169 Comments

"At least, you know, for people who aren’t stock holders."

There's an important distinction to make between productive capitalism and unproductive capitalism. Productive capitalism is investing capital into a productive enterprise, like new stocks of a factory.

Unproductive capitalism is investing capital into an unproductive enterprise, like real estate or buying already existing stocks of said factory.

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Josh Hawley thinks auto workers deserve a raise. But what about the other 99% of American workers? We're chopped liver, lazy takers, disorganized and unnecessary.

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One of my favorite college courses was labor economics. Our professor played union organizing songs from the 1930s (Seeger, Guthrie). The one I remember best is "Which Side are you on"? I continue to say this whenever I hear about people supporting a third party candidate, or Democrats complaining about Biden.

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Solidarity forever.

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Stock buybacks used to be illegal, period.

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It's always about the stockholders. You'd think they'd get tired of being corporate greed's scapegoat.

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What about manufacturing switching to automation? How does this factor in to the jobs? I'm just curious is all but I'd imagine that there's some significance here, given how modern the technology has become.

Yes automation means losing jobs / you will need people, but what does the future look like for the auto industry in general?

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You can use automation in many different ways. You can automate simple work and achieve four goals: Reduce workweek length, reduce employees, increase labour wages, and/or increase stock payout. So it doesn't have to mean losing jobs.

but there is another type of automation possible. The C-suite's job is to decide between the business proposals the analysts come up with. Since you can quantify the value of most business proposals easily, you can automate this away with some simple logic. (Just make the teams fact check each other's work to prevent them from gaming the system). For the remaining proposals a judgement call needs to be made with insufficient information. Since instinct doesn't actually affect results, you can automate this with a proverbial coinflip, which a computer can do for you.

So I propose we automate away the C-suite's jobs and split the savings between a shorter workweek and higher wages.

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It looks like even with a ton of automation and advances in sensors etc humans can still visually process and manipulate a lot of stuff on an assembly line more economically than machines, we'll see how long that goes. Just don't ever give machines the power to design and build self-replicating machines with some purpose defined within some confidential AI prompt by some fascist billionaire/s.

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One day, I hope we can discuss an economic issue without worrying whether or not it benefits Muskrat.

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Maybe if he gets extradited to ukraine for military sabotage?

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Hey Union Comrades: One party in this country has been attacking and slowly and efficiently destroying collective bargaining in this country for the last 60 years.

And cops and firefighters need to be reminded of this on a daily basis.

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“Human capital stock”: The PAB's White House adviser Kevin Hassett, May 25, 2020. Working people are just another disposable commodity to the GQP.

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Honestly, if you listen to the video posted above, what the corporations have done has been far more damaging to the economy than a much deserved strike by the UAW.

This sums it up nicely:

https://www.thedrive.com/uploads/2023/09/14/UAW-President-Shawn-Fain-Livestream-Update-9_13_23-9-13-screenshot.jpg?auto=webp&optimize=high&quality=70&width=568&dpr=2

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Woooow, that is so much worse than I thought!

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Bill Maher and Drew Barrymore gonna to slip into the factory over the weekend and produce a few cars, probably just a couple of Fiesta's so they don't violate the spirit of the strike.

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Am I misremembering or did our luscious tax dollars bail them out when Bush was in charge?

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Not sure about Bush, but definitely Obama. In fact, I seem to recall the Conservative politicians sniggering that Obama's plan to bail out Detroit was going to backfire on him, because the Era of the American Auto Industry was over.

I think Bush bailed out the banks, actually.

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I think we bailed them out under Obama but we probably bailed them out before. Too big to fail my fat ass..

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I originally posted that I thought it was Obama, but I looked it up on the Google machine and found out it was the year before Obama took office, ergo another big, sloppy wet kiss for corporate America from the "good" Rethugs...

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Nope, Obama had to clean up the mess from the Bush years right as he entered the office. That and the smoldering dung heaps of two petty racist revenge wars/ wars for oil.

“In March 2009, the Task Force recommended up to $5 billion in support for automotive industry suppliers,[5] and by late May 2009, following the recommendations of the Task Force, the U.S. government had lent approximately $25 billion in total to the companies.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Task_Force_on_the_Auto_Industry#:~:text=In%20March%202009%2C%20the%20Task,in%20total%20to%20the%20companies.

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Another example of us socialist libtards saving CEOs...

Here's the source I saw, but the Wheel of Time keeps on turning same as it ever was: https://www.politico.com/story/2008/12/bush-announces-174-billion-auto-bailout-016740

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Ah, so Bush did begin the bail out GM and Chrysler by diverting money from TARP [bank bailout]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/an-inconvenient-truth-it-was-george-w-bush-who-bailed-out-the-automakers

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And it should be remembered that they were loans that Obama made sure were paid back, which they were. Not sure if they were charged interest or not, but at least the principal went back into the Treasury.

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With interest, yes. Romney, despite roots in Michigan, had no chance of carrying this state after he said the auto companies should have been allowed to fail.

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Including this gem from the Decidererer in Chief (the "free market" works until it doesn't):

“If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy,” Bush said at the White House, in remarks carried live by the national broadcast networks. “In the midst of a financial crisis and a recession, allowing the U.S. auto industry to collapse is not a responsible course of action. The question is how we can best give it a chance to succeed.”

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A person on the overnight ot was pretty insistent that anti-scab is anti-worker. Well, that’s quite a take, but I responded in the nicest way I could muster that I strongly disagree.

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Sep 18, 2023
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It was me. And I'd scab again, too. Poverty makes strange bedfellows, or something.

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This is why unions have strike funds, so you don't have to go hungry while negotiating to make sure you don't have to go hungry in the future.

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Thank you for this breakdown. I shared it with some who just see greedy workers. A friend pointed out that this is what our employer had done, especially in relation to pensions.

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Companies issue huge stock option packages to execs. If share price is rising due to organic growth - say, in tech, the share price growth can offset share dilution and its price-depressing effect. But for low-growth behemoths such as automakers, dilution effect of exercised options can depress the price below the strike price, leaving the options worthless. Buyback voodoo can be used to attempt to buttress the shares to keep the execs' comp above water, but it doesn't always have the desired effect. So, you could buy high and sell low. ~AND~ bonus, you pay ordinary tax rate on any capital gain upon exercise. I prefer to be paid in cash, i.e. a (permanent) base salary increase.

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"So it seems they’ve largely settled on claiming that the strikes are actually about electric vehicles and how electric vehicles are bad. Does this make any sense? No, it does not!"

BIDEN IS GOING TO COME FOR YOUR CARS ONCE HE'S DONE WITH YOUR CEILING FANS!!!11!11!1

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