Word: gm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Organic and locally sourced food is no longer the preserve of hippies and vegans in Britain, following a series of food scares such as the BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics, concerns about GM crops and, more recently, the arrival of bird flu, plus the high profile efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to promote healthier eating. "The organic culture is very strong in the U.K.," says Lannon, which is why Whole Foods intends to eventually open as many as 40 stores throughout Britain. Although organic products currently account for only 1.6 percent of Britain's $167 billion food trade...
...chronically scruffy auteur may play the game tonight and get all tuxed up. But he's still a blue-collar kid from Flint, Michigan - the car town that became a poor town when GM closed many of its plants. A classic entertainer and a professional mensch, he knows how to couch a daunting issue in human terms. In Sicko, as he said at a Cannes press conference today, the larger questions are: "Who are we? What has become of us? Where is our soul...
...Detroit Three, however, and you can easily conclude that they are money-losing retirement and health-care organizations just masquerading as money-losing carmakers. Consider General Motors, which supports three living retirees for every worker now on the job (at Chrysler the ratio is 1.3 to 1). GM long ago lost its status as the nation's largest private employer, but it remains the biggest private purchaser of health care. Investors value GM's business at $18 billion; the fund it has set aside to pay for employee pensions is worth more than $100 billion...
...Detroit Three complain frequently about the cost that health care in particular adds to each car they produce in the U.S.--at GM it's $1,600, at Chrysler $1,500, at Ford $1,200. But the cost paid in management attention and focus may be even greater. The single greatest stroke of Rick Wagoner's seven-year tenure as GM CEO, for example, was probably his well-timed decision to use $18 billion in mostly borrowed money to shore up the pension fund in 2003 (yes, $18 billion does seem to be something of a magic number here). That...
Early in this decade, all three of those trends reversed, and Detroit was suddenly in big trouble again--bigger trouble, in fact, because the companies' ratio of retirees to active workers has only grown. Which has turned up the pressure on retiree benefits. In the case of pensions, GM, Ford and Chrysler now all have enough money set aside to meet their obligations. But none put much in the bank to cover future health-care costs...