'08 Cadillac CTS

[DNW]

Originally Posted by mongo615

Yes it is brutish--American style, whether in autos, or architecture or industrial design has never been about being delicate. it's about being big, broad-shouldered and the like. Delicacy is for the Far East & Europe--I guess that's why the more aesthetically pleasing clothing designers come from abroad.

GM can continue to build brutish American cars until the day it goes into bankruptcy. This might be what some people want, but obviously it's not enough to make the company profitable. To be successful, you have to make what your customers want, not what you think is "American" style--whatever that means.

Also, I've never seen the accusations that the Japanese and the German governments manipulate their currencies taken seriously. Care to point out the scholarship for these accusations?

Brian addressed your other concerns very well, so I'm not going to rehash what's been said.

 

[mongo615]

Yes, I am mistaken on the prices on the BMW's. I don't think that the M5 will be that much more car than the '08 CTS-v; the proof will be in the comparos when it is made availiable to the public. The CTS has opened up a new market for Cadillac--hopefully, the second gen Sigma vehicles will build upon this momentum. As far as the UAW and concessions go every time the UAW has made concessions over the last 25-30 years, GM management fails to invest the savings back into the company. The first thing the execs down at Renaissance CENTER HEADQUARTERS do is pat them selves on the back, give themselves massive bonuses as a reward for underachieving, and buy a new toy for themselves. Roger Smith was the king of wasting revenue in an attempt to diversify. Those billions of dollars spent on Hughes, Raytheon,FIAT, et.al., should have been spent putting my company on the most competativ path possible. Instead, we see weak efforts like the V8-6-4 fiasco, the Quad4 and the Aztek. They let their bread-and-butter vehicles get so long in the tooth(Re: Cavalier/Sunbird, Camaro/Firebird,Olds, Buick, the first Saturns) that vehicles that were marginally competetive in the first place become industry laughing stocks. GM has a lot of very talented technical staff that are going to waste due to the slavish attention to the bottom line. As far as their relations with the rank-and-file, most of the bad seeds have been weeded out--you have a workforce that is ready to give input on how to build great cars--management is still stuck in the 1960's. I can't begin to tell you how many times the 'vaunted' co-operation between hourly and salaried has broken down because of the need for lower-line managers to make their quotas--they will still ship junk if they have to, yet the media blames it on us. The days of "don't buy a car built on a Monday or a payday" are long gone--the engineers have pretty much 'idiot-proofed" every critical operation on the assembly line floor. Quality has to be designed and engineered as well as built in--GM is lacking in the former two.

As for as the drive toward globalization, it's a bad deal for America. It is driving our living standards closer to the rest of the world, and that doesn't bode well for our economy. If the acolytes of globalization want to destroy the American middle class in the name of short-term gain, they're slitting their own throats. As with the election of FDR in 1932, the American people will just vote to redistribute the upper-classes wealth--we will never go back to a pure Free market economic system--the Euros haven't, the Japanese won't, and the 'Asian Tigers' have yet to deal with this issue,but they will have to--authoritarian governments never last long during extended periods of economic growth. The "free-market" economic model was broken after the Great Depression, and the reforms that arose from the New Deal provided the longest period or economic growth in the history of the world. Any attempt to go back to pre-Keynesian economics will result in either an orderly transition to an even more socialistic system, or revolution, and the multi-nationals can't have that, now can they???For the few cents you save at Wal-Mart,you are not only destroying the middle class, you are putting China in the position of being the dominant superpower, while dooming America to a status not unlike Britain or France ,post WWII--former superpowers whom spent their national treasuries fighting wars in order to maintain empires. The U.S. is headed in that same direction, and I, for one don't want to doom my children or yours to a life of waiting tables, or wiping asses in a second-rate nation. This is the spectre of globalization. Thanks for letting me rant--I now return you to your original topic!

