You are correct, most media outlets report what they want to report. I also agree that it would seem that there are more and more large companies being run into the ground. There are some things I don't really agree on. The whole "rich get richer" take sounds more like sour grapes than anything else. I work hard and often. I don't blame anyone else for the amount of time I have to work. My situation is my own and I am responsible for it. If I want to change my situation, I am responsible for making that change. Not the gov't, the wealthy or even my neighbor are responsible for the state of my economical affairs. That is socialism, plain and simple. Maybe I don't expect anything of anyone else because I don't have a great deal of debt. When I buy things, specifically items that are luxury, I pay cash. If I cannot pay cash, I don't get it. Plain and simple. As long as the wealthy citizens of our country are not breaking any laws to gain or add to their wealth, I don't care. In other words, don't hate the player, hate the game.
Lastly, in regards to "the erosion of civil liberties", I don't understand your point. I personally have not had an experience where my civil liberties have been taken from me. Have you?
On all of the other points in the above post, they are right on. Unfortunately, special interest and lobbying have been an issue longer than most of us have been walking this earth.
Again, at least all of us agree on one thing. We all love our wheelers.
Talk to you later fellas
Matt

 

Wow, this thread catches attention. Polaris product is mostly American made. Yes, the engines are Fuji/Robbins. So how American is John Deere? They use Fuji Robbin Engines as well in some of there small tractor lines. Fuji is japan but I'm almost sure (not 100%) That Robbin Is American but has combined with Fuji. The great Harley Davidson, the "American Motorcycle" is only 62% American (as of 2003). Victory motorcycles are just over 90%. Polaris can do better as far as the "Made in USA "is concerned. But if you compare them to most companies, you'll be suprised how much more "Made in USA" is in them.

 

As a New Zealander and a former owner of a Polaris 2002 Scrambler, I'd make these comments about American design and engineering. The scrammy was Ok, but no more than that compared to others riders quads in our group.
I was surprised how some of the engineering was great and some pretty clunky and basic.
American products are designed for your home market and often have little relevance elsewhere in the world because of size or fuel consumption...however as I see it this limits your total market and constrains items like your R&D programme. whereas the Japs/Koreans/Chinese see a world market and target it more appropriately.
You guys have some very well known brand names in the vehicle market, however it will be a long hard road to reestablish their respect and reputations in the global world market.

 

Last time I looked at my 01 Scrambler, it has a Canada sticker next to the vin. So I wish you guys would stop saying made in the USA when it's made in Canada. Polaris is only based in the US.

 

that canada sticker has something to do with shipping and emissions agreements. The plant they are made in is only 10 miles away from the boarder. Just so you know

 

Interesting you brought up Rubbermaid since I had sold parts to one of the Companies (based in Germany ) that used to make those football field long monsters, and even about ten years ago when the US based manufacturing was sold the majority of the machines were being exported to south america anyhow.

So not only did an american company lose that portion of their business to the German based one originally, but then even they lost it to another, and the end user of the equipment lost their business to another concern (in your mentioned case China) overseas etc etc etc. Its really a viscious cycle or downward spiral, and its interesting and concerning how all of the changes effect each other, and all of us in a negative manner.

 

That is one area that I have to admit having some issues with as far as the Republican party is concerned.

I think that the logical thinking and law making on lands access is much needed and their approach to it is mostly practical as they as a group seem to actually put some thought into the decisions made, and do not just pander to a special interest group like the democrats.

What I am not especially fond of is how this party deals with serious environmental concerns with industrial polluters. It seems that somehow the only polluting emissions that they are concerned with at all is that which comes from our vehicles (I guess like so many others do also) and just ignore the vastly larger corporate offenders of the envirionment in most every industry (especially energy production).

While everyone looks at emissions from our cars, boats, and atv's there are single industries that out produce all of them that are overlooked. From coal and fuel burning electric genration to continued ocean dumping there is more damage done that either goes under regulated or gets new laws that extend their requirments to meet current mandates.

Still I guess its always a compromise and we should be happy we are seeing more places to ride and continued access to our lands, but it would be nice to know that corporate america is doing their part as well.

 

You bring up very good points!

It is also good to see an outside opinion on the quality level too.

