Do You Oppose or Support the Auto Industry Bailout?

What a great letter! youhit all the right points!. I have also been saying FIRST restructure to become really competitive then maybe loan gurantees! tossing 25 billion at them ends up like AIG, they will be back for more...and more...

Re bailout letter, Re high taxes...come to FLORIDA!! Homes very cheap (you canget one for around 50-80 thou..my prop/school taxes got cut in half to $614 for the YEAR. In NY I last paid $5300!! (Which i swhy i am now in NY LOLOLCOuldnt afford the taxes...ALSO NO state income tax!

1. I hope things improve for you and your family.

2. Good letter. There is NO REASON for them to get bailed out when they have not yet exhausted other options (or even tried for that matter.)

seriously?

Hmmm...may have to move lol

I Oppose the bailout.
Let them fail.
Let them file chapter 11 and reorganize.
This bailout is just to keep the unions happy.
I heard they are making no concessions.
The dems don't mind because the unions give them big contributions and are in their back pocket.

Let them reorganize and start competing with the Toyota and Honda plants in this country who keep wages, bennies at appropriate levels.

And, stop using our tax money to bail out every one with their hands out. Where does it end?

I wrote of why that was a dead-wrong idea for multiple reasons -- including this little minor thing called the U.S. Constitution -- and proposed exactly and in detail what the correct curse was.

I responded to the survey this morning. No bailout. No government intervention, either before or after bankruptcy. If you're anti-capitalism, go for it. The market will take care of this, and efficiently, once the government stops interfering where it has no right, no authority, no credibility, and no clue.

Thanks for stopping by.

Kev, Florida might be nice but dbear, the roo and I can't tolerate the heat, bugs, and hurricanes, and I hate to fly. Besides which, if we move out o South Jersey the Repubes are short two people not to mention conservative values.

AMSW, you may enjoy florida many people do. Thanks for the encouragement.

Pepp2, good for you did you guys go to congress.org to air your opinion.

dr pete, you were right and I was wrong, stupid me about the 700 bil: I reluctantly gave my support for the approval and told them about it and wished I had opposed it, from now on if something doesn't strike me as right then I should speak-up even if it means looking insane among the experts.

Great letter and consider it done.

The auto industry will do fine without GM/Ford/Chrysler.

Excellent letter! I think the auto industry should not be bailed out. They should restructure and fire the CEOs. Renegotiate the union contracts, $70 an hr is obscene for assembly line workers. No bonuses unless the company shows a profit. Salary caps for execs unless the stockholders approve increases. Get lean and mean.

Congress, read: Democrats, will not allow the auto industry to go bankrupt because that would mean that the IAW and the auto industry will have to renegotiate their contract, thus loosing face in ffront of the Union workers. The Union would have show what greedy idiots they are, and Congress would have shown the Union, what we already know, that they cannot be trusted.

I will go to Congress.org, since I believe it is do time to clip the UAW's wings.

is an opportunity to cut pay disparity and waste

CEO's seem to have working brains in their heads and both have their own agendas; the American people be damned. For one thing, nobody is saying a word about the part congress, i:e. Barney Fwanks, Chris Dudd, Our illustrious new Czar and his Acorn thugs played in this whole economic
meltdown. Why in hades are these crooks allowed to be a part of the "solution"? Guess it doesn't matter since one of the biggest of the crooks is about to move into the Whitehouse. For heaven's sake....this makes my head hurt.

What are you talking about? Mr Paulson whined his way into congress demanding 700 billion dollars much like chicken little proclaiming the sky is falling. He fully expected the clueless and gullable to willingly fork over the above amount and then adding 700 billion was a number he picked from the sky. He would not divulge to us what, how and when the money would be used. There was no plan just a whole lot of speculation. Which he was not forthcomming in revealing. Congress thinking they would be Santa Claus wants to use some of the money the treasury printed out to assist the uninformed, unwise, and largely irresponsible homeowners who did not plan let alone seek financial counseling before they were targeted by the LIKES of the ACORN people and the unscrupelous lender. Paulson then informs us that the bailout is not working. Which brings me to another point not everyone is meant to be rich, there will always be pay disparity sorry cd5 this fact I learned many years ago. Try to accept it. You have the freedom to try to achieve whatever you want but it doesn't always happen the bosses will always make more money then the employee. The owners, and executives will always make more than the employees. This is the nature of this world there are bosses, supervisors executives leaders of all sorts and the underlings which is the great majority of us. The only difference is we do not live yet but give the liberal congress a chance in a totalitarian or marxist society where there are only a handful of the elite, rich ruling class and everyone else is forced to live 6 in a room for the benefit of the people and when this happens I will move someplace where big brother will not exist.

