Free Republic

The White House believes it can win back depressed and economically stressed voters by turning President Obama into the storyteller-in-chief again. But consider the real-life horror story of 20,000 white-collar workers at Delphi, a leading auto-parts company spun off from GM a decade ago. As Washington rushed to nationalize the US auto industry with $80 billion in taxpayer "rescue" funds and avoid contested court termination proceedings, the White House auto team schemed to preserve UAW members' costly pension funds by shafting their nonunion counterparts. The nonunion pensioners also lost all of their health and life insurance benefits. The abused workers...

I just discovered this and since the MSM hasn't picked it up yet I thought I'd break it here. Anyone who knows me here knows that I'm a electric car nut. I've been following Aptera for a while. Aptera Motors is a company in Vista, CA that's making the "google car", the Aptera 2e. It looks like an wheeled iPod and uses almost no energy; the gasoline version gets 130 mpg and the electric version goes 100 miles. But there's trouble in California. Last fall they handed control of the company over to Paul Wilbur. Paul's greatest fame was running...

General Motors Corp will likely take on some of the operations of its bankrupt supplier Delphi Corp to make sure it gets needed auto parts, and is negotiating terms with Delphi's estate, according to a source familiar with the company's plan.

We still have a chance to not fail in our historic opportunity to turn this nation back to its roots. Unfortunately, many people think the activities of April 15, 2009, have done just that, but they are wrong. Simply attending a TEA Party, even several TEA Parties, is not going to move Washington. What needs to happen, if we’re going to move Washington, is this: We must organize into Action Groups to first take back our party Precinct Meetings in an overwhelming majority of the precincts in the nation, then advance that effort to the State level. That will not...

"Everyone has a right to take part in this discussion, nobody has the right to take it over and dominate. The status quo is the one option that's not on the table, and those who seek to block any reform at all -- any reform at any costs will not prevail this time around," he added. A direct quote from the president at the recent health care summit."nobody has the right to take it over and dominate" Does that include you Mr. President??? You and your nanny state health care buearocrats?Click here to get to The Peoples Cube!What no one...

I just wanted to make everyone aware of the Delphi Technique. It is a Consensus and Facilitation technique that keeps those who are unaware of how it works from being effective political activists. For those who are just beginning as politically active conservatives, mastering the countering techniques will help us be much more effective as we move against the Marxists who have overtaken our government.

I've been reading through President Obama's much touted Recovery.gov web site and thought I would share the Frequently Asked Questions part of the site. It is in fact, the Delphi Technique in action. Through the whole of that web site, the Consensus and Facilitation of the Hegelian Principle is at work. To fight this phenomenon in our country, Freedom Lovers need to understand the forces at work, and master the language and techniques that will allow us to overcome the Barrage of facilitators and change agents who have just overtaken our country, fully, at the federal level. Please take some...

NEW YORK (AP) — A bankruptcy judge says Delphi can stop paying for health care and insurance benefits for its retired salaried workers. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain on Tuesday provisionally approved the auto supplier's request to cut off the benefits effective April 1. But he says the 15,000 affected retirees can form a committee to investigate if they have the right to negotiate with the company. The committee will present its findings at a March 11 hearing. Troy, Mich.-based Delphi Corp. has been operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since 2005. It says it needs to cut off the...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/business/17bizbriefs-DELPHITOSLAS_BRF.html

Tradition attributed the prophetic inspiration of the powerful oracle to geologic phenomena: a chasm in the earth, a vapor that rose from it, and a spring... The ancient testimony, however, is widespread, and it comes from a variety of sources: historians such as Pliny and Diodorus, philosophers such as Plato, the poets Aeschylus and Cicero, the geographer Strabo, the travel writer Pausanias, and even a priest of Apollo who served at Delphi, the famous essayist and biographer Plutarch... in about 1900, a young English classicist named Adolphe Paul Oppe['s] opinions were so strongly expressed that his theory became the new...

DETROIT - A union representing more than 2,000 of Delphi Corp.'s hourly workers said Friday it has told the auto parts maker that it plans to terminate its contracts, a first step toward a possible strike in October. The International Union of Electronic Workers-Communications Workers of America said the notification, delivered in a letter earlier this week, comes as contract talks have dragged on concerning job security, wages and benefits. "There is still much time to change our course," IUE-CWA Automotive Conference Board Chairman Willie Thorpe said in a statement. "But we cannot sit back and be unprepared. In our...