I dont like to make excuses but I do see a cause behind some of the "clunky-ness" issue and how it relates to a global market. Being that the US based manufacturing facilities have a considerably higher cost for most everything there has to be areas that see cost cutting in order to compete with the oversea companies that do not share the same levels of expense. I hate to think that companies are forced to use "clunky" products or designs in their end product in order to compete, but I would think that its possible since profitability is very important.

I know the US auto mfg's are doing a much better job than they had in the past, and newer GM and Ford products I have owned or checked out over recently have greatly improved in both the fit and finish and powertrain areas (as well as reliability), but what I have also noticed is that the overall feel and look has become more "japanese" and many of the products used to make many parts of the vehicle are just not as nice or "real" as they used to be. Basically it seems as the quality and overall product seems to get better the overall feel is more in line with the imports, and this I believe is due to the use of more and more imported parts and a need to cut manufacturing costs of every type to be able to compete with the global market even domestically.

Then there are other products that seem to know no boundries in any economy and are exported all the time to people who are very happy to pay a premium for these US made and designed products. I know these are so very limited as they have been in the past, but they do still exist and most are either hi tech, biotech or other specialized products. Thing is that even when there was a larger gap in currency values the US had exported a larger amount of product, and that combined with considerably lower imports into the US shows us that some things have completely changed, and its not just the work ethic, quality, or end product that has caused such a turn around.

Sorry I dont have the whole answer to that one, but I figure such a global change would be from global pressures and very much influenced by politics.

So I guess what I am getting at is before too many put their total effort into producing products for certain oversea markets that many dont have a level valuation and business expense we really need to get our sheet together locally and be able to compete in our own market.

 

Heres a good reason to buy american, it was in todays paper.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...ck=1&cset=true





TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT
Will work for less
'It used to be a good job, now it's just a job'

By Stephen Franklin
Tribune staff reporter
Published January 22, 2006

DECATUR, Ill. -- Whenever Robert Johnson puts in 12-hour shifts, which is often because he needs the money, he knows he should grab a bite in the factory lunchroom because he's a diabetic.

But he rarely does because a slice of pizza at the Caterpillar plant costs nearly $3, and that's beyond his means.

Glued to a bare-bones budget, he saved for weeks to buy a five-pack of $7 T-shirts. Sunday visits with his kids, 53 miles away in Springfield, are out of the question if he doesn't have gas money.

He didn't always live this way.

Six years ago Johnson was earning more than twice as much money--$29 an hour--at a nuclear power plant in nearby Clinton. Then he got laid off and tumbled into an underworld of low wages and slimmed-down benefits.

This underworld is now the reality, or a disheartening look into the near future, for thousands of workers as the industrial Midwest undergoes the most wrenching economic transformation since the bad old Rust Belt days of the 1970s.

With the forces of globalization leading companies to slash costs, move out of the country or go under, workers who don't bring a clear competitive advantage to work every day are vulnerable to having their pay cut.

At this moment the risk is clearest in the auto parts industry, where Delphi Corp. has filed for bankruptcy court protection, and its chairman, Robert "Steve" Miller, has threatened to cut wages from $27 an hour to as low as $9.50.

But look at any number of industries where American factory hands are competing against the Chinese or the Cambodians, whether in textiles or furniture or appliances, and the fallout is the same: The standard of living for the Americans slips.

"For the United States, it's the end of labor as we once knew it," Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, wrote recently.

A version of this new reality is taking place in Decatur, where Caterpillar Inc. introduced hundreds of new hires last year. Job creation was the good news. The bad news: Starting wages were cut to $10 an hour from $20.

The result is that Caterpillar and Decatur have become a laboratory of sorts for witnessing the impact of wage cuts. Working and living side by side are Caterpillar employees doing the same kind of work for different wages. The lucky ones are paid according to the old scale.

The unlucky ones are struggling, like Johnson, who got his $12.24-an-hour Caterpillar job in January 2005. It was days before he was due to start work for $7 an hour at a Target store in Decatur.

The new job has hardly lifted him up financially.

"I live on just the bare necessities," he said one day recently in his one-bedroom apartment, a small, darkly lit place with nearly empty walls. He pays $385 monthly rent for the cheapest place in town that he thought he could live in.

