Jim Bunning Voted Against Auto Bailout

GoGetEmTigers wrote:

TOM WALSH
Someone needs to watch over changes at the Detroit 3

BY TOM WALSH • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • December 20, 2008

As a taxpayer who will soon be part-owner of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, and as a Detroiter who wants to see its automobile industry revive, I beg you, President-elect Barack Obama, to please name a fearless, respected, kick-butt car czar to ride herd on Detroit's reinvention.

Here's why:

• Because President George W. Bush's necessary and much-appreciated promise of $13.4 billion in immediate bridge loans for GM and Chrysler is just that -- merely a bridge to get them to you, Mr. Obama, without flatlining first.

• Because you, Mr. Obama, must be the enforcer of the binding conditions and fuzzy targets of this bailout plan.

• Because the auto companies and labor unions and bondholders and suppliers and dealers who are now obliged to sit down around Detroit's rickety table and restructure their industry, have wildly different priorities and constituencies. And therefore, they will be at each other's throats, blocking progress and stifling change, unless a no-nonsense car czar keeps everyone in check and on task.

Within minutes of the Bush bridge loan announcement Friday morning, after the perfunctory thank-yous, the key players started staking out turf and sharpening elbows for the battling ahead.

"While we appreciate that President Bush has taken the emergency action needed to help America's auto companies weather the current financial crisis, we are disappointed that he has added unfair conditions singling out workers," said UAW President Ron Gettelfinger.

Gettelfinger was protesting what the White House called targets for the automakers to achieve in return for federal loans. These targets include elimination of the jobs bank, which pays laid-off UAW workers most of their base pay for extended periods; and work rules and wages that are competitive with foreign-owned, nonunion auto plants.

"These conditions were not included in the bipartisan legislation endorsed by the White House," Gettelfinger said, adding, "We will work with the Obama administration and the new Congress to ensure that these unfair conditions are removed."

Talks have barely begun with owners of auto company bonds, who will certainly squeal about huge write-downs in the value of their investment.

Yet Cerberus Capital Management, the 80% owner of Chrysler that's receiving $4 billion from the first batch of federal loans, sounds dead set on wresting sacrifices from both bondholders and labor. "Unless Chrysler's labor costs can achieve parity with the foreign transplants, and without the restructuring of Chrysler's debt, Chrysler cannot be restored to long-term health and the government loan will be unlikely to be fully repaid," Cerberus said in a prepared statement Friday.

Uh-oh, we already have a recipient of government cash ruminating about scenarios under which it might not be paid back. Not a good sign.

That's why, Mr. Obama, we need a car czar who's respected, smart, utterly fearless and hell-bent on winning.

Think Roger Penske meets Warren Buffett meets Paul Volcker meets Vince Lombardi.

In Detroit, automotive finance people and engineers and dealers have been infighting among themselves and squabbling with labor unions for the past half-century.

We can see where that's gotten us -- to death's door.

So it's got to stop.

But old habits and animosities die hard. And these folks serve different masters. Gettelfinger can't just cut a deal because a bellicose U.S. senator or some Wall Street sharpie from Cerberus says so. Changes in UAW contracts must be ratified by rank-and-file members who may not care squat about what the senator or sharpie thinks.

The short-term overseer of this ragtag band of auto industry stakeholders is outgoing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. But Bush is said to be open to an Obama nominee coming on board to bridge the administrations.

GM, Chrysler and Ford Motor Co. are a long way from the promised land, Mr. Obama. Please give them a great leader to help them find their way.

Contact TOM WALSH at 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com

Car Czar?


Russia was once led by a czar


Only led to Communism

We need a third party in this country



The Republicans and Democrats continue to squander billions of dollars of taxpayer money


Absurd

Regardless; I bet Bunning will be banned for life from the trade center

gs78 wrote:

Regardless; I bet Bunning will be banned for life from the trade center

Good.

And to make things worse, the congress idiots just gave themselves a raise! When all of America is having to cut back, these crazy people just take more money, to bail their spending ways out!!!

