Bloated benefits for unions are sinking automakers

The crisis facing America's Big Three auto manufacturers has, arguably, a single source: legacy costs resulting from union contracts that were negotiated half a century ago. The financial burden thus incurred weighs down their balance sheets to such a degree that, even if the industry in which they compete were thriving, it would be extremely difficult to maintain long-term profitability.

As automobile manufacturing became a global industry, the foreign manufacturers that expanded their operations into the United States flourished. But while Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ltd., along with relative latecomers Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Motors Corp., have a significant manufacturing and sales presence in the United States, they don't have the staggering labor-related financial obligations under which General Motors Corp., Chrysler L.L.C. and Ford Motor Co. are struggling.

GM, for instance, has about 450,000 retirees - more than three times the number of its current full-time employees - to whom it pays pensions and for whom it provides medical care. By some estimates, medical costs alone add $1,500 to the average cost of each GM automobile. And the company is facing an unfunded liability of more than $80 billion, about half its annual pre-downturn gross sales.

Toyota's future liabilities, on the other hand, will remain right where they are today: at zero.

That's because Toyota has put the responsibility for funding their retirements on the shoulders of the employees themselves, through individual investment accounts to which the company contributes...

[you know, like the rest of us][snip]

The bottom line is that if Obama ends up bailing out the auto industry, then the U.S. taxpayer ends up underwriting the leftist agenda of the last half century, as manifested in labor agreements antithetical to capitalism. That it has taken so long for this leftist tactic, in tandem with the current exacerbating financial crisis, to finally bring the auto industry to its knees is a testament to the resilience of capitalism. That Obama's "solution" to this crisis might spell the end of U.S. automobile manufacturing should not be lost on those of us who will have to bear the financial burden of "rescuing" it.

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Sis⋅y⋅phus   [sis-uh-fuhs] –noun Classical Mythology.
a son of Aeolus and ruler of Corinth, noted for his trickery: he was punished in Tartarus by being compelled to roll a stone to the top of a slope, the stone always escaping him near the top and rolling down again.

AP's Auto Bailout coverage journalistically negligent

Wednesday evening's dour Associated Press report by Tom Krisher and Ken Thomas on the proposed bailouts of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler acted as if their fates will determine the viability of the entire US auto industry, and waited until the 15th paragraph to name the primary reason why the companies are where they are financially. [snip]

Here are three key values in a chart shown Monday at Carpe Diem:

Total Compensation Per Hour, 2007-2008 (includes wages and all benefits):
Big Three automakers — $73.08
Toyota — $48.00
All workers — $28.48

In 30-plus paragraphs, the AP reporters "somehow" failed to mention - at all - UAW President Ron Gettelfinger's refusal last week to give an inch on labor costs, as reported by Dow Jones at CNNMoney.com: [snip]

What an outrage. The AP's failure to mention the UAW's stand is journalistically negligent.

As an e-mailer said in a post at Michelle Malkin's blog earlier this morning:

The Big 3 has a cancer that needs to be removed. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why they cannot compete profitability (sic). They have parity on supply costs, materials, and energy with Honda and Toyota. So why can’t they compete? It is clearly the cost of unions.

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Car giants 'laugh at Aussie suckers'

The American owners of local Ford and Holden plants will be laughing at the Australian ''suckers'' who have handed them a $6.2 billion industry assistance package, former car company executives say. Expressing disappointment yesterday at the latest industry handout, industry veterans said the money would ultimately end up back in Detroit rather than bolstering needy sectors of the local industry.
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*****

*.

Face of Defense: Apache Pilot Receives Distinguished Flying Cross

There was a fierce ground battle under way, and the Iraqi and U.S. soldiers on the ground needed air support. Johnson and his crew were that support. In eight minutes, Johnson led his team from Forward Operating Base Kalsu to the battlefield.

"Those were the longest eight minutes of my life," he said. "There was sadness because I just lost some of my friends. I was worried about my friends who were still there. I was scared. But like the movie ‘Black Hawk Down,’ when the bullets are flying, you just do your job. I tried to stay level headed and cool under the pressure."

Johnson, originally from Nampa, Idaho, orchestrated more than an hour of organized attacks before running completely out of ammunition. His team flew back to FOB Kalsu, re-armed and went back out into the fight.

"The governor met me, and was sobbing. Not out of sadness, not out of anger, but out of thankfulness," he said. "He was so grateful that we took away that burden."

