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"Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing" -- Detroit Free Press' Mitch Albom

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Bozita Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 11:49 AM
Original message
"Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing" -- Detroit Free Press' Mitch Albom
Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing
A few parting words for the senators who squashed the auto rescue
BY MITCH ALBOM • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • DECEMBER 13, 2008

Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: We’re taking a piece of you with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but your actions surely could have killed it.

We have grease on our hands.

You have blood.

Kill the car, kill the country. History will show that when America was on its knees, you lawmakers wanted to cut off its feet. How does this happen in America?

Suddenly, the worker is the problem? Suddenly, unless union members, overnight, drastically slash their wages with a hard deadline, you pull the plug on an industry?

Suddenly, Detroit is the symbol of economic dysfunction? Are you kidding? Have you looked in the mirror lately, Washington?

In a world where banks hemorrhaged trillions in a high-priced gamble called credit derivative swaps that you failed to regulate, how on earth do we need to be punished? In a bailout era where you shoveled billions, with no demands, to banks and financial firms — who created the problem in the first place — why do need to be schooled on how to run a business?

Who is more dysfunctional in business than you? Who blows more money? Who fashions and molds its work based on favors and pork and traded compromises?

At least in the auto industry, if folks don’t like what you make, they don’t have to buy it. In government, even your worst mistakes, we have to live with.

more...

http://www.freep.com/article/20081213/COL01/81213055
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Greybnk48 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 12:04 PM
Response to Original message
1. These f**kers need to pay for this. And how refreshing it is
to read a no holds barred assessment of what's really going on. January 20th cannot come soon enough, and I hope many people are made to pay for stunts such as the Repigs have pulled here. This one is actually potentially deadly for our country. It is truly unbelievable.
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roguevalley Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 08:55 PM
Response to Reply #1
13. anyone who works and doesn't sit behind a desk doing it and votes
for a repuke is a dumb fuck. The pugs have decided to kill off the working man and woman, fuck their kids over and smoke a stogie doing it. Its time to inundate the internet with viral emails making it clear that if you work with your hands, you are targeted for slavery.
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rurallib Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 12:14 PM
Response to Original message
2. Isn't Albom kind of right wing?
I may am not sure and may be very wrong. Just an impression I have had over the years.
Goes to show that everybody gets upset when it reaches them directly.
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1gobluedem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 12:36 PM
Response to Reply #2
5. Not really
I'd say he's more centrist than anything but leans more left than right.
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rurallib Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 01:01 PM
Response to Reply #5
8. Thanks. I really read him rarely and therefore probably got a distorted view
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spoony Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 05:27 PM
Response to Reply #2
12. He's often hokey, but when something's really obvious
he's able to get a decent bite on it :)
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polichick Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 12:15 PM
Response to Original message
3. Blue collar sacrificial lambs for this country's white collar criminals.
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Uncle Joe Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 12:30 PM
Response to Original message
4. Kicked and recommended.
Edited on Sun Dec-14-08 12:31 PM by Uncle Joe
I believe a domestic manufacturing base is crucial to our economic and national security.

Detroit and the workers of America shouldn't be abandoned, they should be reinvigorated. If the government keeps giving up on and abandoning cities and vital industries in distress, the nation will rot from the inside out.

What kind of priorities do we have, when high priced, white collar gambling is bailed out after their losses and honest work trashed?

I do wonder sometimes if organized crime has already taken over large segments of the government?

Thanks for the thread, Bozita.
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TomClash Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 12:45 PM
Response to Original message
6. The Detroit Free Press Editorial was better
When they said there will be blood, they meant it. Actually. It was not hyperbole. Or euphemism. Or literary license.
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Bozita Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 04:46 PM
Response to Reply #6
10. Agreed.
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JNelson6563 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 12:52 PM
Response to Original message
7. Well said Mitch.
:toast:
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Odin2005 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 01:05 PM
Response to Original message
9. The GOP are a bunch of economic TRAITORS!!! n/t.
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FLAprogressive Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 04:56 PM
Response to Original message
11. Reading some of the comments....it appears the union-haters are out in full force.....
...a shame that people are so stupid.
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BeFree Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 10:56 PM
Response to Reply #11
15. True
The union-haters are out in full force. But it isn't just unions they hate, it is the workingman they hate. They hate us because they are wimps who can't do what the workingman and working women do: build America and keep her running. All they can do is tear her down and suck off her teat. They have shown themselves, finally, to be anti-American.
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sarcasmo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Dec-14-08 09:51 PM
Response to Original message
14. Kick back to the top.
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crikkett Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-15-08 10:58 AM
Response to Original message
16. The big 3 have a lot to do with this problem - "who killed the electric car"
The Suits of the Big 3 had every means and opportunity to mfr electric cars, efficient cars and hybrids.
They had every means and opportunity to push for national health care programs to ease the cost of hiring workers.
They had every means and opportunity to run their businesses in a way that didn't bankrupt them.
They had every means and opportunity to support their workers and their workers' unions.

Instead they were All-American: greed, even more greed, laziness and short-sightedness, blocking progress and hoping the govt will bail them out like they did the last time.

And now 3 million people stand to lose their jobs.
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Pathwalker Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-15-08 11:50 AM
Response to Reply #16
17. And all those mile long lines of customers, money in hand, demanding those cars...
wait - those were lines at foreign car companies for GAS cars. Even the freaking movie partly blamed the CONSUMERS for IGNORING an electric car when gas was cheap. Yet, no one on DU ever bothers to mention them - why is that?
Those who drove the cars loved them; I remember when Lansing's mayor stood with a check in hand, trying to purchase his, but by then, it was all over for the electric car. But, to act like this was SOLELY the result of GM is flat out wrong - consumers showed NO interest in the car, and pretending otherwise is b.s.
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Kalyke Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-15-08 11:56 AM
Response to Reply #17
19. Raises hand
I regularly blame the consumer for ignoring the electric car.

I regularly blame them for buying SUVs and trucks (both foreign and domestic).

I regularly blame them for buying foreign cars, period, and living as though it's still 1988 when American cars weren't good (they are now).

However, I also blame corporations for not paying people enough money to actually invest in a hybrid or an electric (they are still far more expensive and, frankly, quite small and ugly, than the average car, which may hold a family of four and not look like something Glenda the Good Witch would ride in).

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Romulox Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-15-08 11:55 AM
Response to Reply #16
18. Problem with this conspiracy theory: Where are the electic cars from Honda, Toyota, Nissan?
Since it was only the Big 3 that where involved in the conspiracy, then all the foreign manufacturers where free to bring these electric cars to market.

But they didn't.

Unless you can answer why the foreign manufacturers didn't being electric cars to market, your conspiracy theory loses a lot of steam...
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EnviroBat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-15-08 12:00 PM
Response to Original message
20. This is exactly what the republicans have wanted since Cheney took office.
They want a global economy in which there are no unions. Everyone makes the same wages. Lower the American standard of living to more closely resemble that of a third-world country.

When we talk about the wealthiest 1% of people in this country owning everything, we need to realize that they want to shift everything to the wealthiest 1% of the World.

They are fucking us. We have been had by criminals. This is what they have been engineering for the past eight years with deregulation and "free trade". And we just sat back while American Idol was spewing forth from our T.V's

We sat around like deluded morons, and let this happen...
How many H1B's where you work? If you still have a fucking job.

I fucking hate greedy republican bastards, and I blame them for the utter collapse of our economy. History will NOT be re-written on this.
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