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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Price Of Human Life, According To GM
by Michael Moore
I am opposed to the death penalty, but to every rule there is usually an exception, and in this case I hope the criminals at General Motors will be arrested and made to pay for their pre-meditated decision to take human lives for a lousy ten bucks. The executives at GM knew for 13 years that their cars had a defective ignition switch that would, well, kill people. But they did a "cost-benefit analysis" and concluded that paying off the deceased's relatives was going to be cheaper than having to install a $10 part per car. They then covered up their findings and continued to let millions drive around with the defective part in their cars. There would be no recalls. There would only be parents and the decapitated body parts of their dead children. See the USA in your Chevrolet. In 2007 a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official recommended a formal investigation but was overruled by others in Bush's "business-friendly" Transportation Department.
Only now, under the newly-configured GM -- owned, essentially, by you and me from 2009 through last year -- has the truth come out. And my guess is that it has to do with the fact that a mother now runs General Motors. A few months ago, Marry Barra, a former resident of Flint, the daughter of GM union autoworker, was named its CEO. And it looks like she isn't one of the good ol' boys. She stepped forward, announced the truth of what GM did, ordered one massive recall after another, and now is showing up to face Congress in a few hours.
The Washington Post, in an otherwise good article, blames the whole sad affair on the "corporate culture" at GM. What a user-friendly term! To even have to read the words "culture" and "General Motors" in the same sentence is enough to make anyone gag. No, the cause of this tragedy is an economic system that places profit above everything else, including -- and especially -- human life. GM has a legal and fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to make the biggest profits that it can. And if their top people crunch the numbers and can show that they will save more money by NOT fixing or replacing the part, then that is what they are going to goddam well do. F*** you, f*** me, and f*** everybody they sent to their deaths. That pretty much sums up their "culture". They knew they wouldn't get caught, and if they did, no one would ever serve any time.
I hope someone in the Obama administration will get out the handcuffs, the SWAT teams, or the U.S. army if need be, march into GM headquarters in downtown Detroit and haul away anyone who is there who had anything to do with this. And if they already left town, hunt them down and bring them in to face justice.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/02-3
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)on the column shift to keep it from popping out of Park.
Bean counter decisions over engineers' warnings have always cost lives.
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)GeorgeGist
(25,294 posts)Kinda prophetic isn't it?
djean111
(14,255 posts)airplanes. This was back in the 1970's or so - I read it, of course, whilst flying from Bloomington to Chicago. Have never slept on an airplane since - and I used to fly to Japan a lot.
nykym
(3,063 posts)Benefit Cost Analysis.
They all do it.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)airlines were flush with cash, there was less safety oversight and air crashes of all kinds were way more commonplace...These days one high-profile negligent crash can kill an airline...They're working with a much thinner margin of error in regards to finances...
Ironically, there was a longtime credo in the auto industry that "Good quality is ALWAYS cheaper in the long run", and it has been proven once again with this sad GM story...
djean111
(14,255 posts)We started to hear rumors of equipment failures and one flight I was on, the pilots were asking us if a stain on a wall was coffee, and flipping through a manual to see if there might be an internal line leak or something. They used to ask us how much we weighed, and then figure out how many boxes of paper reports they could safely load up. So a lot of us refused to fly on the company planes, and eventually one of them flipped on a runway in Texas, killing everyone. No more planes. I refused to fly at all for many years, even turning down a job interview at another data center. A few years later, transferred to a great group that involved travel overseas, and figured hey! At least I was going to Den Haag and drink big biers, and not to Dothan, Alabama, just to look for loose computer cables.
Small comfort to know they are more careful due to finances and publicity!
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)Currently, traffic fatalities are running in the low 30 thousands per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year
No other product class kills as many Americans each year as cars and light trucks.
It is an inherently dangerous product consisting of a 1.5 to 3 ton mass of metal and plastic driven by incompetent and/or impaired Americans at speeds up to 80 mph on congested and dangerous roadways.
6 people dead in a couple million cars over 10 years is statistical noise.