Be Thankful For Your Pink Slip
You may have already seen this discussed elsewhere - GM fires 30,000 workers - and you may also have realized this was likely to be coming, given the state of General Motors' finances and the frequent discussions of it on NPR's Marketplace.
Marketplace is a funny program. First of, it's two programs, Marketplace and Marketplace Weekend, and the Weekend edition has different people, subprograms, and a very different feel. Both of them are defenders of the System, the Status Quo, but Marketplace (weekday) does a lot more questioning and critiquing, whereas Weekend is all "Ooh, we're rich, rich, rich!!!" squeeing with almost no social awareness. The weekday program has OTOH done series nailing environmental exploitation by oil companies, torture in Iraq, and more recently, an expose on how "think tanks" are used by big bizness to push legislation - yes, they actualy ran a series on The Matrix, with quotes and connect-the-dots. So the same story may be talked about on both shows at different times with different slants.
GM's "woes" (when you repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot, over a period of about 30 years, and then blame it on exterior forces, this doesn't seem quite the right word to me) have thus gotten two different treatments, both indicative of the problems in this country. The first is to take GM's declarations unchallenged, and the second is to say "Houston, we have a problem" but without demanding that it be fixed, in both cases a sort of hopeless hand-flapping resignation and trust that maybe Somebody Else will Do Something before it gets too bad - with "too bad" implicitly defined as, affecting me and my people.
So the blame is placed on all the people who have the nerve to think that they deserve what they were promised and worked hard for all their lives, their pensions, and health care, all that which they paid into with contributions of wages witheld and hours slaved away, to give the stockholders and CEOs of GM their fortunes. And now that "sales are down" and "health care costs rising" and other car companies are doing much better, GM must cut costs in order to compete, and the obvious way to do it is - not to stop paying their top executives upwards of 2, 3, even 4 million dollars per year, but to break their promises to the old commoners, or fire the new ones, in order that their elite may continue to live the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed.
And people like the Marketplace and Marketplace Weekend commentators accept this, and the NPR news reporters - and this is the liberal media, mind you, as liberal as the BBC, the most liberal of the mainstream outlets in this country - although some of them go "but we need to do something about health care in this country" and then the others go "but nobody will" and that's the end of it.
It's all passive voice construction - sales have "gone down," we "face increased competition" as if no actions and choices made by US CEOs and corporate cultures and their tame lawmakers have had anything to do with this. As if the fact that they "didn't forsee" current circumstances - after all the many repeated warnings and all the trends out there for the world to see - exonerated them, who were supposed to be the leaders, and who get payed many times more than their employes, and more times now than ever in history or anywhere in the world.
As if they should be patted on the head and told "there there," for not choosing to heed the omens, the warnings of peak oil, the lessons of 1977 and of the 1980s as well-designed Japanese cars proved one free-market truism right, and subsequently other countries did so with a vengeance - that if you sell better made products at affordable prices, people will prefer them to the worse-made ones, sentimentality be damned. For insisting that it was too expensive to make hybrids, or even fuel efficiency - that they had to go on not just pandering to but creating the taste for multi-ton clunkers in order to be profitable - and guess what, they guessed massively wrong. And did so for years, even as they continued to eat Prius dust and insist that it wasn't their fault--
But hey, somebody's getting rich. We reward incomptence in Holy!Capitalism: work hard all your life and get screwed, trick other people into working for you, get a million-dollar salary and severance package when it catches up with you. God must want it that way, and there's no possible better way it could be.
Or so the votaries of Mammon assure us, and they wouldn't lie now would they?
--Judith Miller got a seven-figure severance package from the NYT, btw. She's a very good servant of the Hegemony, even if she did become too much a public embarrassment. She just got caught lying, but don't worry, she'll be protected by that golden parachute, over 20 times what a struggling family needs to squeak by in this country. For lying us into a war - but a war that is enriching the elite hand over fist, which is all that matters.
Just trust your leaders. Trust The System. Surely they wouldn't use you and throw you away as if you were nothing but an assembly worker, leave you to starve in your old age on empty promises - and if they do, you must deserve it. Or else God would have made you a CEO.
