GM debt rating dropped to JUNK 4975

bankruptcy, employees that and send with no rest of

previous thinking that

employees that

Nice try, but Toyota, Honda, and BMW build cars here because (among other reasons) the labor costs are cheaper here than in their home countries. You can't blame GM and Ford's crappiness on globalization.

Hmmm... I wonder if we can get some consistency within the newsgroup. Half are saying its just the monumentally bad management (I agree) and the other half say its the horrible, terrible Unions forcing chargable-as-rape high wages and pensions and health care (probably a factor).

Its "globalization", however, that lets these products into the country at a marked advantage over the domestics, and not just in quality. There's a pricing problem, too, or at least there was.

drain. (Don't section - its double by

Well, my state of origin, Ohio, has some governor's candidates (I read an Ohio newspaper local to my old hometown online and this was mentioned) that are lamenting the still-continuing exodus of the young people from the state, and blaming different things for it. Myself, I think the answer is pretty simple - the rust-belt economy is not being converted fast enough to a tech economy (go to dice.com and try to find a software job in Toledo, for example... old, mainframe things with COBAL, etc. but extremely few Java, C++, etc.) and the rust-belt economy is toast due to foreign compebreastion. Steel, autos, etc. are going away. The textile industry, not a big thing in Ohio but used just for illustration, is long since departed from the country - most stuff is made in China, with some shoes from Italy, and just about everywhere else that is not the United States. If the US were to compete, we'd have to have our kids out of school and into the sweat shops just like the SE Asia kids - not that the last 4 or 5 administrations would mind, judging from their willingness to let this sort of compebreastion kill such jobs here.

And now the tech economy is going away to overseas homes, never to return. The once-$100K jobholders can be seen posting to some of the software-oriented newsgroups stating how they're now doing $19K-yr helpdesk work because its the only thing they could get. Yeah, they're probably a hair over 35 years old... and there's rampant age discrimination in that particular industry - again, not that the administration(s) care a bit - they don't.

No, the last 4 - 5 administrations are just tickled pink to let the American worker seek the Wal-mart greeter jobs, or the physical jobs that have you in pain at the end of most days (welldrilling, plumbing, electrical contracting, etc. - anything but actually manufacturing something) while all our money goes overseas and screws up the balance of trade in the bargain.

The country is on a downward slope, greased in part by the income tax that makes our goods expensive overseas and allows overseas goods to come her and not pay income tax for their buttembly. Wonder why so many American cars and trucks are manufactured in foreign countries? Could it be... avoiding some corporate income tax? I think so - esp. if the auto buttembly labor is now on a par with US labor costs (I doubt it, actually, esp. where Korea and China are concerned)

Can you say "dot com crash"? Outsourcing to India is a problem in the software industry, but your using a bubble as your basis for comparison.

Yeah, there was a bubble. But the deflation of it is still out of proportion to the loss in jobs here, and the growth in jobs in Bangalore, India. And so we get helpdesks that can't do anything but follow a script, don't have a clue how life here works, and try to tell me to call the phone company to figure out the apparant overcharge of connect time for my CompuServe account via the 800 number a couple years ago. Had to listen real hard, and then they didn't have anything helpful to say. But, THEY WERE CHEAP! That's all that CompuServe cared about, and why I'm now with AT&T.

Dave Head