That wouldn't have been possible without the skills and professionalism of Johnson and his team, Fil said. "I have never been associated with anyone more deserving of the Distinguished Flying Cross than Chief Warrant Officer 3 Johnson," he said.

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Iraqi town defies Al Qaeda

Dulaim is an Iraqi village transformed. Where masked gunmen from Al Qaeda in Iraq once imposed their will with killings and even stole irrigation pumps, today numerous Iraqi Army, police, and local Sunni militia checkpoints attest to new levels of security.

The change has been dramatic. It is the result of this farming hamlet deciding last January to change sides, turning away from Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and toward US and Iraqi forces. But despite recently paying a high price for that shift, this village is determined not to turn back.

AQI struck in late September, killing 22 in the most lethal attack in a year in troubled eastern Diyala Province.

Instead of fear or failure, however, the unexpected response has been a recommitment to fight...

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Obama Will Honor Iraqis’ Wishes

Today, in a near-unanimous vote, the Iraqi cabinet approved a security agreement that will keep American forces in Iraq through the end of 2011. The Iraqi parliament is likely to pass the agreement before the assembly goes into recess November 24. What does this mean for the incoming American administration. What happens to the claim that Barack Obama’s drawdown plan was consonant with the hopes of the Iraqi leadership?

[A: it was all campaign maleficence which was never questioned, nor will be]

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Anatomy of a Biased Headline: Part IV

A mere couple of days ago the media was salivating at the President-elect ‘ratcheting’ up the effort to hunt down bin Laden.

With the media this gangbusters about bin Laden, wouldn’t that be the first mention in any article involving a CIA report that says he is essentially fighting for his survival? It should be the absolute crux of the headline, as Fox News and even CNN agreed.

Perhaps it would be after January 19th, but certainly not prior to that. Let’s take a look at some of these ‘glass half empty’ headlines which will only continue to exist Before Obama (B.O.).

MSNBC CIA chief says al-Qaida still greatest threat
New York Times C.I.A. Chief Says Qaeda Is Extending Its Reach
Washington Post CIA Chief: Iraq Not Main Front
The USA Today CIA: Al-Qaeda 'single biggest threat' to U.S.

USA Today's article did actually mention bin Laden as a priority, but apparently not enough to give it headline status. That is only warranted when Obama mentions his name, as evidenced by their headline two days ago:

Report: Obama to focus on bin Laden capture

Pro-Obama journalism at its finest.

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Somali Islamists seize town, impose Islamic law

Mogadishu, Somalia -- Advancing ever closer to Somalia's beleaguered capital, heavily armed Islamic fighters declared Thursday they will use strict Muslim rules to bring their lawless Horn of Africa country back under control. The latest conquest by Islamic forces came late Wednesday in Elasha, 10 miles, (16 kilometers) from the capital of Mogadishu. Islamic fighters now control most of southern and central Somalia...
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Sharia-Compliant Finance Funds Jihad

Turn your clock back 70 years. Imagine that Wall Street banks and brokerages sold Nuremberg-compliant bonds and stock funds in 1938. American Nazi sympathizers bought financial instruments certified by Berlin-based advisors as free of “Jewish profits” from, say, Salomon Brothers and Bloomingdale’s.

In turn, a percentage of such funds’ gains underwrote pro-Nazi charities, like the German-American Bund, and similar organizations in the Fatherland, like the Hitler Youth.

Seventy years hence, an analogous outrage grows on Wall Street, only this time for real.

Sharia-compliant finance (SCF) is expanding among banks and securities houses eager to absorb the hundreds of billions of petrodollars cascading into the Middle East.

SCF goes far beyond marketing to Muslims and Middle Easterners. IIFM lists “wider sharia acceptance” among its goals. Selling sharia-compliant investments legitimizes a barbaric theocratic orthodoxy that should be defeated, not promoted... [snip]

*In 2002, Caribou Coffee had to explain the ties between its Atlanta-based sharia-compliant owner, Arcapita, Inc., and Arcapita’s sharia advisor, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. He had defended “our brothers and children in Al-Aqsa and the blessed land of Palestine generously sacrificing their blood, giving their souls willingly in the way of Allah"

[snip]

*According to “The Tax Lawyer,” Yasin al-Qadi -- an investor in one Hamas-connected, sharia-compliant company called BMI (not the perfectly legitimate Broadcast Music, Inc.) -- transmitted $820,000 to Chicago’s Quranic Literacy Institute in 1991. QLI employee Mohammad Salah confessed in 1995 that he trained recruits to handle assorted toxins and “basic chemical materials for the preparation of bombs and explosives.”

