'People' Archive
The answer appears to be “no.” The marriage in question is the 25-year partnership between General Motors and Toyota Motor in a joint venture, New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. — widely known as NUMMI.
GM this week gave out a brief statement that it could not agree on future product plans with Toyota. The NUMMI plant makes the Pontiac Vibe sport wagon for GM, and production of the Vibe is set to end later this summer — well ahead of the scheduled phase-out of the Pontiac brand.
GM said its 50% interest in NUMMI would stay with “Old GM” — the bankrupt carcass of bad assets and debt that will be left behind when the company emerges from Chapter 11, which could be next week, if the Obama administration’s auto task force can muscle the company’s case through bankruptcy court. “New GM” may be out of bankruptcy reorganization in 40 or fewer days, which would top Chrysler Group’s record of 42 days.
At the NUMMI plant, which is hailed as a highly efficient American implementation of the vaunted Toyota Production System, the UAW-represented workforce makes Tacoma pickups and Corolla sedans for Toyota to sell in North America. What happens to the NUMMI plant now is a big question for Toyota and its new president, Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the automotive manufacturer’s founder.
As the global downturn in the automotive industry took hold last year, Toyota called a halt on completing its new plant in Mississippi, which was going to build the Prius hybrid. Rumors abounded that Toyota would convert NUMMI to Prius production in light of high demand for the third-generation Prius, one of the few car models in the world that’s garnering pronounced popularity. Toyota officially quashed those rumors, however.
Akio Toyoda has a thorny problem in pondering the fate of NUMMI. The factory has long outlived its purpose and value as an experiment in cooperative production. It’s not the traditional practice of the giant Japanese automotive manufacturer to shutter a factory, lock the doors, and throw away the key, as Chrysler and GM did with so many North American plants. (The sprawling NUMMI factory was a GM plant until it was closed in 1982.) Toyota doesn’t do big layoffs. NUMMI is the last car plant in California, it has a unionized workforce of some 4,700 employees, and it’s a highly visible employer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Pulling the plug on NUMMI would be a public-image nightmare for Toyota. Not that it would slow down sales of Toyota vehicles in the US any more than the recession already has, but it would be an international liability to the corporation’s image.
BTW, the NUMMI plant is a few miles north on the Nimitz Freeway from the Great Mall of the Bay Area — a facility that was a Ford Motor plant from 1955 to 1983 and which was redeveloped as a giant shopping mall in 1994. Maybe that could be the future of the NUMMI factory, as well, although the mall business isn’t what it used to be, either.
Less than a week after Michael Jackson’s death, and the sharks already are circling.
This morning it was revealed that a 2002 will drafted by Michael Jackson stipulates that his mother, three children, and charities would split the benefits of his estate, estimated at more than $200 million. That will could see a judge as soon as this week.
A lawyer for his parents, Joe and Katherine Jackson, however, disputes that any will ever existed (perhaps, cynically, because Joe was left out of that 2002 will). And, to add spice to the brewing drama, in just the past few days at least one other will has evidently surfaced, which could throw Jackson’s already entangled assets into further disarray.
The bermuda triangle of Jackson’s finances will only make the process that much longer and laborious. In 2007 the singer’s assets, including Neverland Ranch and his 50-percent stake in the Sony/ATV Music Publishing catalog, tallied $567 million. His debts reached $331 million, leaving Jackson with a net worth of $236 million.
Here’s the biggest shocker, though: According to financial documents prepared by accountants Thompson, Cobb, Bazilio & Associates and obtained by the Associated Press, Jackson had little more than $668,000 in cash in 2007.
(Another estimate puts Jackson’s debt at around $500 million, which would certainly put a crimp on his net worth.)
It was no secret that Jackson’s planned “This is It” performances at London’s O2 Arena were, in one way, a debt-relief vehicle. Promoter AEG Live had already sold $85 million in tickets for the 50-date show by June 25, and it was expected to be the highest-grossing concert event ever.
AEG Live said it would return money and fees to ticket buyers, or, alternatively, send a ticket (designed by the Gloved One himself) as a souvenir. “This is It” indeed. Unclaimed cash would go to cover production costs (estimated at up to $30 million) with the rest returning to Jackson’s estate. And depending on Jackson’s cause of death, AEG could join other creditors and family members already lined up to grab a piece of the pie.
However the Jackson empire is carved up, though, don’t expect any swift decisions. Alongside his legacy, his finances will be news for a very long time to come.
Passions were running high in Congress last week as the Obama Administration’s “cap-and-trade” Energy Bill squeaked through the House of Representatives on a vote of 219 – 212. A visibly irate House Minority Leader, John Boehner, spent nearly an hour castigating the House leadership for both what was in the Bill, and for the limited amount of time that Congressmen were allowed to read it.
At the heart of the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill is the push for the US to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and by 83% by 2050.
For the White House and Congressional Democrats the thrust of the Bill is for the US to lead global energy policy in a new direction by reducing carbon emissions, the main cause of the man-made contributions to global warming. In return, the Bill’s advocates argue, millions of green jobs will be created as the country inventively shifts to greater reliance on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar and develops more fuel-efficient automobiles.
