Buyer of GM Indianapolis plant demands 50 percent wage cut: Who is JD Norman?

[Hannah Bell]

On August 15 Indianapolis workers threw UAW International officials out of their local union meeting and forced the cancellation of a vote on a new contract, which the UAW negotiated behind their backs with potential buyer Justin Dennis Norman. The deal would have scrapped the current UAW-GM contract, which contains a successor clause guaranteeing workers their current wages, job protections and transfer rights in the event GM sells the plant.

In a press conference last week, Norman reacted angrily to the rebuff by the workers and demanded a revote...Posing as a savior of the workers, he said, “I’m not going to apologize to keep a plant open and jobs going.” The factory would shut down and all the jobs would be lost, he said, unless there were “fundamental changes in the way the plant is operated.”

Listening to the praise from the UAW, GM, the media and Indiana officials...one would get the impression that Norman is motivated by a philanthropic desire to revive American manufacturing and save jobs...Norman’s career as a “manufacturing man” is based on the view that there is money to be made by buying up existing plants and sharply reducing wages and benefits for workers. There is not a great deal published on the career of the 34-year-old CEO of JD Norman Industries, a start-up company based in Addison, Illinois launched in 2004. Norman’s net worth, the financing he has received from major banks and private equity firms to buy the Indianapolis stamping plant and the conditions workers face inside the factories he already owns are closely kept secrets.

It is known that the graduate of University of Chicago’s business school was a stockbroker in the Chicago office of Morgan Stanley, where he was part of a small team advising investors cashing in from the sale of industrial companies...The mid-2000s saw a virtual gold rush of private investment into auto and auto-related companies. According to a report by the investment consulting firm KPMG, between 2004-2007 private equity firms and individuals like Cerberus, The Carlyle Group, Blackstone and billionaire Wilbur Ross saw distressed auto companies and suppliers as “buying opportunities for savvy investors..."

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/norm-a24.shtml

[Newest Reality]

1. Another example of ...

profit equals poverty. Plain and simple.

If we keep this ridiculous and clearly unsustainable scheme going, (by supporting it with our lifestyles, political views and apathy) then we continue to fund a movement whereby all investors and billionaires are the reason for living and we are merely the parts in their machines enabling them to achieve and maintain a lifestyle they deserve by their own predefined destiny.

If you cut away the large portion of words and economic theories, aka bullshit, it comes down to a general recognition of what is clearly being said to us all, but we tend to get bogged-down in the voluminous piles of bullshit spewed liberally around the facts of the matter.

Savvy investors are as good as intestinal parasites for the rest of us and yet, they are touted as our benefactors and saviors in the testaments of capitalism. They do not feed us, but rather, they feed upon us and infect us with some sort of economic fungi that exhorts us to think we are the actual benefactors of their infestation even while we are being sickend and sucked dry of our mental, emotional and physical energies all along the way. And they call that normal while their seers and viziers in the lucrative, mental health industry call our personal results and reactions, "mental illness". That's a major disconnect and, of course, only powerful entertainment, distraction and medications can make it seem otherwise.

Oh, but don't read this and think. There will be no need for proof when it comes to your door, despite your own rational reasons for ignoring it and keeping your place in the death rattle of the Status Quo, while the bell tolls for ...