[snip]

* The North American Islamic Trust owns 69.8 percent of the Dow Jones Islamic Fund. The Justice Department identified NAIT last June as an unindicted co-conspirator in supporting Hamas’ murderous anti-Israeli terrorism. NAIT also owns Albany, New York’s Masjid As-Salam mosque. In April 2007, its founder, Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, and imam, Yassin Muhiddin Aref, received 15-year prison sentences for assisting an FBI sting operation to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in Manhattan with a shoulder-fired missile.

The last thing America needs is jihad with tailored suits and Excel spreadsheets. It’s time to stop the clock on this deadly idea.

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Treasury submits to Shariah

As reported in this space last week, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt set the stage with his recent visit to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states. His stated purpose was to promote the recycling of petrodollars in the form of foreign investment here.

Evidently, the price demanded by his hosts is that the U.S. government get with the Islamist financial program. While in Riyadh, Mr. Kimmitt announced: "The U.S. government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis."

The department is hosting a half-day course entitled "Islamic Finance 101" on Thursday at its headquarters building. Treasury's self-described "seminar for the policy community" is co-sponsored with the leading academic promoters of Shariah and SCF in the United States: Harvard University Law School's Project on Islamic Finance.

At the very least, the U.S. government evidently hopes to emulate Harvard's success in securing immense amounts of Wahhabi money in exchange for conforming to the Islamists' agenda. Like Harvard, Treasury seems utterly disinterested in what Shariah actually is, and portends...

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Switzerland, a Possible Target of Islamist Terrorism?

Once considered the safest country in Europe, if not the world, Switzerland is now a potential target of a terrorist attack. Why? (Snip) the stronghold of Islamists over the Geneva Muslim community continues unabated. At the end of March, four executives of the Geneva mosque were swiftly fired by the mosque's new director, an imam recently arrived from Jeddah. Speculation has it that they were not radical enough.
[GWOT]
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Sarkozy Questions U.S. Missile Shield Plan

NICE, France -- France's U.S.-friendly president sent a clear message to the next American administration: Plans for a U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe are misguided, and won't make the continent a safer place.

Sarkozy's comments, at a summit with Medvedev, were the strongest to date by an American ally against the missile-defense plans _ and undercut the rationale behind U.S. President George W. Bush's European security strategy.

"Deployment of a missile defense system would bring nothing to security ... it would complicate things, and would make them move backward," Sarkozy said at a news conference with Medvedev.

Medvedev smiled and pointed his finger at Sarkozy in approval.

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Russians Know Missile Shield Is No Threat, U.S. Says

The U.S. Ground Based Interceptor (GBI) missile shield may have raised some old, Cold War hackles, but the system is no threat to the Russians -- and they know it, according to a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency in Washington.

The small, 10-missile defense system is set for deployment in Poland within four years. Its primary purpose is to protect Europe from a new class of medium-range missiles being deployed by Iran, U.S. military officials insist.

“[The GBI shield] isn’t designed against any kind of Russian technology; it is strictly designed for Iranian missiles,” MDA spokesman Rick Lehner tells Newsmax. “It would be a tail chase and we could never intercept them -- the geometry isn't there.” [snip]

What MDA does know for sure is that GBI can defeat current and future Iranian threats, Lehner says.

“The missile is designed to collide with a target in space.” says Lehner. “It is a bullet that can hit a spot on another bullet. It works. We have had 36 out of 45 [80% - and rapidly climbing] hit-to-kill intercepts since 2001, and that is very impressive.”
[snip]

Medvedev has said he would reconsider aiming the offensive missiles at Europe if President-elect Barack Obama agrees not to deploy GBI. On Friday, the Chinese news agency Xinhua in Moscow quoted an unnamed official on Obama’s transition team as saying Obama is open to negotiation on the issue.

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Medvedev wants talks with Obama as soon as possible

WASHINGTON— Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is calling for talks with Barack Obama as soon as possible after the U.S. president-elect takes the oath of office. Medvedev is reaching out to the incoming U.S. administration during his first visit to the United States since becoming Russia's president in May.During an appearance Saturday night in Washington, Medvedev said there is a lack of trust between Russia and the United States and he hopes this will change...
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Welcome to the new Sunday `World of the Global Citizen’

All is quiet on the Western Front today, even though world governments taking virtual control of world economies is now complete.

It went down without a peep, with only The Washington Times asking “What if they held a protest and hardly anybody came?”