The cap-and-trade mechanism allows for companies to honor government limits on emissions, by either meeting the goals by reducing output, or by buying emission credits from companies that produce less. The mechanism is designed to provide a market incentive to reduce pollution.
However, the Bill means one thing for certain — less use of fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal. And for Democrats representing coal-, gas-, and oil-producing states — as well as for global warming skeptics and “drill here, drill now” advocates on the Republican side of the aisle — the size, scope, and direction of the Bill was too much to take.
The Bill is “a pile of s**t,” Boehner told The Hill magazine, presumably not advocating the use of biomass (in the Bill) with his comment.
While the fate of this Energy Bill in the Senate is highly questionable, a little cool reflection is required.
The push for utilities to use renewables is not a brand new idea. A quiet revolution of renewable energy initiatives has been sweeping through the power sector of the US economy over the past five years. The country’s regulated utilities and the companies that own them have been steadily pushing energy conservation programs with their customers and turning over a small but increasing percentage of their energy plants to renewable energy sources — wind, solar, and biomass. All this in order to meet environmental regulations from previous administrations.
According to Carol Browner, the president’s Assistant for Energy and Climate Change, in 2009 renewable energy already accounts for 3% electricity production in the US, and is likely to double by 2012 or 2013 with or without this Bill. Utilities are already heavily engaged in the process. Pick up any Annual Report for any utility/power company — FLP Group, NRG Energy, Duke Energy, PacifiCorp, NV Energy, etc, — and you will find many paragraphs on renewable energy, and on conservation initiatives.
And the cap-and-trade mechanism is not a new concept. It has already worked well in the US, according to Paul Krugman. In the 1970s and 1908s, acid rain caused by the emission of sulfur and nitrogen compounds into the atmosphere, was a big problem. In 1990 the EPA introduced a cap-and-trade program to address it, and by the end of the decade utilities met compliance, greatly reducing SO2 emissions.
Big Oil, and Big Coal, and Chinese and Indian coal plant expansion notwithstanding — the future lies with clean energy, if the US has the will to make it happen.
British Airways boss Willie Walsh actually asked the airline’s 40,000 employees if they would do one of the following to help keep the carrier from crashing financially: work without pay for up to a month, take unpaid leave, or drop back to part-time work.
Say what? I think I would be taking unpaid leave. Not getting paid to be at work? Not going to be there! Any of those choices are horrible. Shockingly, about 800 BA workers have agreed to work during July for no pay and several thousand have said they will take pay cuts or unpaid leave. Walsh and CFO Keith Williams also will skip their paychecks in July and even BA’s board members are getting in on the act (just don’t expect them to give up free flights).
Clearly desperate times are calling for such a move. British Airways reported a whopping £401 million ($664 million) loss for the fiscal year ending March 31. Walsh warned employees that the airline’s future would be at risk if they didn’t help out — no pressure.
British Airways hopes these measures will trim a cool £10 million ($16 million) off costs. They had better hope so because there are more than a few rivals out there — not the least of which is Virgin Atlantic’s outspoken Chairman Sir Richard Branson — who might love nothing more than to see BA go down.
The anecdotal consensus that blogs and social networking sites can give traditional news outlets serious competition was undeniably proven yesterday during coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. TMZ, the fairly trashy celebrity gossip site, was the first outlet to report that Jackson had died — many hours before old school media like the LA Times, CBS, and CNN had confirmed the King of Pop was gone. Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites were filled with news of his death throughout the early afternoon, forcing so many people onto the Internet that it slowed to a crawl.
I think my own steps toward learning of Jackson’s death displays the incredible speed with which our wired world moves.
- I saw a crawl on CNBC late in the afternoon that Jackson had been rushed to the hospital. People go to the hospital all the time and I’m not a Jackson fan or anything, so I didn’t think much of it.
- Right before I left work, I checked my Facebook page and saw many status updates from contacts along the lines of, “Is it true? Can he really be gone.” I thought, “Uh oh. Must be bad.”
- I headed over to CNN.com to see what was up, but all they had was the “Jackson rushed to the hospital after cardiac arrest” headline. No word on if he had died. I checked around to the other main news sites and they all had the same version of “Stay Tuned.”
- I pointed my browser at TMZ and they claimed, “Michael Jackson Dies.” I was shocked by this. Either TMZ had just scooped the big boys, or they were seriously jumping the gun. Either way, that’s huge from a journalistic standpoint.
- I then embarked on a bit of a morbidly curious experiment to see which news outlet would be the first to report that he was dead. I kept refreshing all the news pages to no avail before I had to leave work to pick up my kids.
- On my way home I listened to CNN on SIRIUS to see how much longer it would take before his death was reported. Unfortunately this meant listening to Wolf Blitzer — not to be confused with a reporter, he’s more an on-camera CNN promoter/cheerleader — bring on doctors to describe cardiac arrest and reporters who had covered Jackson in the past to talk about him, all while giving somewhat of a ghoulish play-by-play. “CNN has learned that he is in cardiac arrest. Now we’ve learned he’s in a coma. Now we’ve learned that the LA Times and CBS is reporting he has died, but CNN has not confirmed that.” (Presumably meaning it hasn’t happened.)
After about an hour of this, it was finally widespread knowledge that he had died. It was a strange journey through this new information age, with TMZ of all things at the head of the pack.
A weird end to a weird day.