Not an American so take this as you will...
Why is it OK to throw $700 billion at a bunch of wallstreet douchebags who provide no useful input into the economy -- seriously, wtf do these asshats do other than trade money and stocks back and forth and scrape profits out of both sides of the transaction?
Then on the other side, get all jumped up and forthright when the auto industry asks for loan guarantees roughly 1/30th the size?
Is this because the Fed is run by wallstreet douchebag Paulson? Or is there actually a good reason to prop up these worthless pricks and let the largest industrial sector in North America wither?
Yeah yeah, american cars suck, the auto companies are mismanaged, blah blah blah...
I think there should be conditions attached, ie GM should be told to FOAD, no-one should lend them the money to buy and gut Chrysler -- and yes the wallstreet douchebags at Cerberus should be lined up and sent packing, placing Chrysler back into the hands of manufacturing people -- but if they need money to transition to hybrids and more efficient vehicles, why not? Hell, if they need money to bury some legacy pension and medical costs that NONE of their competitors face, why not?
And if they're not going to put in a decent socialized (yeah I said the S-word, deal with it) medicine program, like every other country in the world has, in place to level the playing field between the foreign and domestic autos then they should tax and tariff the hell out of the foreign companies to level it. Hell, while they're at it, until they're are as many (proportionately) chevy dealers and car sales to match in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, etc they should face the same obstacles to market that our stuff does over there.
As for the Presidency for sale aspect -- all high level politicians are scumbags, doesn't matter what their party affiliation is, who or what values they "say" they represent, they pretty much do whatever the hell they want once they've lied their way into office. The only thing we can hope for is that maybe this group of scum will spend a little less dough on blowing up other people's shit than the last group of scum.
Now I'm going to get back to work attempting to sell tooling to all my broke friends at the domestic autos (see we all have an agenda
)
Cheers, Ted
Pure mathematics is the enemy of every truly creative man -- Sir Alec