1. Home
  2. SAAB Cars Forum
  3. Well, that appears to be that. Game over

Well, that appears to be that. Game over

Saab files for bankruptcy. Now we can sit back and watch Youngman buy the manufacturing assets from the receivers for buttons, ship them all to China and start producing ersatz Saabs with their slave-labour. It will be a Swedish repeat of the Rover story. It is the way they behave, and we in the democratic 'West' keep opening our legs and asking them to rape us. We really don't deserve to survive, if we continue conspiring in our own destruction.

I've recently been doing some work on behalf of a Spanish company, not a motors or engineering business, and the same thing is happening there. A Chinese group has been messing the directors about for months, with false promises of investment. The longer they delay, the worse the finances get.

Surely there's enough cheap labour in the rest of the world - Brazil and India, for example, to say nothing of robotised factories - for us to be able to ignore China. People can surely do without new iPods and Levis for a few months while we switch over to factories somewhere else.

Rant over!

Reply to
Charlie
Loading thread data ...

Sad...

And yes, if we'd control our desire for cheap (at any price!) consumer goods things would be different. Problem is that consumers go to WalMart (or whatever the local equivalent is)and buy the cheapest things they can get without regard to the future costs of such items.

I've been saying, for some time now, to avoid Chinese made products and buy locally/domestically made ones wherever possible.

Reply to
PeterD

You can't blame consumers from going for the cheapest option available. You can blame the manufacturers for opting to have their products made in crunchingly illiberal countries. If Levis and iPods were made in Brazil, and cost 5% more, would people really object if they were the only such things available? They would still have aspirational value.

I know it's hopelessly idealistic, but we should simply isolate China. Nixon, Heath and others did the free world a great disservice by embracing China. It might otherwise have imploded, as did the USSR. Not that modern Russia is all that great an advertisement for liberalising a command economy, of course.

Reply to
Charlie

Are the Chinese really the problem? GM did not want them (the Chinese) to have SAAB or am I missing something. People do not want buy SAABs, I had the pleasure of having 3 and now I am on my fourth. Surely we can't blame the Chinese for it.

Reply to
Charles

Clearly there was a problem predating the Chinese, partly because we were driving our Saabs for hundreds of thousands of miles and refusing to buy new ones! My issue is with their negotiating tactics. They have been screwing around for months, promising a deal but not delivering. They have been running the directors ragged, and the company into the ground. They are dishonest.

Now that it is apparently bust, who will be the only game in town to buy the assets for a fractional amount? The Chinese. They played the same game with Rover, and they are trying it with the Spanish company. You may say that's the capitalist way, and you'd be right.

My contention is that the democratic countries should not be so feeble about allowing state-backed corporations in undemocratic countries, whose accounts and business practices are not subject to the same safeguards and scrutinies, to eviscerate our economies. We are being feeble, naively trusting and pathetic, and we are being rolled over by a homogeneous state which has a potential slave-labour force (and, to be melodramatic, army) amounting to about one-fifth of the planet - and effectively zero human rights. We are playing cricket/baseball, and they are playing war.

So, yes, I blame our governments but I blame the Chinese. My first boss, many years ago, said of the Chinese: "Everyone says they are an inscrutable people, but for my money they are all too bloody scrutable".

Reply to
Charlie

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.