Comments on Ford? Profitable!

I'm from Detroit, too. You should check out this photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetjuniper/

The blog is good too. I recommend starting with this entry:

http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2008/04/knowledge-of-what-happened-and-what.html

all my family comes from detroit (i was born in kzoo). both my dad and uncle worked at the rouge plant, too. my grand father was an engineer at pontiac. having a lot of family in the detroit area, i could relate to your post on a lot of levels. i really enjoyed reading it!

Keep that in mind the next time you wish to condescend to a (likely former) Midwestern lineworker—assuming they’re just too dim witted and parochial to understand the glories of international trade.

This is what I look at when I'm homesick for The Shitty City
http://www.detroityes.com/industry/index.html

i remember when they blew those up. when i was growing up i spent a few weeks every summer with my uncle, and when you're on lake st. clair those stacks were always on the horizon. when they came down it was kind of creepy to not see them anymore.

this always feels like a great metaphor for detroit.

Hallelujah, praise the maker of the Model T!

With abundant iron ore, fresh water, water- and land-based transportation networks and an incredibly skilled workforce for starters, one of the world’s centers of manufacturing should be Detroit

I don't know - it is kind of nice that people are able to occasionally eat fish from the Great Lakes for the first time in decades. Clean fresh water is not going to be a cheap commodity in the future.

Agreed that the anomalous social equality of the postwar industrial US was a great thing, though. If still anomalous.

I wish everyone a good paycheck and social equality, but you have to remember that the beautiful forward thrust of those years is what landed us in much of the peril we are in now: cars, cars, cars.

Even Ford himself, at the end of his life, had doubts about what he had done. And he was a fucker, too. When my grandad's local went on strike at the Kansas City plant in 1936 (Not so much over pay as working conditions - the car bodies were hand-sanded, with SAND, in a pit with a foot of water in the bottom, open to the elements. In winter. In KANSAS CITY.) he hired goons from Chicago to come and do drive-bys on (and eventually blow up) the union office. He gave a brand new car to every member of the KCPD, and there were gun battles in the streets. Then my grandparents moved to LA in '38 and by '51 Grandpa was working for Lockheed, they had a house in the Valley and were Republicans.

Maybe not in Detroit, but in the west the unions built a middle class, and that middle class in turn forgot them. Starting to remember now, though.

whoa whoa whooooooaaa...

don't you think there might be something bigger than Ford that is responsible for their increased revenue? dollar devaluation, maybe?

The reason they're doing well is they're expanding their market overseas. Yes, their sales in the US continue to suck, but somehow, they're getting dopes in the rest of the world to buy their junk.

What's killed the US auto industry is bad design and bad management. Yes, Ford is getting a little exchange-rate bounce right now, but they're still getting lapped by smarter companies (who still use American workers).

People are and have been eating fish from the Great Lakes for thousands of years, tsm. Besides Lake Eerie. I pity and mourn the person who eats fish from Lake Eerie.

#7, you make a good point and bring up one of my favorite topics in US history. Awesome.

there are only two types of cars: ford and can;t afford!

there are only two types of cars: ford and can't afford!

In retrospect, I should have bought Ford bonds when my broker phoned me during the fire sale.

Bygones.

In positive news, they have two new cars coming out - one is a plug-in hybrid, the other electric - that are priced fairly well ...

My families all Detroit and Toledo, so I come from a line of them as well. My uncle still occasionally comes out of retirement to consult for them. Probably the only US manu making a decent car, IMO.

My grandmother and her family moved to Detroit from rural Kentucky to find work during the depression. She married my grandfather, a gardener on the Ford's Grosse Pointe estate, in 1932 and my mother was born a year later. When the war broke out Grandpa moved to the assembly line and kept that job until his retirement. As the city began its deterioration my grandparents joined the flight from downtown. After the 1967 riots they moved to the edge of the city off Eight Mile Road near the Eastland mall.

My grandparents were not rich but Grandpa took pride in the fact that he could support his family during very difficult times. He could own a home and retire reasonably well on a blue collar salary. I don't know if that's possible today in Detroit or anywhere else. The city is a symbol of what the country could be like if the war on the middle class continues. My mother, now living elsewhere, never wants to see Detroit again. The neighborhood where she grew up is now, according to my uncle, a wilderness of rat infested boarded up crack houses. She wants to remember it the way it was.

Thank you all for sharing your family stories as well. It's consistently surprising to me how many family histories involve manufacturing in the midwest at some point as a key.

For what it's worth, when I went to the North American International Auto Show this January, I thought GM has the most impressive products and technology to show--vastly better than Ford and more interesting than Toyota or Honda. Their heavy-duty hybrid technology, now showing up in the Yukon, is far more impressive to me than Toyota's similar technology--and more likely to have a significant impact on overall fuel consumption.

If I were to invest in an auto company, it would be GM right now. That or Tata motors...

Love the Brave New World Reference, Napoleon!

Fords still suck... a lot. It's like they went to the designers and engineers and said, "Okay, I want you to design a car that looks like it's 5 years old and make it run like shit."