I never believed everyone should be rich. But when the number of those who live in poverty increases for the first 6 years of Bush's Presidency, and when the disparity in the pay between the highest paid employee and the lowest paid employee grows rapidly and that the wages of the average american stagnates though his productivity increases, then something is wrong. Add to that the number of those who have no insurance is 47 million and tens of millions more are under insured, then the disparity has to be addressed.

When I was growing up, part of the middle class consisted of the blue-collar or working Middle class was large. Now, the working middle class is all but extinct.

What we have been experiencing for the past 30 years or so is the redistribution of wealth. Only that redistribution was a consolidation of wealth. Many people have suffered because of that. It is time to reverse the process. That does not imply make everyone rich. But how about giving everyone a livable wage.

is the only way to fix it. UAW will NOT concede, they've already said so. No bailout, Yes to restructure.

In his fox interview, he says UAW concessions and restructure are only a "last resort". When you have multisystem failure in medicine, you address all threats to life and limb equally, not what you might consider the most threatening...because you don't know what the lesser evils are. This "body" is near death, so treat the problem holistically, don't focus on restructure when other diseases (UAW) are equally life threatening.

You claim there is a shortage of middle class and blue collar workers try these on for size: In my Dads day they did not have the opportunites we have today. They had just come back from a really big all emcompassing mother of a war the end of a depression and now were faced with rebuilding other countries and themselves. In those days you really either worked or you starved. Several months recently, before the economy decided to go artificially beserk, if you put your mind and body to work and you take advantage of the opportunities provided by the gorvernment you can believe it or not crawl your way out of the poverty you claim is rampant in America. Listen dude I don't deny that there are folks living in squalor and who need help. My question is where are all these social services and government programs that are supposed to be helping these people. Evidently they are not doing the job or there is way too much beauracracy to make a difference. Let me stress again for the 100th time CONGRESS CANNOT RUN A BAKE SALE let alone help the economy.

Chapter 11 will force a restructure and reorganization thereby providing a need to renegotiate the unuin contracts and encumberson legacy costs. Michael Steele had a good point essentially, they arrived by private jet waving their tin cups crying give us mo money without a plan.

I am not overly impressed with Warren Buffet these days he had some points but very few of these financial geniuses are willing to face down the unions the ceo's and congress they still think throwing money at a problem without correcting the problems will work. Now I am not against unions they serve a purpose in many cases and they were needed in the past especially when business leaders were just learning what real human rights were about. I was a union member and a shop steward in my twenties but I had my doubts about my own union. My point is because of the situations we are now facing, maybe its is time that all parties work together within the free market and tenents of capitalism to solve our economy. I did notice whenever the leaders started talking especially congress paulson etc the stock market went down. So Congress lay-off the economy stick to running all those social programs you have run into the ground at least we will know who to blame when they fail.

The difference between our parents' day and ours is that we had factories in the cities. Today, only the service sector is providing the jobs which is inadequate for the number of people in the area.

Now what I was talking about before is that Congress has been bailing out our corporations for a long time, it is that before they used proxies like the Pentagon to funnel money to them and now it is a straight bailout.

So since no past principle is being sacrificed with the bailouts, what we should do is to attach very strong strings to the bailout money.

No Bailouts for anyone.

The union label has come home to roost.

New Post up, Stop by.

This is hardly a union problem. What it is is a ceo problem

You wonder what destroyed the middle class.

The unions are the reasons why so many businesses left the United States.

The unions were originally set up to give workers a fair shake which was good.

But now union members and union bosses got so greedy that they are driving businesses either out of business or straight to a foreign country.

Union greed ruins a world in need.

Not that unions haven't contributed, it isn't the problem. The problem is when we reduce the state of the economy to the problems of the owners and CEOs and allow them to make a living off of the work of others.

No bail outs!!There is not enough pie!!

more than I do CEO's. A CEO that is not doing his or her job can be replaced. A union member can sit on their lazy *** and do nothing all day and can never be replaced because their union will never allow that.

also do their jobs. We have good and bad union members and CEOs. But again the point is that when we attack the working class, we lessen the number of those who could consume and our domestic markets die.

