The point is that these people and their former employer entered into a contractual agreement -- apparently by mutual consent, not coercion -- and one party unilaterally broke that agreement without seeking or getting the consent of the other.

And despite blatantly welshing on a legally binding contract, it's very unlikely that GM will suffer any consequences at all, even though it's absolutely screwed these people to the wall. That $300 a month isn't going to go very far when these people try to buy medical insurance on the open market as individuals, rather than as members of some made-for-insurance group.

Plus, at retirement age, most of them will have preexisting conditions that exclude them from any standard medical insurance policy. That means they'll have to try and get into one of those private insurer/state-subsidized partnerships that insure high risk clients for obscene monthly premiums, deductibles and copays. Or they can use the ER as their primary care facility -- just like most of those 50 million and climbing uninsured do in this here "greatest country in the world."

Further, the slack the law grants these "fictitious persons" is only comprehensible if you envision a gigantic river of money -- hundreds of millions of dollars of it to be given away by lobbyists and other elements of the corporate bribocracy -- flowing non-stop into the overloaded briefcases of tens of thousands of local, state and national politicians.

In return, these corrupt bastards show their gratitude by giving their corporate employers every damn thing they want -- tax breaks, privatization schemes, de facto monopolies, completely absence of regulatory oversight, freedom to violate any environmental laws that will allow them to chisel another penny's profit by ruining an entire ecosystem. You name it, corporate America gets to violate it... with complete impunity.

Hell, they can even run a massive illegal surveillance and data capturing ring at the behest of spymaster Cheney and get Congress to pass a special law immunizing them for their crimes. That's some representative government they've got. Unfortunately, to represent the corporate interests that enrich them, Congress must also mis-represent the rest of us peasants.

Corporations are pathological by nature, as is any zero-sum entity that encourages stealing, cheating, lying and then denying any responsibility for the damage they do as long as their needs are being met.

So it's not about buying a Chevy or a Honda. It's not about whether US manufacturers are shitty marketers. It's not about whether their products are sexy.

It's about honoring a commitment, putting a corrupt system in place that allows them to just flip off anybody they want any time they want, getting legal cover at all levels of government, and then doing the same damn thing time and again because they're always going to fuck people over if it increases profits and as long as they can get away with it.

That's how corporations are wired, that's what they're in business for and they stopped caring a long time ago about any human consequences -- if they ever cared at all. Kind of like the Bushies in that regard.


wp