Ralph Nader says the Treasury should halt GM IPO

"They also suggested the Obama administration should abandon its policy of not interfering with the running of GM, and should manage its stake to advance its objective. "

This is the main part I agree with: since the government is a stock holder. It doesn't seem that GM is doing that much to stay commercially viable. Ford is leaps and bounds better then GM when it comes to surviving. It seems like they're really gambling with the Volt: which is their first true hybrid and is so much more expensive then the Prius. They should have introduced some true hybrids at cheaper prices (the Malibu hybrid isn't a true hybrid from what I've read).

 

what does nadar know? he kileed the corvair, when of the best cars ever built.

 

Ah-ha! I think Bisco and Jocko are one in the same!

 

When the government first bailed out GM, Michael Moore published an open letter in which he urged the government to use its controlling interest in the automaker to launch large-scale production of sustainable-energy infrastructure components: wind turbines, passenger rail, etc.

Unfortunately, our government (both parties, adamantly) clings to the notion that anything profitable must be done by corporations for private profit, and that the public should have no say in business. So the criminals at GM who have been screwing the public for a century were given free rein to continue screwing the public. The government didn't even use its controlling interest to limit the obscene salaries of the criminals who ran the company into bankruptcy in the first place.

Even if the company really was "too big to fail," we didn't have to allow the SAME criminals to stay in place where they could continue screwing us over.

Note that the bankruptcy canceled workers' contracts, but management's contracts were given as an excuse for allowing the bailed-out government-owned company to continue paying management obscene amounts!!!

 

i'm not telling. just cause we both end in o and cannot spel?

 

He is also about 1/3 responsible for the Iraq war. Another 1/3 goes to Al-Quida, and the final 1/3 to Dick Cheney (Pres. Bush).

If he did not run for President against Gore and Bush, history would have been dramatically different. He just did not have the forsight to see what his actions might cause.

 

this third party candidate stuff is a problem. i often vote for them but wonder who they are taking votes away from. i'm sure the candidates wonder the same thing, although ralph could probably care less.

 

Ralph Nader did not "take votes away from" Al Gore. Gore ran such a pathetic, lackluster, unimaginative, wishy-washy campaign, offering nothing new, nothing different, just more of the same garbage, that voters who would otherwise have stayed away from the polls, or voted for whatever "protest" candidate was available, saw him (Nader) as the most prominent protest candidate and voted for him.

I voted for Nader in 2000 because he was endorsed by the Green Party. If he'd not been on the ballot, I'd have voted for whoever the Green Party candidate was. And if the Greens had not fielded a candidate, I'd have voted for some other protest candidate. And if there had been NOBODY but Bush and Gore on the ballot, I'd have written in Daffy Duck or Ficus or Gus Hall even though he was no longer alive.

Do I regret not voting for Gore? Nope, because my vote made no difference to the outcome. My state went for Bush and since the electoral college is winner-take-all for each state, my vote didn't count.

What lost the election for Gore was his own lackluster campaign and Jeb Bush illegally turning 5,000 black voters away from the polls in Florida, where the state's bureaucrat in charge of running the election was also Bush's state campaign chair.

The only thing Ralph Nader bears "responsibility" for is making American cars safer.

 

The story of the VOLT when told is going to sound a lot like the prototype of the Tucker. I think GM intended to build an EV with a motor to charge the battery. At some point, GM figured out that the engine powerful enough to charge the battery fast enough for highway driving would weigh too much to be practical. But PR requires the delivery of a prototype and car too soon.

That being said, the Tucker would have been a great car and America lost out big time. And no, I doubt we need a Tucker forum. Sadly.

 

I don't put much stock into anythning Nader has to say. He is a very arrogant man who is only interested in his own career trajectory.

 

I would also be in denial if I had voted for Nader.

 

I wasn't voting for Nader. I was voting against Vice President Joe Lieberman.

If you want to explain to your kids why you think Joe Lieberman would be the best guy in the world to be A Heartbeat Away, that's your problem.

 

perhaps this thread should be sown up as well?

 

So by avoiding voting for Lieberman, you helped put Cheney a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Thanks a lot.

'explain that one to your kids.

I can appreciate your aversion to voting for the lesser of the evils, but next time please consider the greater good, hold you nose and vote for the least of the evils that has a real chance of winning.:rockon:

 

Yeah. Nader politically is a jerk. He's also a real socialist. Anti-corporation.
It's ironic that Obama has been labeled a socialist in the barrage of misinformation by the Right funded by those Libertarian Koch Brothers-oil billionaires.

The only real socialists in this country are those represented by Nader on the far left. Calling a Democrat a socialist is a joke. The Democrats currently occupy the center of the political spectrum, but they are so inept politically (including Obama), they haven't told anybody. It's a secret they may have saved the country from a depression.

In the election just held, the voter turnout was 75 million, compared to 130 million that turned out to elect Obama 2 years before. This time, the turnout was whiter, older and more Republican. Typical of mid-term elections. But there were a lot of people disappointed in Obama's passiveness and lack of leadership that stayed home.

 

Hi Robby,

Your close, but not quite right. The highway power is actually quite low. On level terrain, at 65 mph, only about 15 to 20 hp.

The issue I think they could not let go of was highway climb duration. Climbing a mountain highway, is a full power endeveour. And in CS mode, with no battery overheard left, the engine needs to be big.

They have a "mountain" mode. What this probably does, is keep the engine at full power on the more level portions of the road to get some battery head room.

What happens when the battery is at low SOC limit on half-way up a mountain. We know what happens in a Prius, the battery gets charged, and the car is essentially in limp mode. This is with the larger engine too, its still a limp mode. With an efficiency sized engine in the Volt (two cylinder, 1 liter Otto engine) this would be really really slow. Like 26 foot gas truck slow (25 mph) in the rockies.

I wonder if a small turbo diesl would solve this issue, as they have better performance in high-torque, high altitude performance.

 

another thread with a lot of politics in the pancake forum.....how strange.

 

Um, no. A basic education on how our President is selected is in order.

Our system is called The Electoral College. At the time, I lived in the state of California (that's that really big one all the way on the left hand side of the map). California was guaranteed to go to Gore. So rather than say "Hey! I get a woody thinking about Joe Lieberman!", I decided to do the right thing instead and vote Neither of the Above.

If I lived in any state that was guaranteed to go to either Gore or Bush I would have done the same thing under the same circumstances even knowing what I know now.

Had I lived in what's called a "swing state", ie, it wasn't clear which way it would go, then I PROBABLY would have held my nose and voted for Gore. Maybe.

You see, here's how it works. Even if only 50.01% of the people in a given state vote for Candidate A, that candidate gets every single one of the delegates. This is how Bush wound up in the White House even though Gore got more votes.

In 2000, with an official slogan of "Hey, I'm Just As Conservative As He Is!", voting for Nader was voting for Hope and Change (something I've always done). Voting for Gore was as vote for Business As Usual. Look back on the debates and speeches. The Al Gore of 2000 was NOT the Al Gore of 2010. I would vote for the Al Gore of 2010 in a second. Nader only said there was no difference between the two because that's the message Gore was intentionally trying to sell, too.

 

I probably consider mountains and climbing a lot more than you do. I do understand- when I lived in Dallas when I bought my 81 Pontiac with the V6. Big oopsie since I moved here two years later!