 

[mongo615]

Originally Posted by DarkNWorn

GM can continue to build brutish American cars until the day it goes into bankruptcy. This might be what some people want, but obviously it's not enough to make the company profitable. To be successful, you have to make what your customers want, not what you think is "American" style--whatever that means.

Also, I've never seen the accusations that the Japanese and the German governments manipulate their currencies taken seriously. Care to point out the scholarship for these accusations?

Brian addressed your other concerns very well, so I'm not going to rehash what's been said.
http://www.mapi.net/filepost/Exchang...ative_cur.html

http://worldtradelaw.typepad.com/iel...ative_cur.html

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/...03055748/print
policycouncil.nationaljournal.com/EN/Forums/American+Iron+and+Steel+Institu...http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/redir?s...ion=WebResults
SCHOLARSHIP. HE SAYS!

 

[DNW]

Originally Posted by mongo615

http://www.mapi.net/filepost/Exchang...ative_cur.html http://worldtradelaw.typepad.com/iel...ative_cur.html http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/...03055748/print policycouncil.nationaljournal.com/EN/Forums/American+Iron+and+Steel+Institu...http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/redir?s...ion=WebResults SCHOLARSHIP. HE SAYS!
You consider the views of a few US Congressmen and "The Coalition for a Sound Dollar" scholarship? Your standards must be pretty high. Also, the source you cited notes:

It is true, as Mr Paulson says, that Japan is not intervening to hold down the yen. But since Japan still holds almost $900 billion of foreign-exchange reserves, accumulated a few years ago when it was intervening, it is hard to claim that the currency is truly market-determined. Stephen Jen, an economist at Morgan Stanley, argues that Japan's Ministry of Finance should consider selling some of those reserves to break the one-way bet against the yen. There is a risk that such a move could itself upset financial markets. But the lower the yen slides, the greater the threat of an even sharper rebound.

Time to look for the next scapegoat.

 

[briancl]

Originally Posted by DarkNWorn

You consider the views of a few US Congressmen and "The Coalition for a Sound Dollar" scholarship? Your standards must be pretty high.

Also, the source you cited notes:



Time to look for the next scapegoat.

Bottom line: Toyota has much lower labor costs.

 

[mongo615]

No, they've never been taken seriously by the 'knee-jerk' free-traders, who'd just as soon sell their fellow citizen down the river to make a quick buck.These scholars who don't take the threat of globalization seriously remind me of the stockbrokers who jumped from their Wall Street skyscraper windows following the 'Crash of '29'--over-speculation never hurt anyone, they screamed! Sorry, but I don't worship at the temple of free trade--the Japanese and Chinese are the biggest practitioners of currency manipulation, and it is devastating entire American industries--look at what happened in Cleveland and Pittsburgh(Big Steel)--they still haven't recovered. Look at what's happening to agriculture in our country--it is being devastated by low-cost food imports in the name of 'free trade. Look at what's happening to the textile industry down south--it is being wiped out by low cost Chinese imports. Where are the people who work in these industries supposed to go? On a level playing field, there's no question that America can beat anyone, but with 'free trade' we're leaving the true american middle class, not the bougousie, out in the cold, and that fact will come back to haunt all of you who hide behind the banner of so-called 'free-market' capitalism, because without consumers, there is no 'professional' class.

 

[DNW]

