Showing posts with label big auto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label big auto. Show all posts

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Alberta Deficit Created By Auto Bail Out

Not only is the deficit in Alberta not about overspending on infrastructure, which had been put on a decade long hold as the result of the cuts and privatization of the Klein era, but because of royalty holidays to big oil and the corporate bail out of the Auto-Industry.

The final chapter in the stormy marriage and divorce of Daimler-Benz AG and Chrysler Corp. will provide a $1.5-billion (U.S.) windfall to the deficit-ridden federal, Ontario and Alberta governments.

Daimler AG as the maker of Mercedes-Benz cars is now known, will pay the three governments $1.5-billion to settle a dispute over 11 years of Chrysler taxes that began in the mid-1990s and lasted until Daimler unloaded the No. 3 Detroit auto maker in 2007.

The bailouts of Chrysler and General Motors Corp., which total about $12.7-billion, were partly responsible for the record-setting deficits the two governments racked up to fight the recession. Those governments are still fighting to stem the red ink.

The federal deficit for the April-December, 2010, period was $27.4-billion (Canadian). Ontario is on track to post a deficit of $18.7-billion in the fiscal year that ends March 31. Alberta, meanwhile, tabled a budget last week that forecasts a deficit of $3.4-billion for 2011-12.

So not only did Chrysler get tax breaks from the Liberal and Conservative Federal governments and then get bailed out but they avoided paying taxes for over a decade.

Corporations don't need tax breaks, they take them anyways whether you give them to them or not.

If a Canadian fails to pay their income tax over ten years they not only go to court they go to jail.

But not if they are a corporation.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

More Corporate Welfare

Big Business is never satisfied, it wants tax breaks and tax credits.....either way you and I pay.....So much for being job creators....the only way they can create jobs is not with their own money but yours and mine.....which shows that contrary to the rhetorical litany of the right wing government actually does create jobs.....

Auto executives also called on the federal and Ontario governments to continue offering manufacturing incentives in light of the impact the soaring loonie is having on their industry’s competitiveness.
Since auto workers are taxpayers, and they and we have bailed out big auto with tax breaks, investments, bail outs, pension forgiveness, and pension give backs, as well as wage concession by unions then frankly we own Big Auto we should simply take over the industry and put it under workers control. Especially now that it is profitable again......thanks to you and me and the autoworkers.....

UPDATE 1-Ford, Chrysler Canada sales rise in January

SEE

Big Auto Crisis is the Crisis of Capitalism

There Is An Alternative To Capitalism

Auto Solution II



Friday, February 20, 2009

Big Auto Crisis is the Crisis of Capitalism

The time has come to quit pussy footing around the issue at hand. Capitalism is in collapse. But the truth is that factories still are capable of production, raw resources are still available, technology has increased worker productivity, and workers are still able to work. So why are GM and Chrysler incapable of being productive. Because they rely not on creating products but creating profit. And the bottom line is that while their Canadian factories are some of the most productive they now face closure. No bail out by taxpayers, no bail out by bond holders (that's you folks who own mutual funds and bonds, including your pension funds which are institutional bond holders) nor concessions by workers will end the bleeding at GM or Chrysler. Indeed you can include Ford in that as well.
Instead of bailing out the Big Three it is time to fire the executive class, stop the bleeding of white collar and blue collar jobs and socialize big auto under workers control. In fact that should be the agenda of the left from the NDP and CLC through to the more radical of the left.
And yet nowhere do I hear the call to socialize capital under workers control. Despite statist attempts to nationalize banks and financial institutions by various governments of diverse ideologies, this is simply a public bail out of private capital.
Capitalism is the problem contrary to Gordon Brown, George Bush and Stephen Harper, it is not the solution. The solution is not taxpayer stimulus of existing infrastructure of capitalism and its state. Rather it is the complete and total overhaul of capitalism by socializing it, recognizing that capitalism is currently publicly funded by workers wages, pensions and taxes. It is time to restructure all production under workers control, to reconstitute government as the administration of things rather than people.
Just as big auto cannot restructure itself neither can capitalism. Ownership at GM and Chrysler has not changed, the executives have not changed, the command structure of the organisation has not changed. Nor has concessions, nor bail outs changed the fact that big auto like capitalism in general is simply about the creative destruction of workers and factories, in order to get slim enough to increase the bottom line; profit. And what is profit? It is the surplus value accumulated for further investment to make, more profit. It is this simple equation which exposes the capitalist system as being incapable of solving its own crisis. Which is not a crisis of production but of profit making.
This is the solution that needs to be shouted from the roof tops. And yet I find no cheerleaders for socialism, rather the left seems as despondent as the apologists for capitalism. It is time to challenge the established propaganda of the day that capitalism is a horrible system but it is better than the alternative. The alternative is socialism which contrary to popular mythology is not the same as state owned public works. Socialism is socialized capital, and production under the democratic control of those who own and use it that is us the vast majority of people.
Socialism as a democratic restructuring of capitalism and its statist forms is the unknown country, still to be explored. In this crisis it is time to begin the broad discussion that was so vibrant forty years ago, after the failures of Stalinism and Labourism, about new forms of community and worker control, extending democracy to the work place and into our public institutions, etc.
Unless we have a vibrant vision of a new world, being built in the shell of the old, we will not be grave diggers of capitalism, but rather labour and its political parties will simply dig themselfves into a grave created for them by the current capitalist crisis. Their lack of imigination is their failure to see beyond things as they are, because inevitably for the past fifty years they have abandoned the belief in the revolutionary potential of the working class they claim to represent.


SEE

There Is An Alternative To Capitalism

Auto Solution II

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