With economy in shambles, Congress gets a raise
By Jordy Yager
Posted: 12/17/08 05:41 PM [ET]

A crumbling economy, more than 2 million constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay.

Instead, they will get a $4,700 pay increase, amounting to an additional $2.5 million that taxpayers will spend on congressional salaries, and watchdog groups are not happy about it.

“As lawmakers make a big show of forcing auto executives to accept just $1 a year in salary, they are quietly raiding the vault for their own personal gain,” said Daniel O’Connell, chairman of The Senior Citizens League (TSCL), a non-partisan group. “This money would be much better spent helping the millions of seniors who are living below the poverty line and struggling to keep their heat on this winter.”

However, at 2.8 percent, the automatic raise that lawmakers receive is only half as large as the 2009 cost of living adjustment of Social Security recipients.

Still, Steve Ellis, vice president of the budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense, said Congress should have taken the rare step of freezing its pay, as lawmakers did in 2000.

“Look at the way the economy is and how most people aren’t counting on a holiday bonus or a pay raise — they’re just happy to have gainful employment,” said Ellis. “But you have the lawmakers who are set up and ready to get their next installment of a pay raise and go happily along their way.”

Member raises are often characterized as examples of wasteful spending, especially when many constituents and businesses in members’ districts are in financial despair.

Rep. Harry Mitchell, a first-term Democrat from Arizona, sponsored legislation earlier this year that would have prevented the automatic pay adjustments from kicking in for members next year. But the bill, which attracted 34 cosponsors, failed to make it out of committee.

“They don’t even go through the front door. They have it set up so that it’s wired so that you actually have to undo the pay raise rather than vote for a pay raise,” Ellis said.

Freezing congressional salaries is hardly a new idea on Capitol Hill.

Lawmakers have floated similar proposals in every year dating back to 1995, and long before that. Though the concept of forgoing a raise has attracted some support from more senior members, it is most popular with freshman lawmakers, who are often most vulnerable.

In 2006, after the Republican-led Senate rejected an increase to the minimum wage, Democrats, who had just come to power in the House with a slew of freshmen, vowed to block their own pay raise until the wage increase was passed. The minimum wage was eventually increased and lawmakers received their automatic pay hike.

In the beginning days of 1789, Congress was paid only $6 a day, which would be about $75 daily by modern standards. But by 1965 members were receiving $30,000 a year, which is the modern equivalent of about $195,000.

Currently the average lawmaker makes $169,300 a year, with leadership making slightly more. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) makes $217,400, while the minority and majority leaders in the House and Senate make $188,100.

Ellis said that while freezing the pay increase would be a step in the right direction, it would be better to have it set up so that members would have to take action, and vote, for a pay raise and deal with the consequences, rather than get one automatically.

“It is probably never going to be politically popular to raise Congress’s salary,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to find taxpayers saying, ‘Yeah I think I should pay my congressman more’.”

I say, fire the ALL! I hate what this congress has done to the Republic of the United States of America!!!

Canada Agrees to Its Own Auto Bailout

By IAN AUSTEN
Published: December 20, 2008

OTTAWA — Moving to pre-empt a possible shift of auto production to the United States, the governments of Canada and its Ontario province offered the industry 4 billion Canadian dollars in emergency loans on Saturday.

Depending on currency fluctuations, the amount is roughly equal to 20 percent of the Bush administration’s bailout plan as well as Canada’s portion of North American auto production.

“I will not fool you,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters in Toronto. “There is obviously money at risk here and there may well be more money at risk going forward.”

But, in words echoed by Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario, Mr. Harper said that a collapse of the auto industry would create “a huge problem” for the Canadian economy.

“There are literally across the country hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of potentially affected families by the distress of this industry,” Mr. Harper said.

The Canadian auto industry, which exports about 90 percent of its production, accounts for a greater percentage of Canada’s manufacturing economy than its parent companies contribute to that of the United States.

Many American and Japanese automakers operate factories in Ontario, and so do parts makers that feed plants throughout North America.

