I just threw up in my mouth writing that title. Anyways. I have often wondered why I care at all about cars. They aren't particularly interesting mechanically, there's no mechanism under the hood that's going to blow any minds. I don't even own a car. But for some reason I'm interested in them as objects and thus I believe I am entitled to have an opinion about the recent approval of a payout to the three largest American companies.
So far, the worst coverage I've seen of this was surprisingly on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His first obvious mistake was comparing the Auto industry to the banking industry. While we're comparing things, why not discuss the salvation army in context with the Marine Corp.? They both have the word "army" in their vocabulary, but lets not kid ourselves by saying that "auto company" can be compared to "banking company".
Now here's why we need to save the auto industry: to get rid of the UAW. I understand the argument for unions, I understand that they do some good things, but at this stage we need to start reigning them in. Mollycoddling auto workers leads to one thing: shitty products with huge health-care premiums.
I used to work in a foundry. I worked in a factory that literally turned molten steel into finished products, and it was a shitty job. Standing in a 6-foot wide by 7 foot tall by 6 foot deep station between a furnace blazing at 1500 degrees and a ten foot tall forming machine rotating in a 10000 gallon vat of toxic oil really makes the paychecks a big deal. We were not unionized. The harder we worked and the more pieces we created the more money we made. Direct capitalism!
Now let me be blunt: The only jobs worse than mine in the auto industry are the ones that involve people doing exactly the same thing I did: forming metal. There's nothing worse.
Now here's the difference: They make 100K a year, they have full health benefits, and if they get laid off, they get paid for 3 years.
Excuse me, what? Is their labor worth more?
Unions would work if it was a unified labor union. Unions would work if they were subjective instead of operating each in their own seperate bubble. The so called "workers paradise" controlled by beneficial unions is a figment of anyones imagination and now we're suffering the consequences: shitty products, bad moral and overhead operating costs that have allowed imports and outsourcing to rape the economy and people's opinions of their country. The UAW has done more than George Bush to damage the American psyche. They have no confidence in their products, their technology or their people, because workers, tired of not getting paid to suck, banded together.
At first this was brilliant. It gave us the 5 day work week and steady paychecks and we finally got all those mafia ties we've been after, yet we still failed to think of a way to get rid of unions once they served their purpose.
There's a few things I'd like to see:
1. No unions in manufacturing and production. Things will get worse before they get better, but in the end we'll have products we're proud of.
2. Moratoriums on negotiation. I want a mandatory period of 10 years before a contract can be negotiated, or better yet, negotiation periods that occur a minimum of 2 years after a government announces a change.
Now part 2 of this post is in relation to the burgeoning world of conspiracy theories. We're so sure the government is out to get us that we re-negotiate a contract based on every rumor or political statement. People's livelihoods are being decided by arguments between arrogant union heads and selfish company heads based on what a semi-educated, melodramatic and otherwise useless to society politician said on a whim. I thought I'd use that as a segue, but I cant see any way to tie it in to what I want to say next so:
Why all of the sudden has this conspiracy theory jazz become such a huge issue? True, we've had this idea of "not everything is what it seems" for millenia, but only in the last couple decades has it started to really affect the normal person's life.
My theory is that its entirely because on confidence, and I think the auto industry is one of the major causes of this. One thing as a society that we all have in common, conspiratorial or not, is the need to move and displace. Our jobs are rarely our neighbors, and our friends and family are often somewhere distant. We need to get there. We need cars, we need buses and we need planes. The people who manufacture these objects are usually unionized heavily (and I mean heavily). The products coming out of those industries with the obvious exception of airliners, were pretty much complete garbage for 30 years. This crucial, massive and widespread part of our society was produced about people who cared for the wage, not the product. We've lost our confidence in our own ability to have a good society, and incompetent governments have only provoked an already annoyed population by claiming "you're being taken advantage of by the current government".
Well, newsflash, you're being taken advantage of by both parties. Self help books work by convincing you that a) you have something wrong with you and b) they are the only ones who can fix it.
a) You cant produce valuable merchandise or services as a society
b) We're going to make this a workers paradise so you have pride again, except products won't be important because we, as quick study marxists and lo-rent swedish socialists, don't understand the intricacies of the economy very well. We are the NDP.
Fairly familiar, non?
Anyways, in conclusion, I believe we have conspiracy theories because we are so filled with self doubt that even our elected officials are representations of our own insecurity. We are a society of isolated groups and individuals who do not trust, and instead must,
MUST believe that something else is up. We are so dissilusioned with what we must see every day that we invent things, like the often thrown about "jet fuel is not hot enough to melt steel" which is both incorrect and irrelevent, because steel loses 80% of its strenght at 1000 celcius, well below jet fuel burning temperature, which I believe is 3406 celcius or something. Its bait and switch, every one of them, and we're skirting the root problem:
We don't believe ourselves to be materialistically valuable as a society, and what's more, we now believe that we are idiologically valuable as a more enlightened society due to our standard of living. We are doomed.
Disclaimer: this is not directed at my fellow bloggers, it's directed at the idiot on the train last week who refused to listen to anything I had to say about the september 11 jazz, including me at one point looking up the insurance information on my phone in regards to WTC 7 and completely shutting him down. At least when I'm wrong I allow people to show me why.
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