This should be a reality show.... called how much of your money can I waste. I mean honestly? First the banking industry, then CTI Group, now the auto companies? This is ridiculous. While I've never claimed to be politically savvy, I do know that a large majority of the $750,000,000,000 has been distributed so far. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we worse off then we were before we gave them hundreds of billions of dollars? I really don't get whats happening here.
Now that the auto companies are asking for their piece of the pie, should we concerned? Naturally. But should we at least hear them out? I say absolutely. All of a sudden Congress seems to have woken up and pulled their heads out of their ass and are now being real frugal with our money. That's good but where the hell was this two months ago?
So lets all send letters to our congressmen to thank them to thank them for blocking the Nov. 2008 vote to bailout the auto companies. Right............? Not so fast.
Maybe its the conspirator in me, but I think this is strictly class based issue. The rich take care of the rich. Many of the jobs that were "saved" by the first bailout were the white collar banker jobs (arguably, it'd do something for our financial system but that obviously was a bust). However, the jobs that would be lost in the auto company's collapse are blue-collar, factory jobs. Granted my statistics are a bit unreliable, but its something like 2.5 million jobs! That's a lot of people.
What's ridiculous to me is that these are the people who actually MAKE SHIT. The bankers, the stock brokers, sure they handle our money, but they don't MAKE anything. Also, as if the national debt weren't high enough, imagine if the United States became dependent on foreign countries for the main mode of transportation too. Would there be any money for these bankers to handle? It just doesn't make sense. To get out of this depression, or "recession", we are going to have to start selling shit to both Americans and the rest of the world.
So why not let the companies go bankrupt and re-organize? Its my understanding that declaring bankrupt would allow them to shed all debt including retirement and health benefit packages they currently pay to their past workers. Again, these are middle to lower class people who work thirty years on an assembly line and are relying on their retirement to survive. Allowing this would be bordering on Enron shit. It would also break the Unions and who know what the companies would pay their workers. Granted, I think that the labor unions have gone overboard and that paying someone $125,000 a year for unskilled labor is a bit ridiculous but these people deserve to be paid a decent salary and have decent benefits like health insurance and dental care.
There many more points I could touch on, like how Japan built two of the most reliable car industries on the road by subsidizing them, but I really don't know a lot about most of these things.
So....What should we do? Will giving the auto companies money fix this? I have absolutely no idea.
All I know is that the loss of an industries is would not be a good thing and allowing them declare bankrupt would more than likely lower the standard of living for a majority of the 2.5 million people, not counting all the retired people who would loose their health care and retirement packages. I'm not saying that we should just throw money at them like we did with the banks, because I've already stated that I think that was a gigantic waste of money, but I am saying that we should think about treating the blue-collar workers with the same respect that we treat out upper class. Balee Dat.
-FRo
