Saturday, December 01, 2018

The Price You Pay

General Motors stock went up after the automotive gigantus announced that they were cutting fourteen thousand jobs and closing seven factories across the globe. For me, this is a terrific illustration of just how the stock market does not work for the American worker. As of 2013, the top one percent of households by wealth owned nearly thirty-eight percent of all stock shares. Stock ownership by individuals has fallen since the recession of 2006, and as of 2013 the top twenty percent of Americans owned ninety-two percent of the stocks, leaving eight percent for the rest of us. General Motors shutters factories, and the top eight percent wins. 
Meanwhile, our "President" wants to get all fighty with GM because he had been promising American workers, specifically those who held jobs in some of those auto plants, that he would make America Great Again by keeping their jobs here in the once great but soon to be great again land of the free and home of the brave. 
And out of work. 
Meanwhile, as the "President" continually touts the peaks and records of the stock market, he is threatening to end subsidies to General Motors because they laid people off. Last year, the "President" told workers, “Let me tell you folks in Ohio and in this area, don’t sell your house. We’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build brand-new ones. It’s going to happen.” 
Back in the recession of 2006, as American automakers were teetering on the edge of collapse, the United States government gave them billions of dollars to stay afloat. Thirteen billion went to General Motors. Now they are closing factories. And their stock goes up. All of those big corporations that benefited from big tax cuts from the current administration are making money again. Including General Motors. Money is being made in lost in vast troughs that never seem to land on the workers, specifically those who are losing their jobs. 
All that winning. Some of us are tired of all of that winning. The "President" wants to take away the subsidies from GM? What sort of impact will that make? Maybe it will cause another trillion dollar bailout. Winning, winning, winning. 

No comments: