Damn it, Bush, why do you have to suck?

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Bush unveils $17.4 billion car bail-out.

Is that even legal? The funds for the bank bail-out were appropriated for a specific purpose; I didn't know the President was able to just redirect that kind of cash at his own whim. But what's another ten or fifteen or twenty billion? If our government is going to be spending our money that we don't have, they should at least be doing something that benefits the people. Give me a scholarship, dangit, and give scholarships to all the rest of America's college students. Feed the hungry, give medical care to the sick, shelter the homeless. But enough of this corporatism.

This gem in particular from the article amused me.

"The car makers have argued that even an orderly bankruptcy would send them out of business forever, with the loss of millions of American jobs."

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Really now? They only employ 250,000 Americans between them, and they've been working on cutting that number down through outsourcing. Why the hell should they be propped up, even on protectionist grounds? Honda and Toyota are building plants here and employing American workers, but can you imagine the response if the US government tried to have a bailout package for them?

conservative my f*****g ass.

Bush is just a commie bastard as far as I'm concerned now.

Of course Faux News is going to still spew the same conservative line they've been giving us for years now...

I just wonder what he would've been like in another country had he been a divine dictator

Now there's a scary thought.....

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Last edited by Dox47 on 20 Dec 2008, 2:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

The Oliver Stone film W seems to suggest that Bush should have stuck with baseball, he would have been happier and the country would be better off. At this point, I'm inclined to agree, though I shudder at what sort of alternate hijinks a Democratic presidency might have gotten involved in after 9/11. I like Al Gore more now than I did in 2000, but I still think he's pretty milquetoast.

meh, it's not that hard to ask your defense guys "okay, who do i bomb?". probably would have had similar results to bush...maybe without iraq, though (so there's a few billion $ saved).

and how would he have done anything? the gore would have faced a republican congress to work with. not like they would have made guns illegal or something stupid like that.


how much power do you think the presidency actually holds?

i ask because it concerns me because a majority of the country believes the president holds much more power than he actually does.

because you're being robbed and put into debt against your will.


because your money is going into some failure's pocket and won't really go to save any company but rather keep it afloat a little while longer.



because you're being robbed and you're just accepting it like a farm animal being milked.

oh well im shure the car companies are happy. they'll be back asking for more in a year or two, and guess what? they'll get it. do you think there really gonna change there ways and make more competative cars? not with gas prices this low. it would be intresting to see how the price of gas effects all of this. as for george bush i think everybody knows he a joke and has been since almost day one

I have to agree, when I heard yesterday that he's trying to re-initiate the bailout, I don't care if its a loan or even if it demands immediate contract restructuring - he's killing me. Their failing on their own accord, they let management get perks from the UAW to meet their demands more than ask what makes the companies viable in the future, and I think at this point they deserve to face the consequences of possibly a few mergers or, if they all go down, some of these parts manufacturers who are in this supposed supply group who are in danger may as well want to think about drafting their own blueprints for their own ideas and their own companies to keep themselves going.

Also yes, when a union runs a company into the ground they need to pay the price by finding out that when they have production workers pay and benefits coming out to $70 per hour and half the time have many of them staying home and still getting paid - unless a company is really that profitable it can't last.

Well, the rationale isn't that they directly employ X number of people, but that they form the core of a much larger industry which could be devastated if they collapsed. Interestingly, IIRC, the other week when the first attempt at a bailout fell through, it actually sent Toyota's stock plunging, although I never followed up to find out why exactly.

The UK had a similar problem back in the 70s. Many large industries had been government controlled up to that point, and the unions were basically holding the government to ransom. Eventually, the electorate had had enough, and there was appetite for change. Subsequently, Margaret Thatcher did us all a great service by effectively destroying union power. Only now, after a decade of control of UK government by leftist traitors, are the union despots sticking their heads back above the parapet, as it were.

Personally I think you need to let your car firms go under. I suspect your government knows they will need to let that happen, too. Any money they're giving them at present is only a stop-gap, as they're currently burning cash at an incredible rate. I think the idea is to stop "disorderly failure" with "orderly failure", one assumes, being less damaging all round. Obviously there are political considerations tied in with that, too, with regard to time of year, and the Republican legacy that will be referred to at the next election. Maybe, as well, with Obama as President-elect, the current administration may feel it doesn't have a mandate to allow such a symbolically significant part of your economy to vanish. I'd expect early next year at least one of those car firms will be using your Chapter 11 bankruptcy system.

Yeah, I'm hoping it does go that way. A great many people are already shifting their motto from 'Buy American' to 'Never Again'. I can see what your saying though about the supply chain of other companies tied into these three needing some amount of time to draft a new business plan and find ways to pick up the slack. Truthfully I wonder how much stock such companies owned in the big 3, I'm guessing not enough.

i think its just a way to steal from the people, i just cant see how taking money from all americans and giving it to filthy rich shareholders of GM is supposed to help america

I'm not American, but a few minutes with Google tells me that GM suspended dividend payments for common stock earlier in the year. As I assume you are American, and as this is an issue of national importance to Americans, one would have hoped you'd have done a little research before forming an opinion. Whatever the rights and wrongs of government providing the money, it will keep some Americans in their jobs a little longer. As for your obvious contempt regarding shareholders, you may do well to reflect that without those shareholders the company wouldn't exist in the first place. Moreover, many of those "filthy rich" shareholders are undoubtedly people just like your parents, saving for retirement.