Originally Posted by mongo615

No, they've never been taken seriously by the 'knee-jerk' free-traders, who'd just as soon sell their fellow citizen down the river to make a quick buck.These scholars who don't take the threat of globalization seriously remind me of the stockbrokers who jumped from their Wall Street skyscraper windows following the 'Crash of '29'--over-speculation never hurt anyone, they screamed! Sorry, but I don't worship at the temple of free trade--the Japanese and Chinese are the biggest practitioners of currency manipulation, and it is devastating entire American industries--look at what happened in Cleveland and Pittsburgh(Big Steel)--they still haven't recovered. Look at what's happening to agriculture in our country--it is being devastated by low-cost food imports in the name of 'free trade. Look at what's happening to the textile industry down south--it is being wiped out by low cost Chinese imports. Where are the people who work in these industries supposed to go? On a level playing field, there's no question that America can beat anyone, but with 'free trade' we're leaving the true american middle class, not the bougousie, out in the cold, and that fact will come back to haunt all of you who hide behind the banner of so-called 'free-market' capitalism, because without consumers, there is no 'professional' class.
Nice scapegoats you have there, those damn traders. Where are they supposed to go? How about becoming more competitive by producing more value added goods? Or, find new skills? In other words, man up and fight for their livelihood. What's happening here is a large scale shifting of what was an agriculture and industrial economy to a service and high technology economy, and it sucks for those who can't adjust. But please, don't hold the rest of us back. As to your agriculture argument, look at what we're doing to Mexico and the sub-Saharan agriculture industries. We're ******* them up royally because nobody is as efficient as we are at growing food. Some farmers are getting screwed over because they're not large enough to compete with the mega-farmers, not because we're importing cheap foods.

 

[mongo615]

so business week means nothing either? http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...2/b3875047.htm

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...2/b3875047.htm

The fact remains that just because it doesn't come from the mouth of Milton Friedman(R.I.P.) or the Bush Administration's Treasury Secretary doesn't mean it's not true. The Big Three could have lower labor costs, if the U.S. government went to some type of national health insurance,which they have in a modified form in Japan, and the transplants have younger workers--what's going to happen when they get to the average age of am domestic autoworker?Bingo! they will unionize, and Toyota will be in the same boat as the domestics.Bottom line is that GM and the other domestics negotiated with the UAW in good faith; they knew what they were getting into.Besides cutting labor costs alone will not makeGM profitable in the long run, and neither will getting rid of their union agreements--as I said before, the rank-and-file can only build what they're given--we don't design or market management's vehicles. Ultimately, GM has to have attractive, well engineered vehicles to become competetive--the UAW has nothing to do with that--if upper management would take the millions of dollars they lavish upon themselves, and as was said earlier, invest it in r&d, the UAW would not be the percieved problem. Do you honestly think that if toyota was unionized, with the productthey have to offer, would be unprofitable??? Good product sells, regardless of labor cost, and that's a lesson GM is just now starting to learn.

 

[mongo615]

Originally Posted by DarkNWorn

Nice scapegoats you have there, those damn traders. Where are they supposed to go? How about becoming more competitive by producing more value added goods? Or, find new skills? In other words, man up and fight for their livelihood. What's happening here is a large scale shifting of what was an agriculture and industrial economy to a service and high technology economy, and it sucks for those who can't adjust. But please, don't hold the rest of us back.

As to your agriculture argument, look at what we're doing to Mexico and the sub-Saharan agriculture industries. We're ******* them up royally because nobody is as efficient as we are at growing food. Some farmers are getting screwed over because they're not large enough to compete with the mega-farmers, not because we're importing cheap foods.
The 'information society' will not make up for all of the displaced workers--and what is going to happen to them--we could have 100 million engineers in this country--all that will do is lower their standard of living, because there's no need for 100 million engineers. Anyway, information services will not save the american middle class--when's the last time you put in a call for service for a computer or any high-tech piece of equipment--where does the call go??? if it's not Apple, you'll get some guy named Ted or some girl named Becky with a bengali accent!India and China are taking those jobs too, thanks to so-called free trade--even the professional class is losing out--i guess they'll just have to go and spend another $100k 'manning up' and getting another degree--maybe they can write code...oops those jobs go to India and The Philiipines!maybe they can build the hardware for the oncoming 'info society'...Naaaah--the Vietnamese and Chinese do a much more efficient job of it--where does it end???

