Economy

Echidne, Natch, Says It Better

I should just outsource:

Following the discussion about who deserves a
bailout is fascinating, because Detroit and its car-makers don’t
deserve one, never mind that the industry is one of the largest
employer in the country, but banks, those halls of marble and pillars,
do deserve one, because they have us all by the short and curly. They
are too big to fail! Or rather, their failures will hurt all the little
gals and guys much more than it will hurt the rich, and that is how the
rich got saved, once again.

I am not belittling the need to do
something about the economic recession, because the financial
industries do have us by the short and curly. I just want to point out
that when we ended welfare for all times we added lots of stuff about
the poor having to work to get welfare payments and lots of time limits
on how long any one family could stay on welfare. And all this for an
expense that was around one dollar out of each one hundred dollars the
federal government spent then! Now we are willing to hand over
brazillion dollars and asknothing
back in terms of good behavior. Indeed, we are not even demanding that
those in charge would be demoted, because we want stability in the
banks! Nobody worried about the stability of families on welfare in the
great and roaring nineties.

A.

8 thoughts on “Echidne, Natch, Says It Better”

  1. Right on.
    As one of the news comics noted, the Automaker’s plan for congress is that on date 1 you give me money. On date 2 you give me more, on date 3 … But absolutely nothing about the things that got the auto industry in trouble in the first place (including pushing the gas guzzlers with the aid of the Bush Cabal.
    We could also note some colmplicity of the the people of the US in that we elected (well I didn’t and I’m pretty sure you didn’t) ideogogues who pushed zero regulation. Thus the financial institutions were allowed to go far beyond reason, and even had to in order to stay competative.
    After all, if there is no law on the books forbidding robbing banks, I would be stupid not to.

  2. If you believe, as I do, that Bush was pushed into the presidency by the fat cats primarily to transfer money to the bank accounts of those fat cats, then all of this makes more sense. Bush is ending his reign of terror, so the pace of money transfers has to increase in order to finish the job. So, we have now set things up so one half of the gross domestic product goes to those fat cats. Nice job, Georgie!
    I guess Obama will just have to find money for what he wants to do somewhere else.

  3. I wonder how many compounds have been built in Wyoming the last 8 years? How many Blackwater camps?
    my tin-foil hat is just curious.

  4. The financial wizards on Wall Street have managed to drive the country into a ditchthree times since I graduated high school in ’87 – and a quite few times before that in this century alone. And yet, every few years we seem to forget this and elevate them to demi-god status in our society. That’s not gonna happen this time, right? We’re not going to start thinking that they’re smarter than we are simply because they drive bigger cars and drink more expensive hooch, right? RIGHT?
    Yeah, that’s what I thought.

  6. I think you’re missing one obvious angle, here:
    Auto workers have a union.
    Bank workers do not.
    How could any free-market fundamentalist possibly pass up a union-busting opportunity like this? If the Big Three go bankrupt, so does the UAW. And there is no economic price these guys would balk at if there’s even a chance it will make the unions look bad.
    It’s pretty clear from the pundit spin: We shouldn’t bail out Detroit because the EVIL UNION forces them to pay line workers $70 an hour! They deserve to go bankrupt because they CAVED to the EVIL UNION OVERLORDS.
    1. Blame the union.
    2. Bust the union.
    3.??
    4. PROFIT!

  7. Losing General Motors would be worth the price of losing the UAW. General Motors has been actively making the world worse for about 90 years now, and they need to be humanely put down before they manage to kill the entire world with their disease.
    Theonly way I’d even think about supporting bailing them out is if they agreed to be broken up (GM owns hundreds of companies and its finance arm, GMAC, is larger than a lot of major banks and swings more financial weight), if they agreed to reversing a lot of their “vertical integration,” and if they started making restitution for some of the things they’ve directly or indirectly caused to break over the past 90 years or so. That’d involve them starting to build a lot ofelectric rail vehicles to replace the ones they blackmailed railroads into taking out of service during their “dieselisation” pushes of the 1940s and 1950s, which were instrumental in killing a lot of the US’ street, freight, and passenger railroads (it’s cheaper to run an electric rail engine than a diesel, and they last longer, too). It’d also involve them turning most of their focus away from private cars. Even then, I’m not sure I’d trust them as far as I could throw them.

  8. I’m not a huge union fan, but anyone who thinks the problem is (any longer) the UAW needs to readthis.
    More fact-based decisions, please.

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