Louis Proyect wrote: >> How odd to see "What's good for General Motors is good for America" being >> argued on leftist mailing list.
raghu writes: > Ah no, but what's good for GM is less bad for America than what is > good for Goldman Sachs. > > GM is a lesser evil by a sufficiently large margin that it is worth > caring about the difference. But the difference between GM (before bankruptcy) and Goldman wasn't that big. GM was becoming more and more of a financial corporation and getting involved in the bubble. (It's called GMAC.) They knew the need for capitalist wealth to be fungible, also moving increasing amounts of their operations overseas and out-sourcing to take advantage of low wages, low environmental standards, etc. They would have internationalized earlier and more quicky except for the legal and "natural" barriers. (The latter refers to transportation costs and the like.) The big difference between GM and GS these days is that GMAC bet wrongly on the bubble and GM had to face the cost of old obligations (e.g., pension funds they'd used to avoid raising wages -- GM was far-sighted in the olden golden days and likely knew that they could fink out of pension obligations if anything went wrong). There was some truth to the "what's good for GM is good for the USA" back in the "golden age" of the 1950s and 1960s: relatively high wages provided a domestic market in the US which partly fed back to buy GM cars. But that only works with the correct political-economic environment in place, i.e., the US as the hegemonic power, etc. (I won't repeat the list here.) And evidence collected by David Fairris and others suggests that GM and similar companies were trying to make profits by undermining this political-economic structure, e.g., by moving operations to the non-union US South. This "far-sighted capitalist" corporation was acting as an opportunist (or free-rider) vis-a-vis the maintenance of the "golden age" institutional structure. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