Growing up in Decatur, he expected factory work to pay off for him as it did for his father, a Caterpillar engineer, and for neighbors who earned very decent wages as blue-collar workers at the many factories scattered around town.

Indeed, while Decatur lost nearly half of its factory jobs in the last 25 years, there are survivors who are reminders of how the old system used to work.

Kent Smith started at Caterpillar's Decatur plant 31 years ago when he was 22 years old. For years Smith didn't like the job. It was boring and dirty. But he stayed because of the pay, the pension and benefits that were hard to find elsewhere.

Until last year, Caterpillar picked up nearly all of his health-care costs, a financial boost that's almost extinct among companies today. Now Smith has to pay for his premiums, with out-of-pocket costs growing yearly.

But he earns just over $25 an hour as an electrician. With his Caterpillar job and his wife's salary as a manager for the local telephone company, he has done well financially.

Smith lives in a two-story wood-frame house set amid 10 acres of hickory, oak and ash trees just outside Shelbyville, south of Decatur. He has a tree-shaded 13-foot-deep pond stocked with fish. He also has a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a snowmobile.

Smith doesn't talk about his lifestyle with new hires at work because "I try not to rub their noses in it." He is a reserved person, but he has no hesitation in sharing his thoughts on what's happened at factories like his.

"Corporations want the American worker to tread water or sink so other workers around the world can catch up with us," he said. So, too, it strikes him that a job at Caterpillar "used to be a good job, but now it's just a job."

Caterpillar won't say how many new workers it has hired at the new lower wages, but union officials say it is 1,400.

Dave Stanley, president of UAW Local 751 in Decatur, remembers Caterpillar's warning to union officials during the last round of negotiations, and the feeling that the union's back was against the wall.

"They said that if the contract were not approved, the plants would die on the vine," he recalled. The union fought Caterpillar for 6 1/2 years in the 1990s over the wage tiers and other concessions that it ultimately accepted.

Stanley said Caterpillar has handed out hefty raises since last year in order to hold on to higher-skilled workers, but it has not done the same for those with lower skills, who are the bulk of the workers in Decatur.

He wonders how the new workers will support their families on the lowered wages.

Caterpillar spokeswoman Linda Fairbanks said the company was simply fitting the mold when it reduced pay.

"Our wage and benefit package is competitive in the local market," she said, adding that the company relied on a vast array of data.

`It's the best I can find'

Don Dragovan was thrilled when Caterpillar hired him more than a year ago. He thought he had signed up for the blue-collar gravy train in his early 50s. Neighbors congratulated him.

At the time, Dragovan was working three jobs: one as a part-time psychology professor, one as a painter and another doing whatever side job he could find. It was hardly ideal for someone who had suffered a heart attack a few years before.

His dream didn't totally come true at Caterpillar. He was put on the lower pay tier and today earns about $15 an hour as a painter. He is disappointed. But only slightly.

"The reality is this: It's the best that I can find. Now I have a full-time job, not three, and I have health care. I didn't have that [health care] before," he said.

Dragovan figures the company's health-care plan has covered more than $30,000 in medical bills for his family in the last year.

The problem is, he still can't get by. Not with two kids in college and another headed that way next year.

That means he recently paid $357 for new brakes for a car with more than 150,000 miles, when he had been thinking about buying a new one. It means buying day-old items at supermarkets and bargains like the $1.15 loaf of bread he picked up the day before. It means soon dropping his telephone line and depending on his cell phone. It means looking for a second job --again.

"It's a constant question of `do we really need this,'" he said.

To save money, he relies on a small space heater. It is usually enough to heat the small, three-bedroom house he bought for $37,000 in 1993.

At work, he will hear other new hires boasting that they will do only 60 percent of the job because that's what they are getting paid. He doesn't agree with that kind of thinking.

But there are times when he sees veteran workers not putting out as much as he does, and it clicks that they are making $17,000 more a year for the same work. Such times he wants to remind them how good they have it.

Second-class citizen

Johnson, a quiet, soft-spoken man in his late 40s, has similar thoughts on the job.

