Ford Motor Company practically abandons small passenger autos

[pbrower2a]

(04-27-2018, 09:33 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: It was Obama's regulations that removed the need for companies to build small cars, and allowed them to concentrate on gas guzzling large SUVs - a failed attempt to recover the government's investment in GM.

The economic meltdown of autumn 2007-spring 2009 was as severe after a year and a half as was the economic meltdown that began in the autumn of 1929, and it was on course to become every bit as bad as the meltdown that began the Great Depression. America got out of the danger of a protracted meltdown of the sort that became the Great Depression. Rescuing the lenders was essential to saving businesses that relied heavily upon consumer credit (housing and cars, especially),

It may be that President Obama ultimately rescued the economic interests that wanted a second chance at establishing an absolute, pure plutocracy, and used their economic power (for that class, the full-blown meltdown of autumn 1929-autumn 1932 utterly destroyed their political power. That class had to humanize just to meet the new political consensus and recover a bit more slowly than others -- people who by late 1932 saw the wold (hunger) at their door. In a sane society, basic human needs come before elite indulgence.

Today we have Donald trump as President and a Congress and most state legislators best described as (in majority) as lackeys of people who believe that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as those elites get what they want. I interpret the slogan "Make America Great Again" as a desire to return to the economic norms of the 1920s or earlier, when Corporate America in the North and landed elites in the South had nearly-complete dominion over the economy. To describe the ethos of those elites as "Suffer for my greed, power, and indulgence, you peons!" may be an exaggeration, but a return to such an ethos would look like that now.

The 1920s? Ohm those halcyon days of 60-hour workweeks, no industrial unions, ten-cent-an-hour industrial wages, 45-year lifespans for industrial workers and farm laborers (which was an improvement from the 70- hour workweeks and 40-year lifespans for industrial workers of the true Gilded Age), minimal taxes, children having to leave school to work in factories because their 40-year-old parents were worn out, little environmental regulation, a tax structure that coddled the economic elites... try to bring that back, as Donald Judas Trump dreams (and he is the Judas Iscariot to the American worker -- make no mistake!), and our economic elites might have good cause to support gun control -- to prevent the proletarian revolution, or at least a reprise of the French Revolution.

The use of neo-Marxist rhetoric on my part reflects not so much what I want as what I dread -- an economy predicated upon control by economic elites devoid of any moral compass. If Karl Marx saw control of the decisions of production as the cornerstone of economic and political power, someone 133 years his junior might see the control of  consumption as the essence of economic and political power. In essence, Big Business dictates "You will buy (or lease) this, and you will do so at a time of my choosing, and you will adjust your life accordingly".

And, of course, you will support politicians like Donald Trump and Pat Toomey who are either part of that class or are stioges of that, instead of people who might support something more humane and satisfying. "Suffer for my holy greed, ye peons!"

I thought that I was in the market for a used car a couple years ago, and I found that used SUV were surprisingly cheap. The explanation: there is little used-car market for them unless they are heavily discounted. Depreciation on those vehicles is simply horrible. But if one trades them in every four years for a new one, one makes a huge profit for the manufacturers of them. Pick-ups? Not so bad if you actually use them for work, as on a farm or in construction work, or in places in which low-clearance vehicles fare badly, like Montana (where one might have an encounter with an elk). But there are millions of people who have bought them on 72-month payment plans... an indication that one can't really afford them.

We are seeing much the same with consumer electronics. Goodwill does not want old TVs or computers. Hazardous disposal.

...and let us not forget the influence of Big Oil, a firm backer of the lurch to the Right in American politics. Fuel consumption per capita has stagnated except where people are new to the vehicle market (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia) , perhaps because people are not lengthening their commutes and loving them (which would be ideal for Big Oil) -- unless they are buying gas-guzzling vehicles such as SUVs or pickups to replace economy sedans.

So much for my rant. Plutocracy is horrible no matter how it administers the toil of others for the indulgence of a few. It always creates or enforces mass suffering -- and economic waste.