 

[DNW]

Originally Posted by mongo615

so business week means nothing either? http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...2/b3875047.htm

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...2/b3875047.htm

The fact remains that just because it doesn't come from the mouth of Milton Friedman(R.I.P.) or the Bush Administration's Treasury Secretary doesn't mean it's not true. The Big Three could have lower labor costs, if the U.S. government went to some type of national health insurance,which they have in a modified form in Japan, and the transplants have younger workers--what's going to happen when they get to the average age of am domestic autoworker?Bingo! they will unionize, and Toyota will be in the same boat as the domestics.Bottom line is that GM and the other domestics negotiated with the UAW in good faith; they knew what they were getting into.Besides cutting labor costs alone will not makeGM profitable in the long run, and neither will getting rid of their union agreements--as I said before, the rank-and-file can only build what they're given--we don't design or market management's vehicles. Ultimately, GM has to have attractive, well engineered vehicles to become competetive--the UAW has nothing to do with that--if upper management would take the millions of dollars they lavish upon themselves, and as was said earlier, invest it in r&d, the UAW would not be the percieved problem. Do you honestly think that if toyota was unionized, with the productthey have to offer, would be unprofitable??? Good product sells, regardless of labor cost, and that's a lesson GM is just now starting to learn.

Are you advocating the wholesale restructuring of our national health care system to save the big 3? Thanks, but no thanks.

As to your last point, good products do sell, but not regardless of labor cost. If labor cost is too high relative to competitive products of similar quality, it makes the product uncompetitive. Patriotic buying can only prop up the industry for so long. At some point, your customers wake up and realize that they're taken for a ride. Also, no one here is defending GM's management, so there's no need to pile on. But, the unions aren't innocent either, so spare us the sermons.

 

[DNW]

Originally Posted by mongo615

The 'information society' will not make up for all of the displaced workers--and what is going to happen to them--we could have 100 million engineers in this country--all that will do is lower their standard of living, because there's no need for 100 million engineers. Anyway, information services will not save the american middle class--when's the last time you put in a call for service for a computer or any high-tech piece of equipment--where does the call go??? if it's not Apple, you'll get some guy named Ted or some girl named Becky with a bengali accent!India and China are taking those jobs too, thanks to so-called free trade--even the professional class is losing out--i guess they'll just have to go and spend another $100k 'manning up' and getting another degree--maybe they can write code...oops those jobs go to India and The Philiipines!maybe they can build the hardware for the oncoming 'info society'...Naaaah--the Vietnamese and Chinese do a much more efficient job of it--where does it end???

Nobody is advocating for 100 million engineers, so you don't need to prop up that straw man. You're also greatly mistaken if you think a call center operator represents a high tech worker. This goes to show how behind you are in the current economic climate. America isn't exporting call center, it's exporting financial expertise, business consulting, design, marketing, and entertainment, so on, so forth. Thankfully, the younger generations are getting good at this. And they're competitive as heck (at least the smart ones are).

The bottom line is, our economy is going away from basic manufacturing, and it's inevitable that those who cannot change will be left behind. There's no place for complacency in the global economy.

 

[LSeca]

Originally Posted by mongo615

Yes, I am mistaken on the prices on the BMW's. I don't think that the M5 will be that much more car than the '08 CTS-v

You're mistaken about the M5 as well, it will be alot more car than the CTS-v.

 

[DNW]

Originally Posted by LSeca

You're mistaken about the M5 as well, it will be alot more car than the CTS-v.
The bottom line is, in Detroit's mind, a nice car is a big ass engine strapped to a mediocre body. They don't get the totality concept. People nowadays want a track performer that drives nicely for their 9-to-5 gigs. It's achieving that balance that is difficult, not making the car go faster. If the objective is just to make the car go faster, we all would be driving with a couple of tanks of NOS in the trunk.