A loss of the American manufacturers would be a particularly severe blow to Ontario, the most populous province and the home to all of Canada’s auto assembly plants. About 400,000 people in Ontario work in the industry, Mr. McGuinty said.

In addition to the loans, Mr. Harper announced that the government would extend additional insurance to auto parts makers for money owed to them by automakers, and develop a program to finance consumer loans for new car purchases.

The prime minister suggested that the consumer loan program would also apply to buyers of cars made by Honda and Toyota, companies with extensive operations in Ontario.

“We don’t want a package that simply helps the Detroit Three,” Mr. Harper said.

Unlike the $17.4 billion package announced by President Bush, the Canadian plan, roughly $3.3 billion, is remarkably short on detail, at least publicly. An official who spoke on the condition he not be identified, following Canadian custom, said many of the terms were still being negotiated with the automakers.

Perhaps the biggest uncertainty hangs over the status of labor agreements between the car companies and the Canadian Auto Workers Union. While Mr. Harper spoke broadly about the need for workers “to be part of the solution,” his plan makes no specific demands on the unions.

During the last round of contract talks, the Canadian union rejected a wage system adopted by the United Auto Workers that places new workers on a lower wage scale.

Some industry analysts argue that unionized Canadian workers are now significantly more expensive to employ than their American counterparts. But the government official said that several factors, including public health care, differences in pension systems and currency exchange rates, made it difficult to draw that conclusion.

After the announcement, the president of the Canadian Auto Workers, Ken Lewenza, again rejected suggestions that wages and benefits needed to be reduced.

“This has nothing to do with auto workers’ wages in the United States and Canada,” Mr. Lewenza said during a conference call with reporters. He added that concessions made by the union during the last round of contract talks had left the Canadian industry in a competitive position.

But Mark Meldrum, a business professor at the University of Windsor, based in a city in Ontario that is particularly dependent on auto jobs, said the Canadian union would probably match any concessions offered by the U.A.W. in the United States.

“That will be held up as the yardstick,” he said. “There has to be wage concessions.”

Both the prime minister and the premier said a central condition for Canadian assistance would be commitments from the automakers to maintain Canada’s 20 percent share of continental production.

Because the governments’ only method of enforcement will be refusing to roll over the loans, Professor Meldrum was skeptical about Canada’s ability to police that, or any other, condition.

“Canada cannot save the industry,” he said. “Canada can only help save the industry.”

In a brief statement, Chrysler Canada, which is based in Windsor, Ontario, welcomed the government’s offer.

John Gray, the mayor of Oshawa, Ontario, which is the hometown of General Motors of Canada, was more effusive in his praise. “Hallelujah!” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation minutes after the announcement. “It’s lifted that cloud which has been hanging over our head.”

The decision to provide aid is the latest step in a long change by Mr. Harper’s Conservative government. Until this fall, it had regularly dismissed suggestions that the federal government had any role to play in assisting the auto industry. But before October’s election, it broke with that by promising to help finance the reopening of a Ford engine plant in Windsor, Ontario.

Under the Canadian plan, General Motors will receive 3 billion Canadian dollars with the balance going to Chrysler. Ford has asked Canada only for a line of credit and is not participating.

TG wrote:

gs78 wrote:

Regardless; I bet Bunning will be banned for life from the trade center

Good.

Why



The Big 3 got their money;


So the executives can continue to recieve millions in bonuses and stuff their golden parachutes

So Gettlefinger and the rest of the union bosses, who are already bitching about the deal, can continue to make millions

And Johnny Lunchbucket can make 75 dollars an hour on the assembly line to screw a bolt in a door


Meanwhile most Americans can't afford the sticker price on the product


Including gs78


But my tax dollars gotta help keep them afloat












Yet


If union people had their way; Bunning be crucified on a cross for voting as he did

GoGetEmTigers wrote:

And to make things worse, the congress idiots just gave themselves a raise! When all of America is having to cut back, these crazy people just take more money, to bail their spending ways out!!!

