….Some $13.4 billion of the rescue money will be available this month and next — $9.4 billion of it for General Motors Corp. and $4 billion for Chrysler LLC, the two auto giants that have said they could be facing bankruptcy soon without government help. GM is slated to receive the remaining $4 billion in loans after more money is released from the financial rescue account. Ford Motor Co. says it doesn’t need federal cash now but would be badly damaged if one or both of the other two went under….

This is an absolutely astonishing amount of US taxpayers’ contributions to their Government.

I say : Let them fly into a mountain. All this whinging and grovelling to the US Government is demeaning.

Begging for cash to keep them going. Producing inefficient cars for decades.

I do pity the guys and gals on that slow moving production line when the sh*t hits the fan, and they get “released from their employment contracts”.

Nice euphemism there eh ?

Interesting to see what happens next.

J.

If they go down, it will be a lesson.

It’s not a matter of looking at it from the perspective of people who will be affected should the companies fail. It’s a matter of looking at it from the point of view of should it be the taxpayer’s responsibility to bail out corporations that aren’t profitable because those companies scare people into thinking they are needed for the jobs they create.

You’re damn right that if I was working for Ford, GM or Chrysler I would hope the companies were able to find a way to keep my job going. Of course. But these are two separate arguments.

Again, the government should not use taxpayer money to prop up businesses that are not profitable and are going to continue sucking money from the public tit. They should invest in making sure that if/when all those workers do lose their jobs they have (a) re-training programs, (b) a social security net, and (c) new jobs.

As for if I was the poor ESL teacher in Korea – it wouldn’t be convenient, but I would simply go get a degree. Why should I expect that the world’s not going to change the rules simply because I’ve grown comfortable with them?

Not sure what your last point is.

I say let the companies die off, they deserve it.

Imagine you lived in Korea for many years, married a local, learned the language, happy with your job as an English teacher etc and then Korean government makes a regulations: all foreign English teachers must have a university degree. You won’t die but surely you will have a hard time.

By the way, Ontario has Ford manufacturing facilities as well.

Why don’t they bail out only GM?

Can anyone remember when Detroit last made a relevant car? 20 years ago, when everyone understood that the wave of the future would be economy cars, GM, Ford, and Chrysler geared up for SUVs.

Republicans in the Senate say it’s the unions fault, and until the unions grant mass concessions, these “high-minded” civil servants won’t allow for a bailout.

But what it really comes down to is innovation, or rather the lack of it. Can the union be blamed if the men and women actually running these companies failed to produce cars people actually wanted to buy?

/rambling

While it’s very possible that if the big three go bankrupt that a lot of good paying jobs will disappear, it’s also likely that many of those jobs will be replaced by decent paying ones (like the ones Toyota and Honda have brought to America) by new car companies that buy up the assets of the big three. If they go bankrupt it doesn’t mean all of their capital, company-specific technology & production methods, and labor disappear into the ether. It’s very likely to be profitable at some price to buy up their assets, otherwise why would other (foreign) car manufacturers open new plants in America?

However, it’s a pricey sacrifice.

The trick is finding a way where you can have both. Quick acting and empowered government that is still largely answerable to the population of which they govern.

As it relates to the corruption and inefficiency in the US – there’s no shortage of that in China either. What we need is a better system of citizen-minded checks to balance out human/corporate nature for absolute greed.

One thing that the economic meltdown has done, for good or bad (it seems that you would argue bad, but I’m not so sure) is cast a good light on the Chinese model of heavy state regulation within an ostensibly capitalist economic system. It remains to be seen if China can get out of the other end of this thing in one piece, but the vast amounts of corruption and inefficiency being uncovered in the United States by this whirlwind is certainly calling into question “capitalism with American characteristics.”