Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Billions for Tribute

Auto unionists are angry with Obama.

Money Q:

"It's the age-old Wall Street vs. Main Street smackdown again," said Brian Fredline, president of UAW Local 602 at a plant near Lansing. "You have all kinds of funding available to banks that are apparently too big to fail, but they're also too big to be responsible.

And how responsible were GM's unions? Obama fired GM CEO Rick Waggoner. He didn't fire UAW boss Ron Gettelfinger. A failed GM got billions for failing and only because organized labor demanded it.

UPDATE: Now others are questioning why Obama spared Gettelfinger.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Bob said...

Gil - "A failed GM got billions for failing and only because organized labor demanded it."? ONLY?

How about the steel industry and dozens of other industries that rely upon car manufacturing?

The UAW boss doesn't run the company, decide what cars to manufacture, oversee restructuring plans, etc.

March 31, 2009 10:47 AM 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Industry that is too big to fail! Didn't Britain say that about their steel industry in the 1950s? How did that work out for them?

The federal government is now trying to;

1) blame AIG and others for taking bonuses that the very same congress gave them in the first place. The same congress that was shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that these bonuses were paid.

2) force states like South Carolina to take bailout money even if the states don't want it. Why is it that we have states? Maybe we could pull a Rendell and say that 50 states are as unnecessary as 400+ school districts. Maybe we only need six US regions and we could do away with the states. Save a lot of money and have a lot fewer politicians.

3) Fire the CEO of a major US corporation and then, after giving them multiple billions of taxpayer dollars allow that same corporation to face the very same bankruptcy process that most folks thought was the best solution in the first place, you know, before all those billions were thrown away.

Let me be completely bipartisan here. This nonsense didn't start with Obama. Bush was just as bad. It's not a Republican versus Democrat thing. It's a politician versus normal, sane people thing.

4) surely raise taxes to pay for all this although members of the current administration seem to have a phobia when it comes to paying their own taxes

At the end of the day, we get the government we deserve. At some point, we are going to have to realize that the only way to set things straight is to impose our own term limits by voting out every incumbent for every office in every election.

Maybe politicians will act a little more sanely if they have to live under the laws that they pass.

March 31, 2009 11:06 PM 

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