But we keep voting these assholes in office

GoGetEmTigers wrote:

I say, fire the ALL! I hate what this congress has done to the Republic of the United States of America!!!

bobrob2004 wrote:

catbox_9 wrote:

bobrob2004 wrote:

The Gibraltar Trade Center has canceled an appearance by former Detroit Tigers pitcher Jim Bunning at a weekend sports card show after the Kentucky congressman voted against the loan package Thursday night to help Detroit's auto companies.

Why are they mixing politics in with sports? If I shopped at that particular trade center (which I don't obviously), I would never again shop there as a result of this.

I mean if I found out all 25 players on the Tigers' 25 man roster voted for whoever was running on the Communist ticket this year I wouldn't stop cheering for the Tigers.....although I would wonder why the hell the whole team voted for a third party candidate...especially a Communist.

They are trying to avoid a riot. Most of the people that will seek his autograph are affected by the auto companies. These are the same people who supported Bunning when he played for Detroit. Now Bunning doesn't want to support them.

Bunning is from Kentucky. Kentucky has a great deal of foreign factories. It's no wonder why he voted against the auto bailout.

Bunning does not want to support corrupt, poorly run businesses and the overly strong arm of the UAW.

I don't BLAME him!!

TG wrote:

gs78 wrote:

catbox_9 wrote:

TG wrote:

catbox_9 wrote:

TG wrote:

Well I don't glame the owner of the trade center for canceling him.

I wouldn't go if he was there after he pretty much said you Detroit workers who's jobs will all be affected by this. He doesn't have to care, he won't be affected because he is rich.

I don't think it had anything to do with the Detroit workers. He's from Kentucky so he shouldn't care about the people of one city in a state he's not representing. The auto industry has a big impact in Michigan but very little outside of there. Other than my uncle (who lives in Michigan) I don't know a single person who works for the auto industry. I'd venture to guess Kentucky is similar to California in that regard.

Alright, then if he isn't affected by it, doesn't understandit, and really doesn't care, then we don't need him here.

What is your opinion on coal fields?
The Eastern Mountain Cold Fields (located in Kentucky) are the most productive cold fields in that nation. That is what Bunning should be concerned with.

I think Bunning understands the situation


It is the C.E.Os; Executives. Labor Leaders and the UAW that don't

You mean the workers that can't feed their families?

You CANNOT be talking about the Assembly line workers that are paid WAAAY more than they are worth?

When Assembly line workers with the equivalent (if that) of a High School education are making MORE MONEY than schoolteachers, I cannot support the Unions that have given them such incredible overbloated salaries and benefits.

Feed their families....PLEASE??!!

TG wrote:

gs78 wrote:

That is the main reason people are losing jobs

They are losing jobs because the company made MISTAKES. you have made mistakes. I have made mistakes. Their company has had problems and now they need to correct them. Without the loan everyone loses their jobs, the company is destroyed, and what do those people do? Starve to death.

No, they go out and find jobs that are more in line with the skills they possess....

tigersaint wrote:

You CANNOT be talking about the Assembly line workers that are paid WAAAY more than they are worth?

When Assembly line workers with the equivalent (if that) of a High School education are making MORE MONEY than schoolteachers, I cannot support the Unions that have given them such incredible overbloated salaries and benefits.

Feed their families....PLEASE??!!

Actually I'm talking about my mother, my mother's friends, my friends parents who all were before having their jobs to, YES, FEED THEIR FAMILIES! And now that everyone is losing their jobs, they can't quite do that, Can they?

tigersaint wrote:

TG wrote:

gs78 wrote:

That is the main reason people are losing jobs

They are losing jobs because the company made MISTAKES. you have made mistakes. I have made mistakes. Their company has had problems and now they need to correct them. Without the loan everyone loses their jobs, the company is destroyed, and what do those people do? Starve to death.

No, they go out and find jobs that are more in line with the skills they possess....

