These are the REAL culprits in the auto industry mess

[burythehatchet]

Automakers - for making products that are anti-environmental and behind the times

Consumers - for their ignorance in buying trucks for suburban moms

Legislators - for failing to see the big picture

Oil companies - for colluding with the automakers to keep us on the wrong track

Republican politicians - for refusing to listen to Jimmy Carter and other sage thinkers

Democrats - for being spineless

Republican voters - for being idiots, in general.

[formercia]

1. Yup.

K&R

[ColbertWatcher]

2. Don't forget the moneytheists who believe in the infallibility of an unregulated free market. n/t

[KurtNYC]

4. right up until it crashes -- then they want corporate socialism

aka: fascism

[ColbertWatcher]

11. Well, when Dr. Colbert mentioned it during last night's show, he didn't go that far. n/t

[codjh9]

3. Yep. Succinct.

[Taverner]

5. And definitely NOT the UAW

The unions have been bending over backwards to keep big auto alive since the 80's.

[burythehatchet]

6. No, I didn't list them because they were fighting to maintain a just wage

which is why plants are opening up in AL and TN. Right to Treat Workers Like Shit states.

[Taverner]

7. Exactly

They never asked for a raise other than keeping up with inflation.

They never asked for a better health package

They never asked for anything other than to keep things as they were

And now they are being blamed for 'sabotaging the auto industry'

Somewhere, my Grandpa (labor hero in the great sit-down strike at GM) is rolling in his grave.

[Romulox]

8. Bottom line: American consumers are piggish gluttons who LOVE to point the finger

for their own disgusting excesses.

Detroit "made" you want your SUV the same way Haagen Daz "made" you eat a whole pint of ice cream. :eyes:

[LittleApple81]

9. Don't forget Bush DIRECTLY. Memory is still fresh on what he did...

Bush in 2001 told the auto industry not to worry about fuel economy or redesigning cars... I do remember that because I was so upset about that and the CAFE standards essentially being gutted at the time. I found an article discussing this just for the memories. I am sure that there are many more articles, but I don't want to keep on searching.



http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2001/01/26/motava... /

Bush Sucks
Meet the Bush team, brought to you by ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Texaco
By Jim Motavalli
26 Jan 2001

To an extraordinary degree, the administration assembled by George W. Bush is made up of men and women with experience in the automobile and oil industries. With the energy crisis in California, such energy expertise at the helm, it would seem, must be a good thing.
Would that it were so. In reality, the Bush team is so tilted toward Big Oil that it will never give a thought to the only possible lasting solutions to our deepening problems: mass transit and energy conservation.

We Americans must really love our cars; we spend an hour a day in them. The average family takes 10 car trips a day, mostly for shopping, socializing, and recreation. For every 10 transit miles in the U.S., more than nine are taken in a car. Every year, we use up 100 billion gallons of oil, more than half of it (56 percent) imported. If present trends continue, we'll be importing two-thirds of our oil in 20 years. That isn't love -- it's addiction.

SUV
Living in an SUV-owner's paradise.
If every American drove a 70-mile-per-gallon hybrid Honda Insight instead of a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle, we could stop importing oil tomorrow, but that kind of thinking is not on the agenda. Both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have backgrounds as oil executives -- in fact, Cheney was plucked into the campaign directly from the helm of the Texas-based oil services giant Halliburton, which helped rebuild Iraq's petroleum industry after the Persian Gulf War. And both Bush and Cheney support increased domestic drilling, most radically in the highly sensitive coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
....

The auto industry has a direct pipeline to the Bush administration in the person of White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. From 1993 to 1998, Card was the president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association; in this position, according to the New York Times, "he oversaw the lobbying against tighter fuel-economy and air pollution regulations for automobiles." From there, it was on to a vice presidency at General Motors.
.....

[burythehatchet]

10. illuminating