As GM Goes ...

With the government-mandated bankruptcy of one of the largest, longest-lived, and, until recently, most profitable manufacturers in the world, the takeover of the U.S. economy by the same East Coast forces that destroyed it is now complete. 

The speed with which GM spiraled into insolvency was breath taking. Less than 18 months ago, just as the horrifying effects of Wall Street’s malfeasance were becoming clear, GM was profitably selling SUVs, making money for its shareholders and paying big ticket CEOs far more than they were worth, just like Wall Street.

Suddenly the rules changed.  In a spectacular reversal, GM was deceptively accused of failing to sell what consumers wanted to buy, of being out of touch and out of date, of having too many built in personnel costs which made them unable to compete with foreign auto makers whose short history in the U.S. left them free of pension liabilities. 

The piling on was not done by vaudeville comedians as we might have expected.  No, in a priceless ironic twist, the proximate cause of their downward spiral was the economic wreckage brought about by their accusers: Wall Street and Congress.

Bankruptcy was immediately proposed as an option because, Wall Street-Washington decided, it was the only way to scrap the gains unions had made for pensioners, employees and their families and millions of others around the world.

No one said the words ‘unions busting’ right out loud.  They tidied up their intent by calling it a problem of ‘legacy costs’, giving an antiseptic feel to creating poverty by fiat. 

The most viscerally determined for a GM bankruptcy were senators from the anti-union south who had been instrumental in subsidizing the establishment of foreign auto manufacturing in their own states.

When the Wall Street cabal was put in charge of dismantling the giant, pensioners and health care benefits were automatically toast, as were suppliers, many dealerships, all factory workers, and hundreds of thousands of families.  The successful, final sell out of middle class laborers was heralded by the new, rock bottom wage agreement struck with the crushed UAW which brought American auto workers in line with the low pay of foreign competitors.

Thanks to Wall Street and their elected enablers, the American manufacturing sector and its middle class wages have evaporated, almost as though they never existed.

No one has to be a fan of GM to understand that it was part of the last of the once-dominant American industrial sphere; to understand the importance of manufacturing to a healthy economy; or to understand that the real loser is the middle class which now has millions fewer jobs and livable incomes which are not coming back any time soon.

The American middle class was essentially created by automotive unions and the reluctant Big Three beginning in the late 1930s and continuing into the 1950s.  Everyone, on all continents, wanted the hard won wages and benefits the unions had wrested from the mighty industrialists and, to a large extent, they got it. 

The middle class, which took root in all the western industrialized nations, was one of America’s most successful exports.  People all over the world had the money to buy American clothing, German cars or French champagne.

Every country used trade barriers in the form of import taxes to maintain a level playing field for its middle class and to protect national prosperity. 

The formula worked well for 50 years until the marauders in charge of the free for all known as American capitalism found a way to take it all.  Not satisfied with great wealth, they wanted humongous wealth, sort of a corner on the wealth market. 

At the top of their hate list, always and forever, were the unions.

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