Ha, There are no jobs out there. That is why there is a problem, everyone loses their jobs and then have nowhere to go because they can't find jobs, because their are none available.

GoGetEmTigers wrote:

And to make things worse, the congress idiots just gave themselves a raise! When all of America is having to cut back, these crazy people just take more money, to bail their spending ways out!!!

Typical political bullshit.

They should all be forced to take PAYCUTS like the rest of us American people!!

TG wrote:

tigersaint wrote:

TG wrote:

gs78 wrote:

That is the main reason people are losing jobs

They are losing jobs because the company made MISTAKES. you have made mistakes. I have made mistakes. Their company has had problems and now they need to correct them. Without the loan everyone loses their jobs, the company is destroyed, and what do those people do? Starve to death.

No, they go out and find jobs that are more in line with the skills they possess....

Ha, There are no jobs out there. That is why there is a problem, everyone loses their jobs and then have nowhere to go because they can't find jobs, because their are none available.

Restaurants, particularly fast food places, are hiring everhyday but nobody wants to work for those kind of places. I say it is better than no job at all.....

tigersaint wrote:

TG wrote:

tigersaint wrote:

TG wrote:

gs78 wrote:

That is the main reason people are losing jobs

They are losing jobs because the company made MISTAKES. you have made mistakes. I have made mistakes. Their company has had problems and now they need to correct them. Without the loan everyone loses their jobs, the company is destroyed, and what do those people do? Starve to death.

No, they go out and find jobs that are more in line with the skills they possess....

Ha, There are no jobs out there. That is why there is a problem, everyone loses their jobs and then have nowhere to go because they can't find jobs, because their are none available.

Restaurants, particularly fast food places, are hiring everhyday but nobody wants to work for those kind of places. I say it is better than no job at all.....

Thats not true at all. Everyone has taken those jobs. Everyone NEEDS a job in order to pay their bills and get food.

My guess is that people will start leaving Detroit for better luck elsewhere.

Too much greed (UAW Unions and Auto execs) has caused this problem and the poor people that need the money are the ones that suffer.

There are jobs to be had if people are willing to look.....

Jobs elsewhere, maybe. But not here. You have teenager everywhere that want jobs, and you have parents who have lost jobs trying to find them. My best friend, Alyssa, was looking for a job and nowhere, not even McDonalds, was hiring.

tigersaint wrote:

GoGetEmTigers wrote:

And to make things worse, the congress idiots just gave themselves a raise! When all of America is having to cut back, these crazy people just take more money, to bail their spending ways out!!!

Typical political bullshit.

They should all be forced to take PAYCUTS like the rest of us American people!!

tigersaint wrote:

You CANNOT be talking about the Assembly line workers that are paid WAAAY more than they are worth?

When Assembly line workers with the equivalent (if that) of a High School education are making MORE MONEY than schoolteachers, I cannot support the Unions that have given them such incredible overbloated salaries and benefits.

Feed their families....PLEASE??!!

My uncle works (worked?) for GM....he was a security guard. He sat in a booth and pushed a button to open a gate to let people in. He had been doing that job for many years and was paid something along the lines of $25 an hour.....in Michigan. I have nothing against my uncle, but come on. That is absurd. He's not even a cop or anything - he doesn't carry weapons. Any idiot could be trained to do that in 10 minutes.

Those days are over



Only way the BIG 3 is gonna survive is to change their ways

I wonder if anyone got a Jim Bunning autograph for Christmas

gs78 wrote:

I wonder if anyone got a Jim Bunning autograph for Christmas

I didn't.....

I do have a Jim Bunning autographed 8X10 photo hanging on my wall though

It's in between my autographed Charlie Gehringer and Hal Newhouser photos and right above my autographed George Kell photo.

I want to get one

gs78 wrote:

I want to get one

A quick eBay search and it appears the cheapest one you'll get that comes with a certificate of authenticity of a reputable third-party autograph authenticator will set you back about $30 (or $50 if you want it in a Phillies uniform for some reason).

The most popular photo seems to be this one (mine is a different one):

Thanks