Ah well. Like PT Barnam said, there's a sucker born every minute--
Marketplace is a funny program. First of, it's two programs, Marketplace and Marketplace Weekend, and the Weekend edition has different people, subprograms, and a very different feel. Both of them are defenders of the System, the Status Quo, but Marketplace (weekday) does a lot more questioning and critiquing, whereas Weekend is all "Ooh, we're rich, rich, rich!!!" squeeing with almost no social awareness. The weekday program has OTOH done series nailing environmental exploitation by oil companies, torture in Iraq, and more recently, an expose on how "think tanks" are used by big bizness to push legislation - yes, they actualy ran a series on The Matrix, with quotes and connect-the-dots. So the same story may be talked about on both shows at different times with different slants.
GM's "woes" (when you repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot, over a period of about 30 years, and then blame it on exterior forces, this doesn't seem quite the right word to me) have thus gotten two different treatments, both indicative of the problems in this country. The first is to take GM's declarations unchallenged, and the second is to say "Houston, we have a problem" but without demanding that it be fixed, in both cases a sort of hopeless hand-flapping resignation and trust that maybe Somebody Else will Do Something before it gets too bad - with "too bad" implicitly defined as, affecting me and my people.
So the blame is placed on all the people who have the nerve to think that they deserve what they were promised and worked hard for all their lives, their pensions, and health care, all that which they paid into with contributions of wages witheld and hours slaved away, to give the stockholders and CEOs of GM their fortunes. And now that "sales are down" and "health care costs rising" and other car companies are doing much better, GM must cut costs in order to compete, and the obvious way to do it is - not to stop paying their top executives upwards of 2, 3, even 4 million dollars per year, but to break their promises to the old commoners, or fire the new ones, in order that their elite may continue to live the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed.
And people like the Marketplace and Marketplace Weekend commentators accept this, and the NPR news reporters - and this is the liberal media, mind you, as liberal as the BBC, the most liberal of the mainstream outlets in this country - although some of them go "but we need to do something about health care in this country" and then the others go "but nobody will" and that's the end of it.
It's all passive voice construction - sales have "gone down," we "face increased competition" as if no actions and choices made by US CEOs and corporate cultures and their tame lawmakers have had anything to do with this. As if the fact that they "didn't forsee" current circumstances - after all the many repeated warnings and all the trends out there for the world to see - exonerated them, who were supposed to be the leaders, and who get payed many times more than their employes, and more times now than ever in history or anywhere in the world.
As if they should be patted on the head and told "there there," for not choosing to heed the omens, the warnings of peak oil, the lessons of 1977 and of the 1980s as well-designed Japanese cars proved one free-market truism right, and subsequently other countries did so with a vengeance - that if you sell better made products at affordable prices, people will prefer them to the worse-made ones, sentimentality be damned. For insisting that it was too expensive to make hybrids, or even fuel efficiency - that they had to go on not just pandering to but creating the taste for multi-ton clunkers in order to be profitable - and guess what, they guessed massively wrong. And did so for years, even as they continued to eat Prius dust and insist that it wasn't their fault--
But hey, somebody's getting rich. We reward incomptence in Holy!Capitalism: work hard all your life and get screwed, trick other people into working for you, get a million-dollar salary and severance package when it catches up with you. God must want it that way, and there's no possible better way it could be.
Or so the votaries of Mammon assure us, and they wouldn't lie now would they?
--Judith Miller got a seven-figure severance package from the NYT, btw. She's a very good servant of the Hegemony, even if she did become too much a public embarrassment. She just got caught lying, but don't worry, she'll be protected by that golden parachute, over 20 times what a struggling family needs to squeak by in this country. For lying us into a war - but a war that is enriching the elite hand over fist, which is all that matters.
Just trust your leaders. Trust The System. Surely they wouldn't use you and throw you away as if you were nothing but an assembly worker, leave you to starve in your old age on empty promises - and if they do, you must deserve it. Or else God would have made you a CEO.
Ah well. Like PT Barnam said, there's a sucker born every minute--