sleepy jack |
12-07-2008 08:25 PM |
If we bail them out and they use the money to start pushing smart and efficient cars they won't fail. This wouldn't be prolonging the inevitable. The problem is unless there's strict regulation and oversight that won't happen and seeing how well taxpayer money has been handled in the past...it'll pretty much be a disaster. It's a frustrating situation because neither option is good unless someone sits there and tells the auto industry what they need to start doing and what kind of cars they need to start making.
I think the Congress finally got slightly cynical because of the catastrophe that was that wall street bail out. I rarely agree with conspiracy theorists but Naomi Klien's shock doctrine is looking more and more accurate. If you don't know what that is she has this idea, the shock doctrine, which basically states that there's a partnership between big business and government (going way beyond lobbyists and politicians being in certain people's pockets.) She thinks what goes on is the government purposefully ignores problems and then there's a disaster and then business steps into fix the problem at a huge profit. I mean the people in charge of this had been in charge of some of these businesses, Paulson and and Kashkari for instance had both been very involved with Goldman Sachs and they demanded they be given this money no strings attached and with no regulation. So I can understand congress being very nervous about giving out anymore money. However millions of people will lose their job if the auto industry isn't saved and for political, social and economic reasons you can't let that happen. If you have that many people unemployed, most of whom will have no skills to take into other jobs you'll have a very long term problem with no simple fix.
It's very hard for me to wrap my mind around what Congress is doing with this and how they're acting. They willingly gave away seven hundred billion dollars to the financial industry and they wouldn't even consider the auto industries plea until they drove to DC from Detroit. Yes, flying in separate private jets was frivolous but these people offered to work for a dollar a year so I don't think they're as cash hungry as the financial industry in the slightest. I frankly question the intelligence of congress in their bailing out. Do they even know what the financial industry does? Because we know they don't think to even track the money they give out. They'll bail out the people who make paper transfer speculating on the future value of large groups of car loans but they won't bail out the people making the actual cars? Now cars are actually real and even the ones that are sold can be useful. Yes the auto industry's business model isn't just bad it's stupid and yes they lose two thousand dollars per car they sell but Wall Street lost seven trillion dollars without selling anything.
I don't know, I'm completely on the fence on this issue as well. On one hand I do not want to see millions of people laid off because that would just be horrible. On the other hand I don't trust congress with bailing out businesses nor do I trust the businesses to use the money efficiently. Not only that it seems like every company is asking for money now. I kind of think they should go into Chapter 11 and that would be a better way to deal with this...they just haven't been responsible and they haven't made a car worth buying in a long time.
|