An obviously angry Ann Coulter this morning ripped into critics who deliberately distorted her comments about former senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards. After a relentless 24-hour firestorm during which much of the mainstream media used selective quotes to mangle the meaning of several of Ann’s comments about Edwards, Coulter set the record straight while talking with Joe Scarborough host of MSNBC’s "Morning Joe” program. Coulter told Scarborough: "I’ve never seen people avoid ideas so much in such an obvious way and try to alert Americans not to read anything, not to listen to something someone said — not because...

The Delphi Technique and consensus building are both founded in the same principle - the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, with synthesis becoming the new thesis. The goal is a continual evolution to "oneness of mind" (consensus means solidarity of belief) -the collective mind, the wholistic society, the wholistic earth, etc. In thesis and antithesis, opinions or views are presented on a subject to establish views and opposing views. In synthesis, opposites are brought together to form the new thesis. All participants in the process are then to accept ownership of the new thesis and support it, changing...

Costly Promises LOCKPORT, N.Y. — For two and a half years, Michael Tucker was mayor of this small city by day and an autoworker by night. Then in May, he became one of the nearly 50,000 workers at General Motors or its former Delphi parts division to take buyouts, lured by the $33,000-a-year pension his company offered. That pension, and a smaller one he expects to collect from the state after his years as mayor, makes him a little unusual in a nation where more and more workers are not covered by such plans. But now, as mayor of Lockport,...

DETROIT -- Delphi Corp. said today that 6,300 hourly employees represented by the IUE-CWA union, or 83 percent of those eligible, have agreed to early retirement or a buyout. The attrition program, financed predominantly by General Motors, continues to relieve pressure for a strike at Delphi. Earlier this summer, the UAW said nearly 13,000 of its Delphi members had taken a buyout or early retirement, with an additional 5,000 expected to transfer eventually to GM. Delphi is restructuring its U.S. operations under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, spun off by GM in 1999, has asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court...

The UAW plans to ask its 24,000 members at Delphi Corp. to authorize a strike. UAW Vice President Richard Shoemaker gave the go-ahead Wednesday when he met in Detroit with UAW local presidents and other officials on the union’s Delphi council. The locals, representing workers at about 20 Delphi plants, have until May 14 to conduct the votes, said UAW spokesman Paul Krell. The authorization would give the international union the ability to strike Delphi if it cannot reach agreement on wage and benefit concessions of 60 percent that Delphi is demanding. A union official who attended the UAW council...

DETROIT -- The United Auto Workers and other unions opposed Delphi Corp.'s attempt to cancel its labor contracts in court filings Friday, saying the auto parts supplier has failed to prove it needs to slash workers' wages as part of its Chapter 11 restructuring. "This is a case in which the debtors have opted to place litigation before bargaining and to place confrontation before consultation," said the United Steelworkers, which represents about 1,000 of Delphi's 33,000 U.S. hourly workers. Unions aren't the only parties opposed to Delphi's motion. Appaloosa Management LP, a New Jersey-based hedge fund that owns 9.3 percent...

As fears grow that General Motors will go bust, management and unions are locked in a mournful embrace. “IN THIS case, it takes three to tango.” So said Rick Wagoner, the boss of General Motors (GM), this week—his re-working of an old cliché, capturing the contortions he is having to perform as he struggles to save the ailing giant of the car industry. Given its shrinking market share, GM would be hard enough to revive were it any firm in any industry. But GM is not any old firm, and designing more sellable cars is arguably the least of its...

Auto parts maker Delphi Corp. is free to move ahead on its plan to offer thousands of hourly employees the chance to retire, a bankruptcy judge ruled Friday, marking a key milestone in the company's effort to tame staffing levels amid falling production. The ruling allows Delphi, one of the world's largest suppliers of auto parts, to pay as many as 13,000 hourly employees to retire. Based in Troy, Mich., Delphi filed for bankruptcy protection in October and is trying to shed what it says are increasingly unsustainable labor agreements that have left it overstaffed and saddled with costly benefit...

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- Delphi Corp. workers angered by the auto parts supplier's proposal Friday to close or sell many of its plants said the plan would ruin some employees' lives and hurt communities that rely on the facilities for jobs and tax revenues. ADVERTISEMENT "You're going to see the tumbleweeds," said Allen Huguely, who works at one of five Delphi plants in the Dayton area that employ 6,000. "This whole city is going to suffer." Delphi asked a federal bankruptcy court to void its labor contracts as part of a restructuring plan that includes selling or closing 21 of...