Conservatives are nothing if not redundant. None of them has had an original idea since they decided to kill Julius Caesar because his land reform program was "too radical". A couple of thousand years later, that's why they kill Allende. Same-old/same-old. Over and over and over and over....
And so on.
So it's not too much of a surprise to see them pulling the same routine for the nth time while trying to convince Congress to borrow $$$Billions$$$ for them so their moronic decisions won't finally sink them, while shamelessly using the unions they've already stripped to the bone as stalking horses. Be prepared to hear something you've heard before.
In Capitol Hill meetings, industry officials said the collapse of one or more of the Big Three carmakers could greatly worsen the nation's recession and undermine the companies' ability to survive.
"We're on the brink with the U.S. auto manufacturing industry. We're down to months left," Chrysler's vice chairman, Jim Press, told The AP in a separate interview. "If we have a catastrophic failure of one of these car companies, in this tender environment for the economy, it's a huge blow. It could trigger a depression."
Familiar, isn't it? When they find something that works, they beat it into the ground and then jump on it for 4 or 500 years. What's startling is that Harry's claiming it isn't going to happen, that they don't have the votes. This despite the unions going down on their knees.
The United Auto Workers union, scrambling to preserve jobs and benefits, agreed at an emergency meeting in Detroit to allow the companies to delay payments to a multibillion-dollar, union-run health care trust and to scale back a jobs bank in which laid-off workers are paid most of their wages. The concessions could help mollify some lawmakers who have criticized the union's benefits as too rich when compared with those of workers at foreign-brand auto plants in the U.S.
Reid called those concessions "a step in the right direction" and the Big Three are promising more job cuts, plant closings, and lay-offs. Bush and his cohorts the Democrats are pushing for a $25B bail-out instead from a pot of money dedicated to "help[ing] them [teh Big T'ree]produce more environmentally advanced vehicles".
Uh-huh.
Now it just may be my innate cynicism about anything Corporate America tries coming out but isn't this kabuki sort of aimed in a different direction from the last 3 or 4 kabuki? The BT are going to get $25B instead of $34B ($25B isn't enough?? That extra $$9B is what will keep us out of a global depression? Golly.) which they're supposed to (but won't, as usual) use to produce green cars and the only real thing, real world actually happening to real people thing, to come out of this entire magilla is that they'll put $25B in their pockets to go to Belize with and the unions will make even more cuts, make even less money, have even fewer benefits and maybe lose their jobs anyway as the US plants close and then open again in Honduras. Have I got that about right?
Honestly, if we're this dumb we deserve everything we're getting. The Shaft.
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