is. Let us begin, shall we?

1) Layman – How odd that this is bandied about as an insult. Did you get the memo Arthur? Did anyone tell you that modern liberalism rejects the notion of an anointed priestly class? I am assuming that you use this phrase to disparage me because you do not believe non-academic types ought to be granted space at the table to discuss, of all things, unions. How ironic. However in addition, I must observe that you know nothing of what I do, and hence you cannot even be certain that your characterization of me is even accurate.

2) Plainly fears debate – This one is strange too. If I fear debate, why did I descend into a den of Niman sycophants and write a long, cogent reply to the underlying substance of Dr. Niman's article? Why did I then reply to you, despite your fallacious and brusque, ad hominem reply? Understand Arthur, I am trying to goad people here into actual thought, not perpetuate the mindless echo-chamber. More than anything, I would prefer if Dr. Niman himself deigned to address these criticisms in some quasi-public forum. I do not fear debate; I welcome it.

3) Republican – I have already plainly stated in what I had written above that I am not a Republican. I suggest that you consider that, while political opinion is largely divided into two camps in the MSM arena, subtler thinkers are able to form complex ideologies without associating with a particular camp.

4) Stack a debate – I am not even sure how to address this. The only real way to stack a debate in this sort of medium is to present facts. This is what I have done. If I am wrong, the only way to turn it around is to present counter-arguments. Arthur, you have yet to present any.

5) Bought the field, both teams, and the ump – You suggesting that you cannot argue against the objections I make because... why exactly? Because I bought a baseball team? What? I am sorry, but your analogy loses me. I am claiming that Dr. Niman is fundamentally incorrect in his assessment of the facts. I am presenting counter-arguments to demonstrate this. If you think that rich people bought all the facts so that my argument seems more logical than it really is, then you are eroding the basis for rational analysis of anything.

6) McCain/Palin – I did not vote for McCain for president.

7) Marxism – Ok, so you are a Marxist. That is fine. I never had any complaints with Marxism qua Marxism, aside from the fact that I think it is incorrect. I only mention Marxism because Dr. Niman clearly argues from a Marxist perspective, but keeps his reliance on this ideology hidden. Not only is this deceptive, but it is suspect as well. It is my contention that Dr. Niman would enjoy less proliferation of his articles if he were explicitly Marxist. This is because being an out-and-out Marxist is, ironically, alienating. If you tout the merits of Marxist analysis of economics, Arthur, do me a favor and apply such an analysis to what I had mentioned earlier about unions.

Oh, and as a brief interpolation, recall that my aforementioned lay status was used as an insult. This is so incredibly laughable in light of the current context. A lay person is typically, in the Marxist/Smithian labor theory of value, the one on whom those who engage in intellectual pursuits, such as teaching, directly rely. If anything, university professors teach those who, usually by virtue of their education, go on to engage in activity a Marxist would classify as non-productive. Given that Dr. Niman is a communications professor (communications being a study that yields very few, if any, farmers and manufacturers), you, as a Marxist, ought to be appalled at his exploitation of the proletariat by deriving a living from empowering the bourgeois class.

8) Enroll in your first college course – This neatly brings everything together, does it not? You wrote an entire reply lacking any substantial refutation or analysis. The whole thing was a string of attacks leveled at my person, not at any of my claims. Assuming for a moment that I was not formally educated, are you attempting to exemplify what such an education is supposed to bring to the table? Is that the value of a college education? A designation that allows one to silence opposing viewpoints on the basis of a degree conferred? I sure hope you graduated from different institutions than I. Such tirades sully the reputation of whatever educational institution would have you.

You too, Dave. Some of the uninformed posturing that is going on in here is getting pretty entertaining. Meanwhile, getting back to rational discourse, you're quite right. Liberalism vs. conservatism is a false dichotomy pointed out by Karl dude, himself. It keeps the underclasses arguing within capitalist paradigms, along with the useful idiots who eat yogurt, wear wire rim glasses and wear sandals. Calling Niman a Marxist is a joke. The biggest aspiration of a feel-good environmental liberal like him is to be the nagging conscience of the boss on a TV sitcom.


"Oh, the ambiance! I do so love the gentle tug of the tension dynamic that goes back and forth between our diverse personalities as we reach new understandings of each other's backgrounds that give our belly button lint, each, it's specific tint. *I* live on *this* block, and *you* live on *that* block! ...that's MUCH more productive than what those 'extremists' are talking about with all of there "militancy" about resources, numbers, and things like that! Let's go thumb our noses at our favorite talking heads to hate. We're changing the world! ...one petty sentiment at a time!"