With no fanfare they reached an agreement Saturday to work together in hopes of combating the gathering global recession.

There were no explanations for the chattering classes about how global recession and the death of capitalism coincided overnight—in the case of the USA just weeks before the presidential election. No explanations of how it came to be that the world population fell as one under the utter control of Big Brother Government.

Make that the control of Big Brother Government as dictated by a One World Government, administered by the United Nations...

[as always, silence was interpreted as consent - Recommended > ]

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UK Paper Notes 'Surreal Scientific Blunder' in Global Temps Measurement; US Media Doesn't Care

Earlier today, Christopher Booker at the UK Telegraph noted a "surreal scientific blunder," followed by an attempted cover-up, that should cause everyone to question the source's past and future credibility.

The source of the shoddy work is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the outfit run by world champion globalarmist James Hansen. Hansen has in the past stated that "heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be 'tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.'"

What Booker reports causes one to wonder what the appropriate punishment should be for committing drop-dead obvious errors and integrity-lacking follow-up. [snip]

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

.... whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

No kidding. It's also reasonable to ask why taxpayers or anyone else should be funding Hansen's horrible handiwork.

McIntyre at Climate Audit reported the errors, with What's Up With That also noting, on Monday, November 10. GISS's blunder, and attempted back-and-fill, were both clear by Thursday. Yet a Google News search at 11 AM on "Hansen October" (quotes not used) for November 9-16 shows that there has been no traditional media interest. A similar New York Times search came up empty.

Thus, Mr. Hansen will more than likely be able to continue to spout off in front of congressional committees about the planet's impending doom from global warming -- even as evidence continues to mount that the earth is cooling.

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Coal plants jeopardized over climate

Washington - The fate of scores of new coal-burning power plants is now in limbo over whether to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel on Thursday rejected a federal permit for a Utah plant, leaving the issue for the Obama administration to resolve. The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide.
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Beware: The Gay Enemies List

California
Opponents of gay marriage in California are suffering the effects of a childish tantrum thrown by those who lost on Proposition 8. There have been attacks on Mormons for leading the fight for the ballot initiative as well as racial epithets hurled at African Americans because 70% of them voted "Yes" to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Now these activists have taken their derangement to another level; they are publishing lists of ordinary people who donated to the "Yes on 8" coalition:

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Today: Let's Tinker With Insurance Rates In Name of Gender Equity

In the name of gender equality, the Today show plumped this morning for government regulation forcing health care insurers to charge men and women the same for individual policies even though women cost insurers more because of greater use of services.

Hasn't the financial crisis taught the MSM anything about the danger of government meddling in markets?

No.

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Town divided over Pledge of Allegiance

Woodbury, Vt. - No one is sure when daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance fell by the wayside at Woodbury Elementary School. But efforts to restore them have erupted into a bitter dispute in this town of about 800 residents, with school officials blocking the exercise from classrooms over concerns that it holds children who don't participate up to scorn.

...gathering anyone who wanted to say it and then walking them up creaky wooden steps to a second-floor gymnasium...

[we need universal vouchers]

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WaPo Shocker: Palin Helped McCain Avoid Far Worse Loss

As media outlets across the fruited plain float the notion that Sarah Palin hurt John McCain's chances of winning the White House, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza will break with the herd on Sunday to dispel this nonsense.

Imagine that.

As the last of his "5 Myths About an Election of Mythic Proportions" slated for Sunday's print edition but already available at the paper's website, Cillizza parted with his fellow journalists who believe "McCain made a huge mistake in picking Sarah Palin": [snip]

For skittish conservatives looking for more evidence that McCain understood their needs and concerns, Palin did the trick. It's hard to imagine conservatives rallying to McCain -- even to the relatively limited extent that they did -- without Palin on the ticket. And without the base, McCain's loss could have been far worse.

For those interested, Cillizza dispelled some other myths being floated by media including "The Republican Party suffered a death blow" during these elections, and "A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama's victory."

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MSNBC Duped By Fictional Sarah Palin Leaker

MSNBC's David Shuster was duped Monday by someone erroneously claiming to be the McCain campaign adviser who leaked derogatory information to the press about Sarah Palin.

In his rush to report a scoop, Shuster and his producers failed to recognize that the leaker was actually a fictional creation as was the think tank he supposedly worked for.

This somehow got past that crack, investigative journalism crew so populated by America's most atrocious cable news network as reported by the Associated Press Thursday (emphasis added):

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