Uaw Says Its Full Of Fight - Road to the Middle Class

YOU’VE gotta hand it to the UAW. They’re not ready to roll over and play dead. Why, the whole idea of bankruptcy is absurd, a management trick, as Tom Krisher reports from the UAW bargaining convention.

(By the way, Tom does not tell his readers whether he is a union member. It is the official position of us here at Road to the Middle Class that all journalists should disclose their union membership status when writing about labor unions. Anyone that doesn’t isn’t really a journalism professional. Disclosure: Nobody at Road to the Middle Class is a union member.)

Martin Shawl, 53, a 28-year Delphi Corp. and General Motors Corp. worker from Bay City, said he doesn’t believe the Detroit automakers are in financial trouble.

"It’s voodoo accounting," he said, questioning the timing of the Chrysler Group’s losses and GM’s restatement of earnings due to accounting troubles

He said the union shouldn’t give back anything to the companies, and it should end a two-tier wage scale that pays new hires less than longtime workers.

God bless the fellow! It’s all smoke and mirrors designed to exploit the working stiffs on the shop floor and to force give-backs.

Tell you what, Marty, old chum. I just checked the financial box scores today. General Motors is capitalized at about $18 billion. Google is worth about $144 billion.

Now I don’t know what kind of voodoo goes into the pricing of common stock on the global finance markets. Probably there is a fair amount—dead chicken, entrails, the whole Haitian thing.

But when General Motors is worth about 12 percent of upstart Google it has to mean something beyond smoke and mirrors. Old sport.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

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Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

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