Posted on 03/30/2009 8:46:44 AM PDT by Nachum
In recent months, my Auto Task Force has been reviewing requests by General Motors and Chrysler for additional government assistance as well as plans developed by each of these companies to restructure, modernize, and make themselves more competitive.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
The List, ping
Which translates for me, starting today, I will start considering a replacement for my Hummer H3, possibly a BMW.
How refreshing to see Zero on TV. He hardly ever makes a live TV speech. /S
Chavezrolet?
Right and Wrong
- Joe Jackson
Stop everything
I think I hear the President
The pied piper of the TV screen
Is gonna make it simple.
He’s got it all mapped out
And illustrated with cartoons.
Too hard for clever folks to understand.
Yeah, they’re more used to words like:
ideology...
But they say it’s not the issue
ideology...
They’re not talking ‘bout right or left
They’re talkin’ ‘bout, t-t-t-alkin’ ‘bout,
Right and wrong - do you know the difference?
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left, and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see?
So what ya think?
You like the Yankees or the Mets this year?
And what about this latest war of words?
What about the Commies?
You know I saw the news last night
All illustrated with cartoons.
So when they come with that opinion poll,
They’d better not chose words like:
ideology...
Try to tell me bout the issues
ideology...
Who’s side are you on?
‘Cause we’re talkin’ ‘bout, t-t-t-alkin’ ‘bout,
Right and wrong - do you know the difference?
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left, and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see?
Right and wrong - do you know the difference?
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
‘Tween the right and the left, and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see?
Obama once again speaks with forked tongue.
He tells people that what he is doing isn’t really a pile of poo, it make look like poo, smell like poo, but it really isn’t poo.
Why can’t Federal workers be fired so easily?
He is an angry man. Did you catch the constant scowl on his mug?
i saw on cnn he was talking and checked the stocks, they were down 299 pts....why to go big zero.....
That’s Yugo Chavezrolet!
Year after year, decade after decade, we have seen problems papered-over and tough choices kicked down the road, even as foreign competitors outpaced us. Well, we have reached the end of that road.
We cannot, we must not, and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish. But we also cannot continue to excuse poor decisions. And we cannot make the survival of our auto industry dependent on an unending flow of tax dollars. These companies — and this industry — must ultimately stand on their own, not as wards of the state.
That is why the federal government provided General Motors and Chrysler with emergency loans to prevent their sudden collapse at the end of last year — only on the condition that they would develop plans to restructure. In keeping with that agreement, each company has submitted a plan to restructure.
HOW ODD THIS DOESN’T SEEM TO APPLY TO AIG!
United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard likes to say that Washington policymakers “treat the people who take a shower after work much differently than they treat the people who shower before they go to work.” In the 21st century Gilded Age, the blue-collar shower-after-work crowd is given the tough, while the white-collar shower-before-work gang gets the love, and never before this week was that doctrine made so clear.
Following news that government-owned American International Group (AIG) devoted $165 million of its $170 billion taxpayer bailout to employee bonuses, the White House insisted nothing could be done to halt the robbery. On ABC’s Sunday chat show, Obama adviser Larry Summers couched his passive-aggressive defense of AIG’s thieves in the saccharine argot of jurisprudence. “We are a country of law — there are contracts (and) the government cannot just abrogate contracts,” he said.
The rhetoric echoed John Adams’ two-century-old fairy tale about an impartial “government of laws, and not of men.” Only now, the reassuring platitudes can’t hide the uncomfortable truth.
Last month, the same government that says it “cannot just abrogate” executives’ bonus contracts used its leverage to cancel unions’ wage contracts. As the Wall Street Journal reported, federal loans to GM and Chrysler were made contingent on those manufacturers shredding their existing labor pacts and “extract(ing) financial concessions from workers.” In other words, our government asks us to believe that it possesses total authority to adjust contracts at car companies it lends to, and yet has zero power to modify contracts at financial firms it owns. This, even though the latter set of covenants might be easily abolished.
According to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, these allegedly inviolate AIG agreements promised bonus money the company didn’t have and were crafted by executives who knew the firm was collapsing, meaning there is a decent chance these pacts could be invalidated under “fraudulent conveyance” statutes.
They also might be cancelled via “force majeure” clauses allowing one party to rescind a pact in the event of extraordinary circumstances — like, perhaps, the collapse of the world economy. (Note: BusinessWeek reports that corporations are already citing the recession as reason to invoke such clauses and nix their business-to-business contracts.)
But, then, those legal cases require a government that treats AIG’s shower-before-work employees with the same firmness that it treats the auto industry’s shower-after-work employees, not the government we currently have — the one that believes “the supreme sanctity of employment contracts applies only to some types of employees but not others,”
What kind of idiot would by a car from Chrysler or General Motors? BOYCOTT them both. I intend to never do business that sold its sole to the devil and took a bailout.
Because for every federal worker there 10 federal employees. Someone has get things done.
Aren’t you all happy that your tax money will go to cover warranty work on Opels and Vauxhalls sold in Europe?
Implicit in that statement is another one...
"On the other hand, if you buy a Ford, you are on your frikken own, buddy!"
Buy a Ford instead. They are the last man standing and they did not take the government money. Their quality has greatly improved in the last few years as well. I really like my Town Car.
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