Of course, what really weakens unions is that - besides wages - all they care about is minorities and women. If you have 2 people with an interest, and you have 98 people with another interest, and all that you focus on is the 2 people, then you're solidarity is only going to be 2 people strong. If you have 50 people with one interest and another 50 with a petty interest, and all that you focus on is the 50 petty who only care about maliciously disempowering the other 50 and scabbing for the boss, then your solidarity is going to be for the boss, the boss is going to side with them and the other 50 are going to be slowly replaced with more scabs. That's the problem with unions.

A cowardly liberal will do anything to procure his own position and survival. He/she has loyalty to nothing except his/her master. Hence, his/her aversion to noble concepts like ideology, as well as the tendency to speak mostly in canards toward said ideals, in way of railing against "extremism".


....Now, we should start hearing more about nomenclature, while we are treated to further feints and dodges about "substance" ...all of which helps keep the debate splashing against the glass of the corporate and feminist agenda, both of which are supported by these twerps because they have no problems with ideology.;D

LOL!

Thanks for silencing the new monologist. These shutins can be a bit entertaining but their oddball ripoff rants get extremely old after a while. They just twist everything that doesn't fit the corporate agenda into Marxism or some other phobia against single ideology approaches and leave you with the implied conclusion that privatization is the solution. No one wants to directly take that up that lie because the net effect of privatization is that it encroaches on rights and the public good in exchange for a few gimmicks that only have a short term effect. The housing bubble is a great example of privatization run rampant that crapped out and then the blame left for the demand side of the equation. As long as this game kept the Bush economy churning it was touted as a corporate success and a fundamentally sound capitalist economy. As soon as it popped it became a failure caused by socialism because the victims were low income people who should have been more educated consumers. Huh? How come they weren't blessed for their greed in grabbing everything they could as fast as they could sign papers? How could they have understood that the overall plan wasn't sound and that it wasn't just another form of easy credit and that the bullshit of the miracle of the market was finally going to crap out? Actually the example isn't good for much more than a blame game but no one wants to go too far in blaming high consumption/credit middle class lifestyles that keep pushing everything in this direction.

I exercised self-silence because I simply did not have anything to say. I am not too interested in getting pulled into a petty back-and-forth on, well, just about anything other than the subject of the article. I presented a rebuttal to Dr. Niman's analysis, and have heard nothing but bland comments disparaging my character or tired recycled tirades against "the sort of people" that argue what I appear to be arguing here or "the sorts of arguments" such people make.

For example, Jason, what does your rant about privatization have, at all, to do with either what I have said or Dr. Niman has said about unions? Even if you are right about the housing market and middle class lifestyle, what is the relevance to what has already been mentioned? Such knee-jerk diversion and hand-waving smacks of someone less interested in arriving at any truth about the situation than simply vindicating his or her worldview in the face of any challenge, legitimate or not.

I will not respond to Turin because he/she has clearly pointed to the Marxist "ideology as an instrument of social reproduction." Once this dogmatic impenetrable fort is erected, he/she can forever dismiss anything that would challenge his/her views as an offshoot of the ideology crafted by the moneyed class. Such relativism renders appeals to "capital-T" Truth absolutely impossible, and since I believe in objective truth that transcends class interest, I simply cannot pursue a fruitful dialogue with him/her.

I will observe, however, that he/she is certainly correct to observe that calling Niman's "liberalism" is not strict Marxism. Dr. Niman, however, does lean on Marxist tenets to drive his presentation of the appearance of conflicting interests between workers and managers. So I will take this opportunity to state that while Niman might not be a true adherent of Marxism, he definitely borrows heavily from its reasoning.

And Jason, if you know about Marx, you should see the connections I am mentioning are more than some fear-inspired free-association. I know there are many out there that employ concepts like Nazism, Marxism, Capitalism, anarchism, totalitarianism, et al, as empty notions to serve as pseudo-intellectual, pejorative placeholders. I promise I am not using Marxist in that context here.

I would also like to take this opportunity to implore others reading this and considering responding to resist the urge to circle the wagons and hunker-down in ideological camps. Please, grant my position the dignity of sober consideration. If you reject it, very well; but at least do so for the right reasons.