Every so often he would like to tell the new hires, who last worked at a fast-food place and who are starry-eyed over the 12-bucks-an-hour pay scale, that their jobs are not stepping stones unless they get more education.

But he also would like to explain to his young, recently hired bosses--college graduates who regularly tell him that he won't go anywhere without a degree--that they make him feel like a second-class citizen when they say such things.

Johnson wishes they would realize that he has learned things from working in a factory that years of college studies wouldn't give him.

He never wanted to work in an office, which is why he didn't mind going to work years ago at the Illinois Power Co. nuclear plant in Clinton. Likewise, when he was laid off in 1999, he didn't consider retraining because he wasn't sure what he would do. He thought he would keep doing factory work.

He knew that factory work had changed. But he didn't realize how much wages had declined.

"Ten years ago, many factory workers were making very decent wages. But I don't think we'll see that again," said Robyn McCoy, head of the federally funded Workforce Investment Solutions office in Decatur. It handles job training for laid-off workers in the area.

Such a fact of life matters greatly in Midwest communities like Decatur, which were nurtured by well-paying factory jobs for people who showed up for work with little more than two strong arms and a willingness to put in a hard day.

A learning experience

As Johnson climbed down the pay scale, he shed his middle-class goodies: a large, comfortable house in Lincoln, a new car and a pickup and a racetrack car he dabbled with. He is still paying for the two cars that were seized by creditors.

He pays $285 every other week in support for his three children. That leaves him $516 to spend every two weeks. His monthly rent is $385. He pays $215 monthly for his 2001 Chevy Lumina. He has the minimum car insurance, $30 a month. Food costs $150 a month.

The last movie he saw was shown at a church before Christmas. His parents bought him the ticket.

Without the overtime he works--as much as he can get--he would not be able to pay for his doctor visits or medicine.

Still, he was surprised recently, he said, when he went to pick up prescriptions that cost $104. He had to return home for more cash and later had to pinch money from other expenses.

But one morning recently, as he got ready for work, he was feeling upbeat about his future and stoic about his losses. He talked about moving on, making the best of things, learning to start over.

"It's been a learning experience. It shows me I can do things I once didn't want to do. ... You just have to keep a positive attitude. But a lot of people are giving up," he said. "The way things are, you know you have to take it as you get it."

"Cat," the young cat he picked up recently, bounced around the apartment, keeping him busy. "Cat" costs money, but she keeps him company, he said.

In time, Johnson said, his pay will go up, or maybe he will get a better-paying job.

"We're in a cycle right now where corporations have the advantage, and unions don't," he said. "But soon the cycle will change."

 

Thanks Hondabuster for posting that, and an even bigger thanks to Stephen Franklin for writting it.

Is this the effects that I have been trying to explain all along?

Would Mr Johnson be competely homeless if he lived in an area with higher costs of living (I have not seen an apartment in the NY city metro area for under $800 in years and you would not be wanting to live in it, and the $37,000 house price in the piece would barely cover a down payment even before the recent boom).

I had a chance to listen to some public radio a couple days ago (someone elses car lol) and would you believe they were broadcasting from China, and the major topic was doing business in china and how the so called global economy has boosted china's economy beyond anyones imagaination (sort of the back side or mirror image of our discussion from a view of chinese perspective etc).

I have to tell you no matter how smart or not anyone may be its really hard to ignore the fact that while millions of hard working americans are seriously hurting there are millions of foreign workers in china seeing the highest wages and increases in living standards they ever have.

Where does it all end? Will we see a downturn that makes the great depression seem like a simple layoff? Will Americans seek refuge in social security or welfare where cost of living increases exist as opposed to working long shifts at continually reduced wages and benefits? Will middle class America take to the streets (while there still is a middle class) and riot burning down their neighborhoods like previous riots in lower income neighborhoods? Or ultimately will we continue along like a herd being lead to slaughter suffering continued decline in our quality of life working longer and longer hours while our purchasing power continues to dwindle as we help cause the increase in profits and costs at overseas plants till the point that we become so depressed as a nation that OUR workers are able to perform at a lower cost than those in China?

I dont have the answer but somehow the last one seems to be the way were headed.

I guess we all could give up our jobs of dwindling pay and bene's for a celebrity appearance on COPS [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-sad.gif[/img]