Considering that over the past couple of decades, worker productivity has increased but their wages have stagnated while the disparity between the highest paid and the lowest paid is growing indicates. In addition, the investor class has been trying to increase their return by either cutting the wages of the working class or by moving their jobs to other countries.

make their lives better by learning new skills and working harder to get ahead, the people that are successful follow that example.

I for one and sick and tired of people complaining that wages have not followed suit with the cost of living.

I think people have forgotten that you actually have to do something specific that not a lot of others can do to make a good living. If you are just doing something that 90% of the population can also do, then the demand for a higher salary doesn't make any sense.

I think we have been more than fair, when I see some of the outrageously high "entry level" wages 18 year old kids that just graduated from high school are getting it makes my head spin. I sure wasn't making that much money when I was 18....

some investors and corporate cheerleaders who view workers as merely an impersonal object to whom a corporation has no responsibilities.

What you might not realize is that the more laissez-faire we are with corporations, the more we promote a domestic paternalism that leaves the individual at the mercy of the corporation.

helped cause this problem in the first place.

Absolute oversite corrupts absolutely.

oversight. In fact, it was the loosening of regulations that led to the financial collapse

Lack of oversight? True. Lack of regulation? Not true. It was gov't regulations COMPELLING banks to make loans to people who could not afford them that caused the eventual collapse. Bad loans bought up by Fannie and Freddie, then resold as worthless paper, misrepresented.

Thank You, I couldn't have said it better myself.

It was lack of oversight and regulations that allowed the mortgages to be bundled and resold in an infinite loop that caused most of the collapse. The unpaid mortgages account for small part of the problem. The devaluation of homes made up a greater part of the problem

that allowed Fannie and Freddie to buy up the bad mortgages. Otherwise, the banks could not make those risky loans. ACORN was in the big middle of getting congress to go along with that scheme. And I am so glad to know that President Elect Obama had nothing to do with ACORN or the sub-prime failure. *sarc. off*

Thanks, just adding 2 cents. It's all I've got left.

the bad mortgages make up a small part of the problem. In addition, some of the bad loans are due to the fluctuating variable rate.

well, isn't that just ONE of the problem loan vehicles used to qualify people who coudn't qualify for conventional loans? Adjustable rates were just one of the problems causing the crash. The total problem was making loans to too many unqualified people, then bundling those loans to other lenders, who thought it was all good paper. Wrong! It then blew up when the large volume of defaults started to hit.

my sources tell me that the number who defaulted make up too small a percentage to cause the problem. Part of this problem is the war that the investor class is waging on the working class. There are not enough low-income house units to support those not making enough to buy a house and there are too many who are unemployed or, because of forced job change, who qualify as working poor to sustain the housing market. It was to the lenders' benefit if they could make loans and then turn over the homes regardless of the reason for the change. The problem they ran into was the drop in house values.

are a bunch of nuts. I agree with C-bear,MJSJR and Bob's Nephew on the bailout mess.

I consider myself part of the working class and a part of the investor class. In other words, I work my butt off trying to make a living and "get ahead" and I try to save and invest so that I won't be a burden on society when I can no longer work. I just don't want too many people reliant on my investments for their daily needs, otherwise, there will be nothing left for me. Being a part of both classes, I suppose I am at war with myself according to your view.

Actually I am trying to do what is prescribed for every man. It is the formula for individual success. We've already established that "your sources" are left wing socialist redistributionist ideologues. So, PPPPBBBBBBTTTT!

Basically, you are in a situation where as an investor, you are working against your own interests as a worker. So your one description is accurate.

But I would argue that even as an investor, you can become a burden to others. That is if as an investor, you vote for options with the bottom line as the only line, you are basically making a living off of the work of others. So rather than having someone pay taxes to support you, you have someone work to support you, but that is not all. When the bottom line is the only line, you are willing to sacrifice someone else's chance to work for a living in order to optimize your income. Do you see the problem?

C5, you're pathetic. As an investor, I am providing funds which business can use to operate their businesses. Good businesses succeed and pay dividends to their investors and increase their worth in the market, thus making money for the investor. Bad businesses (ie. badly managed, or businesses whose markets are not sufficient to support them) fail, lose money and value in the market and their investors flee with their money, or what's left of it. This is the way it's supposed to work. Currently there is a Government originated panic in the market and even good businesses are losing investors, because no one likes to lose money. I would say that without investors, few of those workers would be working, because CAPITAL would not be available to hire, make payroll or expand the businesses. EVERY job in corporate America is dependent on the "investment class" to continue. And as a "working class" stiff, I am dependent on corporate America for my job.

