Regular readers know that that news doesn't exactly make me sad. In harping against its passage I was never much concerned with the economic consequences so much as the injustice of it and the corporate assumption that they can be as stupid as tree stumps, treat their workers like peons, ignore safety and health concerns, fill their pockets at our expense, and still get their asses saved - by us - when their legacy of blind greed and refusal to acknowledge any reality outside their corporate funhouse finally comes crashing down around their ears.
I may be the only Leftist who feels that way. The others (3 at FDL alone,
here,
here, and
here) are consumed by the dire consequences and the pain of union workers about to lose their jobs. So am I now more concerned about what happens after the Big Three bite the dust (assuming they do, which isn't at all a sure thing what with Henry and Benny lurking in the background, apparently limitless funds at their disposal)?
No. And just your luck, I'm gonna tell you why.
First, this session of kabuki didn't end the way it was supposed to, the way Bush had planned for it to. This is actually encouraging for a couple of reasons.
One: The GOP radcons were led in Congress by a far-right wingnut named Corker who's too stupid to even attempt to cover or stick a standard Orwellian label on the way the Pubs have been willing to wash the car corpo's down the tubes if that's what it took to break the UAW. Their reasons have been blatant - so blatant even the Post couldn't ignore it any more.
An eleventh-hour effort to salvage a proposed $14 billion rescue plan for the auto industry collapsed late last night as Republicans and Democrats failed to agree on the timing of deep wage cuts for union workers....
Moving Molly Ivors, trying to get her head around a level of crassness and open animosity toward ordinary working Americans she apparently never expected to surface so nakedly, to summarize:
Republicans to Detroit: if only you could figure out a way to pay your executives and not your workers, we might help you.
Have I got that right?
Yes, Molly, you did and so did everyone else. This is the equivalent of what happened when Newt Gingrich overstepped his bounds and shut don the government. What the Pubs want isn't always even close to what the people want (since when do Republicans care about what people want, especially after they just lost an election?) and sometimes it's so far off that those people rebel. This is liable to be one of those times, and that has tom be a good thing - one more nail in the GOP coffin because, as usual, they don't know when to quit.
Two: The Democrats have finally drawn some kind of line on the sand by being willing to let Detroit's corporate morons declare bankruptcy before they'd vote for forcing unionized US workers to accept poverty-level wages and the end of their union. It's a pretty extreme line, after all, but I was beginning to wonder if there was ever going to be any line at all or if the Dems were going to cave over everything. It ain't much but it's a start. Moving into my Pollyanna-ish phase, perhaps the Dems will find they actually like being an opposition party and will look for more Pub policies they can, you know, oppose. Gawd knows there are enough of them.
That they were willing to break the routine has to be a good sign, maybe even a hopeful one. (On the negative, they're still basically backing Bush whose approval this plan was designed to get. Some habits are hard to break.)
Second, the consequences of the US auto industry going into bankruptcy will not precipitate a crisis. That's already happening. At worst it will accelerate the rate of our economic decline but even at its best, saving the Morons of Detroit, and at a very high price, won't do much more than stave off the inevitable for a little while (probably not all that long a while, either) as the real damage conservative economics has done to our country becomes more and more inescapable.
The fact that few are willing to face is that conservative economics, allowed to run roughshod over reality for nearly a decade, has created an entirely untenable situation on a global scale. The fundamentals of one of the biggest and most stable economies on the planet have been weakened by massive theft,
gigantic Ponzi schemes, and greed on a scale no one has seen since the days of the Robber Barons and Teapot Dome. Much as it saddens me to say it, this damage is so extensive that, frankly, the loss of what looks today like an important domestic industry is going to seem in 2 or 3 years like a burp.
IOW, if losing the auto industry in America will make people pay attention sooner and faster to just how bad off Bush has left us, it's worth the price. The $billions$ it would take to keep them afloat for - what? another year? - aren't.
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