 

[LSeca]

Originally Posted by DarkNWorn

The bottom line is, in Detroit's mind, a nice car is a big ass engine strapped to a mediocre body. They don't get the totality concept. People nowadays want a track performer that drives nicely for their 9-to-5 gigs. It's achieving that balance that is difficult, not making the car go faster. If the objective is just to make the car go faster, we all would be driving with a couple of tanks of NOS in the trunk.

You said this better than I could, I agree completely.

 

[mongo615]

i'M NOT TRYING TO IMPLY THAT THE UAW IS INNOCENT--ITS JUST THAT IN THE GENERAL PUBLIC'S EYE, WE ARE ALWAYS PORTRAYED AS THE BOOGEYMAN, AND MOST OF GM'S PROBLEMS STEM FROM ITS DISCOMFORT WITH CHANGE.THE UAW IS COMPLICIT IN THEIR FAILURE TO ROCK THE BOAT UNLESS IT BENEFITS OUR MEMBERSHIP--WE SHOULD BE PLAYING AS LARGE A ROLE AS IG METALL DOES IN GERMANY. NATIONAL HEALTH CARE ISN'T JUST AN ISSUE FOR THE BIG 3--AS OUR POPULATION CONTINUES TO AGE, AND BE DISPLACED IN THE NEW ECONOMY, THEY'RE STILL GOING TO NEED HEALTH CARE. THE HAVES IN SOCIETY WILL PAY FOR IT ONE WAY OR THE OTHER, EITHER THROUGH HIGHER INSURANCE PREMIUMS OR THRU NATIONAL INSURANCE. AS FAR AS CALLING A CALL CENTER POSITION A 'HIGH-TECH' JOB, THAT WAS A LEAD-IN FOR WHAT'S HAPPENING TO THE TECHNICAL SECTOR OF OUR ECONOMY--THOSE JOBS CAN BE EXPORTED AS WELL. AS FAR AS BUSINESS SERVICES AND THE LIKE SUPPORTING A MULTI-TRILLION ECONOMY--IT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN. AMERICA ISN'T DELAWARE-GREAT NATIONS BUILD THINGS. A SERVICE ECONOMY CANNOT AND WILL NOT SUPPORT THE LEVEL OF CONSUMPTION THS ECONOMY NEEDS TO MAINTAIN ITS CURRENT STANDARD OF LIVING, PARTICULARLY SINCE, ACCORDING TO YOU THOSE SERVICES WILL NEED TO BE EXPORTED. THE YOUNGER GENERATION(EVERYONE BORN AFTER 1964) IS GOING TO HAVE TO SUPPORT THE LARGEST GENERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY(76MILLION). THEY HAVE GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO THIS STANDARD OF LIVING, AND IF ITS NOT MAINTAINED, THERE'S GOING TO BE HELL TO PAY AT THE BALLOT BOX-THAT IS WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. FOR YOU TO TAKE SUCH A FLIPPANT ATTITUDE ABOUT THE COLLASPE OF THE 'OLD ECONOMY' GIVES ME THE IMPRESSION THAT YOU DON'T THINK THAT IT WILL AFFECT YOU. IT WILL--ALL OF US BORN AFTER THE BABY BOOM ARE GOING TO PAY DEARLY FOR A PERMANENT UNDERCLASS WITH NO ENTRY-LEVEL JOBS WITH A LIVING WAGE BECAUSE OF THE ABSENCE OF MANUFACTURING, AND SELFISH BOOMERS WHOM THINK THE WORLD REOLVES AROUND THEM. WHILE I AM NO FAN OF FULL-BLOWN SOCIALISM, THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO GET, BECAUSE THE BOOMERS WANT THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY AND THEIR MEDICARE AND WILL WANT OTHER BENEFITS THAT REFLECT THEIR ADVANCING AGE, AND ONLY THE GOVERNMENT CAN PROVIDE THEM, AND THE UNDERCLASS WILL WANT THE SAME, AND THEY WILL BE A POTENT POLITICAL FORCE.EITHER SOCIALISM OR FASCISM. TAKE YOUR PICK