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CPaul-
"Therein lies the rub.
First an foremost, Corporations have as their primary responsibilty profits to their stockholders.."
Ah, you mean publicly held corporations. Perhaps. Which might be one reason the neocons are so adamant that a "corporate entity" should not have the same rights as a real citizen. Or perhaps, corporate stocks and public investment needs to be reconsidered as a whole.
I would suggest to you (and the courts) that a corporation has a higher obligation to the people who contracted with it, and made life decisions in reliance on it, than it does to the stockholders. In most states "reliance" is a legal term and it creates binding obligations--which would predate and outweigh decisions about how the stockholders and CEOs should get their xmas presents next year. Only got a half billion left in the bank? Well, the folks you promised it to FIRST, should get the first piece of it. Not the last hired CEO who had no right to expect it, and jumped on board after it was committed and due elsewhere.
"As far as the "deals" for lifetime medical care the automakers made with the unions, exactly who is at fault here? I suggest that BOTH parties are at equal fault."
The unions were greedy. Not to mention (cough cough) has anyone heard the rumour "mobbed up" ? And the carmakers were equally greedy. The workers...were expected to be dumb about high finance, they often had hard and dirty jobs and were hired for their backs not their brains. But the corporations--who were SO good at accounting and extracting every penny from every car (save ten million pennies, one each from ten million cars, and you've got a nice bonus)--certainly could and should concede that their own accounting was faulty--if it was faulty. Maybe they didn't see the coming obligations for medical expenses and so on. Maybe. Or, more likely, someone said "But in thirty years this is gonna kill us!" and someone else said very clearly "Leave it off the balance sheets, in thirty years it will be someone else's problem." Someone is responsible--either by ineptness or intent, and it is someone at the companies who didn't put aside that money, as it should have been put aside, inviolate.
Kinda like the social security shenanigans (good name for a band of oldsters?) the gummint's been playing for how many years now? Or, last week's news about how bridges are falling down because we don't spend on infrastructure? Oh, wait, that was news in the early 70's too, and everyone promised they'd take care of it. Zzzzzzz....
"The union thought he was bluffing. He wasn't." Yeah. Neutron Jack and Bob Moses...Love 'em or hate 'em, they certainly got your attention though.
"When it becomes more profitable to ship finished goods half way around the world rather than make them within your own borders something is amiss. "
Yeah. Could be (shuh!) the price of fuel is too cheap if it can allow for that kind of shipping. Could be the same problems the Brits had with their thirteen colonies 200-odd years ago, bringing radical chances to textile production and other "established" commerce.
I'm not sure something is WRONG rather than something has CHANGED and we've been blindsided by it. And then, compounding the problem, the only folks who are willing to look at it and deal with it--are the ones who are making megabucks by surfing that wave of change.
"Perhaps someone can comment as to why it cost GM 1500.00 PER CAR to provide health benefits to retired union employees and dependents for LIFE, "
The car industry, or at least all of Detroit, has always been a niche of its own. Someone back in Oldsmobile admitted that the then-new hot radical Toronado only cost them the same thing to build as the ordinary Cutlass. At that time, the Cutlass RETAILED for about $3000 list, loaded. The Toronado, I don't know, maybe $7-10k. And in the 60's, the dealers made a good profit (typically over 20-25%) on any retail sale if they could get it. So Detroit has always been very good at sucking money at out pockets. Heck, when you can make gobs of money that easily? $1500 per car is chump change. Remember, it wasn't 1500 back then, it was was less, and a fraction of the profits that could be sucked out.
The story isn't so different today, couple of years ago another company admitted their $45,000 high end SUVs and pickups cost them the same thing to build as their $20,000 midsize cars. They just generated an extra $20,000 in profit, so that's what they were busy building--while the Japanese finished stealing the market for the rest.
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