GM Invests in Area Plant

This story has been up for over 12 hours without one comment. Seems like positive economic news adding 470 decent paying union jobs, even has a green angle. Are we just to cynical to recognize progress?

Awesome! 100 more of these stories please. Speaking of 'green', the US has over 100 years worth of natural gas and wonderfully filthy disgusting coal. We'll soon have tons more yummy nuclear power and Bloom Boxes are starting to bloom. In other words, when our industrial competitors (take your pick) run out of available cheap energy, we'll still have it in abundance and that means more manufacturing jobs making the green cars and energy efficient stuff everyone wants.

Blackrocklifer - Obvioulsy the angst caused to the typical yuppie Buffalo Rising poster by the addition of a 2nd story to the ugly 1-story credit union building is of much more signficance than the great news in this article.

Give the choice of either having 470 new good paying jobs, or having the credit union torn down and rebuilt to the street, most posters here would choose the latter.

Hourly wages for these jobs are about half of the starting pay under "old GM". That sucks but it would be interesting to see if a more competitive price of labor will lead to more investment in WNY by GM or other auto companies.

This is good news.

I think the hesitation in posting about it is it touches on so many hot button issues.

The free market/private enterprise guys...can't really say this is a victory for free enterprise, after the bailout. (Maybe this is what we get locally for a trillion dollars in new federal debt.)

Union vs. nonunion... ugh. They're paid too much, they're paid too little. Dad worked in the union, but I choose not to.

Green? If it's related to global warming, seems like the data's been tinkered with. But if you say that out loud, the majority here will label you a small minded, backward thinking tea bagger... or something worse.

I drive GM, and will til I die. The jobs are good news, but with the debt we're piling on as a nation, and the recent poor economic news makes (take your choice... double dip recession, or an unsupportable federal budget five to seven years out...or China weening itself from our bonds) it's hard to see a silver lining.

I can't remember the last time a company made an announcement (greater than 50 jobs) that didn't have some government money attached to it. Let's hope that changes some time soon.

Great news for the hardworking men and women of local 774 who have been affected by unfair import and export laws. It is a good thing to see so many offered a chance to return to work and improve the strength of our American economy. These are the men and women who built America, and they are the future of a strong America.

Bottom line is both GM and Ford have shown their commitment to WNY time and time again and its about time Buffalo showed its commitment to GM and Ford.

Great announcement GM, thanks for the faith in Buffalo and care for the environment through new more efficient engines.

In your mind, which was worse for America, the Bush tax cuts, or 9/11?

And whose 'slaughtering' individuals? We send patriotic individuals to do what's asked of them... in response to people being burned to death while sitting at their desks.

Sorry, but it's not too difficult for me to decide which side of that fight we should be on.

Just so we're clear, I'm not really concerned about how we're viewed by the rest of humanity. When they have a problem (name the catastrophe) they don't have a problem putting a hand out, and we respond (rightfully so).

One would think a person in real estate might have a better handle on the markets, interest rates, housing bubbles, credit default swaps, and the other issues that have us hip deep in this current economic morass. Then again, guess it's just easier to blame it on Bush.

Democrats took control of both houses of Congress on 01/01/2007.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006

Federal budgets passed in 2007, '08, and '09 were their doing. They could've reversed any previous tax cuts at any time in 2007, but didn't. In all of 2008, they didn't reverse the tax cuts either. In all of 2009, they also didn't. That adds up to over 1,000 days in which Democrats could have but chose not to reverse tax cuts that are alledegly so harmful to the nation. Now this year they're debating among themselves whether to let some parts of the tax cuts passed in '01-'03 expire.

At what point does the Democrat party become co-owners of those tax cuts? Says me, that already happened over 3 years ago in Jan 2007.

Hmmm... Reagan is an imbecile. Thought you were the historian? Cold war was won by Reagan. If not, we'd still be in an arms race (and the huge expenditure that entailed), or dead.

Your stance that all republicans are x, and others are y, is sophmoric. Read either (or both) Greenspans latest book, or Paulson's, and you'll see that neither parties hands are clean when it comes to Wall Street. I think the 'too big to fail' decision was dangerous, but in a complicated world, it may have proven to be the better of two evils. We'll never know, but the unintended consequence (there always is one with government intervention) is that Wall Street has learned a lesson, but not the right one. Washington will bail us out if we really screw up.

We can nitpick and debate about the relative effectiveness of Reagan, Clinton, Bush(es) and Obama, but the truth is that America has been on a downward slide for the past 60 years. This slide has picked up speed and slowed down at various times, but the overall trend continues regardless of the political affiliation of the President or Congress.

We continue to lose economic strength. We have lost substantial political clout on the world stage, both in the UN and with specific countries. We continue to rely on military force to "persuade" other countries to see things our way, all in the name of protecting our freedoms and the American way.

There are many authors and commentators out there who are predicting the downfall of the United States, not as a complete collapse, but into a secondary status in the first world. The US will give way to economically stronger and more politically stable countries, unless we realize the deficiencies in our system and begin to fix them.

America, as it stands today, is a country that is stuck in neutral. We cannot reach a consensus on any major political, economic, social, environmental, military, or policy issue. Our government policies are heavily influenced by outside lobbyists and internal self interest, this has debilitated our country for decades. Right now, a win for most Americans involves their party gaining a perceived win over the other party. For a politician, a win is being affiliated with a policy change or bill that they can use as political leverage for re-election. In essence, most politicians maintain nothing greater than a 2 year horizon, as they work towards re-election and refuse to take up anything controversial that may hurt their professional political career.

In essence, all of our Presidents have been weak and relatively impotent since the late 50s, and our country and economy has suffered as a result. We should be thankful for the turmoil in other countries that helped us to hang on as long as we have, but as countries like China become stronger, the issues with America will be exacerbated and more apparent on the world stage. Unfortunately, I fear that we will respond with more military action instead of addressing the internal flaws that have weakened our economic proposition and clout on the world stage.