No help or wrong help for Detroit 3965

Yes, that happened in the 80's most certainly. On one hand you had General Motors with the computer-controlled Varajet that the garden variety mechanic could not make head nor tail of, in a big old boat of a car that sucked gas like no tomorrow. On the other hand you had the imports with fuel injection and small gas saving cars easy to fix.

But today it's not true anymore. Take a look at the warranties offered by the domestics and foreign manufacturers, they are all the same 3-36 If the imports were so much more reliable their warranties would be longer.

Operative word there is image. The domestics hurt themselves by having bad quality in the late 70's early 80s as compared to the imports. Unfortunately that gave Generation X an image and that image hasn't changed with that generation. They will be buying imports until they die, and they are influencing their parents purchases today, which 30 years ago was unheard of.

When your parents (if they are still alive that is) were in their 20's, they would have never been asked for advice on purchasing anything by your grandparents. That has changed 180 degrees today, and it started with the Gen Xers because they were the first generation to be young enough to climb into the computer and information culture. The generation that is following Gen X was raised in the computer culture, you see, and they will not have the same influence over their parents - the Gen X'ers - as the Gen X'ers have today over their own parents, the baby boomers, because both the Gen Xers and their children are of the same information culture.

When historians look back 100 years today they will point to the 1990's as the decade that American culture started the Information Age and ended the Industrial Age. The Gen Xers were on the cusp of that change and as a result they are rapidly gaining far more power in shaping the culture than most generations had. The Baby Boomers had that same power as well and they use it to change people's atbreastudes towards each other. In the 60's they used it to promote tolerance, and today they are using it to promote intolerance. The GenXers power isn't in that area, instead the Gen Xers power is in changing people's atbreastudes towards how they make an effect in the material world. That's why the Gen Xers are so interested in people's effect on the environment, and that's why they are so interested in how corporations use employees, etc. The big 3 automakers in Detroit still haven't figured this out in their marketing, the foreign automakers have, though.

A person who is in denial is a person who continues to believe his own view of the world, after being presented with irrefutable evidence that his world view does not agree with the actual world itself. That is a pretty basic definition that anyone knows it is not psycho-babble.

The poster apparently thinks that Bush firmly believes Ford and GM will be able to pull themselves up out of their own holes without government help, and the poster thinks the reality is that they can't do it, and that proof of that has been shown to Bush who is refusing to believe it. Of course this is a rather preposterous set of suppositions, but this is what it means.

Or more likely a merger. The Justice Department has been approving quite a lot of corporate mergers that in prior years would have been considered violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust act. Most likely what the President has been told by his economic advisors is that if General Motors bought Ford, that it would not create a trust because on a global scale there's many many many automakers out there, and that the US citizens would still have many many choices. And those advisors have probably been sold the line that if those two companies merged that it would so greatly increase the manufacturing economies of scale that it would allow GM to spend even less money manufacturing a car, thus the combined enbreasty would become very profitable.

Of course these same advisors seem to think that Goliaths in government organizations are wasteful and a Bad Thing, which goes to show that people have the capability of believing that two completely opposite statements are both true at the same time.

The exact same thing would happen to the foreign car makers if they "had the market" If we don't have domestic car makers left then what will we do?

That isn't why Saturn isn't doing well. Saturn isn't doing well because GM totally underestimated how hypocritical American consumers really are. For years and years since time out of mind the American consumer has ranked the honesty of the typical car dealer somewhat on the level of the average lawyer, and complained endlessly about how they couldn't stand to haggle when purchasing cars. GM fell for that line and created the no-haggle sale. Then they discovered years later that only a small percentage of American consumers actually were serious about not wanting to no-haggle a car sale, the rest of them may have unpleasant womaned a blue streak about having to privateser, but when cash started talking and bullpoo started walking, most consumers figured they would get a better deal down the street from the dealer willing to haggle.

Ted