But the problem has been for a long while is that it hasn't been the market that has been supporting our corporations, it has been the gov't. Before this year, corporate has taken the form of a proxy. One of the biggest proxies is the the Pentagon. So the idea that a successful business implies good performance that then causes the market to respond by demanding its services or product is false.

In addition, effective cost cutting has often included shipping jobs overseas where labor is cheaper and environmental standards that we have here can be bypassed.

See, the problem isn't the desire to make a profit. The problem is when the bottom line is the only line and everything else can be sacrificed. This idea of pretending that the markets are infallible is simply a deification of the markets and results in a blind acceptance that success in the market implies that what you did was right and that failure in the market implies what you did was wrong. Such is true circular reasoning.

the cessation of government underwriting of private business. It's wrong and it's what is skewing the markets at this very moment. It is Socialistic. It is the ruin of the Capitalist system.
The market is not deified, neither is it infallible. But because the market is made up of thousands (or millions) of people, it behaves like a living organism, in that it is usually self-correcting, (unless the government tampers too much, like now).
BTW, in the market, what other motivation ultimately can there be? Millions of investors can have multiple motivations, but the primary motivation in investing is profit. Otherwise, why invest. Just give you money away, if there is no chance of gain.

the market is self-correcting for whom? Certainly not for most of America when for the benefit of the market, jobs are shipped overseas.

And again, the bailouts are nothing more than the gov't coming out of the closet in its support of business. The use of ethanol is just one example of a practice that benefits a business sector at the expense of most others. The pentagon has been the biggest proxy for gov't support of business.

Until recently, our employment rate was above 95%, and that with some 12-20 million illegal aliens in this country taking jobs that Americans used to do. Now we have an economic downturn, so where are the jobs going? Nowhere! They're just gone.
Now, as far as I'm concerned the bailouts are stupid and wrongheaded. Businesses must be allowed to fail whenever they are failing, otherwise there is no real success. It's all just being propped up by government, and that, my friend, is Socialism.

Re: ethanol? Ethanol subsidies are among the stupidest schemes our government has ever cooked up.
Re: the Pentagon. Listen, I will stipulate that there is much waste in their spending as there is with all government spending. But I am in favor of a strong national defense, and knowing that there are entities in the world that want to kill me just because I'm an American, and given that there is Constitutional authority for said defense, I say the majority of their money is well spent, keeping me from getting nuked during the last 7 years.

What the unemployment figures don't tell you is the number of people who became unemployed who gave up working. And what the unemployment figures don't tell you is the number of underemployed people we have.

Regarding ethanol, I agree with you regarding the stupidity of ethanol. But that is an example of our gov't being in bed, or more probably being owned, by business.

Regarding defense, who is to say you would have been nuked in the last 7 years. What we know from statistics is this: world terrorism has gone up since the invasion of Iraq. What we know from interviews is that we were attacked because we attacked, either directly or through proxies, first. What we have heard from a Senate report is that we are likely to be attacked by a WMD within the next five years because of our policies.

Those who seek more power often use "not enough" power as the scapegoat. If they had admitted that we were attacked on 9-11 because of their abuse of power, they could never get permission to obtain more power.

Well, then, since you like the Ghandi and King model so much, I guess we should have just protested the 9-11 massacres instead of proactively going after those who committed the atrocities. Maybe the terrorists would have felt sorry for us. Maybe we could just give them a "Care Bear stare" and they would turn to good people instead of evil, and we'd all be singing Kumbaya. Sometimes, C5, the naivete of the leftists like you astounds. The Islamofascists are predisposed to hating us, Israel, and any "infidel" including you. To them, you are a useful idiot. They will use your pacifism against us every time.

since Conservabear is hibernating.

YOu will find that the whole world protested against the 9-11 atrocities including 1 million people in Tehran.

What is necessary to preventing future 9-11s is to oppose all atrocities including the ones we have committed as well.

You like to talk about the naivete of the left, but there is a naivete of the right as well. The naivete consists of believing that our foreign policies are never unjust or are never immoral. And thus, those who want to harm us have only jealousy or irrational hatred as a motivation.

is thinking that when someone is intent on your destruction, you can change their mind by being polite to them.

And what do you call taking exception at the actions of others while taking your own behavior for granted? Perhaps the reasons why we were attacked have nothing to do with the freedoms we enjoy here while having more to do with the freedoms keep others from having.