Automakers want Gov't Loans

An AP article by Ken Thomas filed today 9/7/08 is headlined thus:

Auto industry to press Congress for $50B in loans

So once again the corporate welfare which supposedly does not exist in the United States rears its ugly head. Car manufacturers are struggling now because Americans are no longer buying the stupid, impractical and selfish SUVs of yesterday. GM and Ford are both closing down factories and laying-0ff workers, and yet in 1998 on the strength of SUV sales, which any jackass would have known would not be a persistent trend, Ford made what was at that time the biggest profit in human history. (Did they invest this profit to insure future sustainable profits when the SUV bubble burst? No, of course not, they gave fat bonuses to their executives and built more SUV plants and lobbied for more tax cuts to deliver more profit) Of course at the moment it is Exxon that continues to hold and break that record and that likewise is not investing in future tech but instead lobbying to get a stranglehold on America's last untapped offshore reserves so they can hold us as energy hostages in the future when oil runs out.
So people like me knew in 2000 that this SUV trend would not last. Gas prices went up quickly after 9/11 and yet the auto industry did not begin re-tooling their factories or designing cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars. Instead they continued flooding our marketplace with stupid freaking SUVs as prices continued to rise for gasoline due to the fuel demands of those ridiculous behemoths. Of course, this is partially the fault of US citizens who kept buying them, but then again if there was nothing to buy then they would not buy them. So yeah, GM and Ford kept pushing out the SUVs without planning to make any changes to smaller vehicles even though the writing was on the walls for anyone with a brain and they were earning the profits to do so.
So why didn't they change? Well because they knew they could "maximize profit for their shareholders" as sociopathic corporations do, and when the bottom inevitably fell out as they knew it would, they would just fire thousands of hard-working Americans (not to mention Canadians, Mexicans and all those other places with US auto production facilities), to cut costs and then use the threat of increasing unemployment to convince the US government to give them money. This is exactly what is happening now. (Government policy either rewards stupid business planning or business leaders are more profoundly selfish, evil and manipulative than we dare think) If the automakers are turning to the US government for funding to make what citizens are now demanding, smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, then that means either a) no bank would fund them because of their poor management and inability to anticipate trends- just like in the 1970s and/or b) they understand what most Americans do not which is that our US government always subsidizes and bails out major corporations for billions more than they ever bail out individual citizens in trouble. In the meantime the board of directors of these companies continue to receive 6 and 7 figure salaries on which they will pay a lesser percentage of taxes than the assembly workers in their plants.
This country is headed for financial collapse if trends continue this way, but the wealthy elites of this country don't care because their capital is mobile as they are as well. If they use up this country and suck it dry like the parasites they are then they can pull up stakes and move someplace else to begin the process again. I always thought those 1920s Communists who called business leaders (not small business owners who are basically just workers, but the corporate sociopaths and their "boards") blood-sucking parasites were just being dramatic and emotional, but as we observe today more and more, Communists were correct. These people are parasites. I am not saying Communism is even possible or correct, but to say the prescription is wrong is not to say that the diagnosis was wrong. The diagnosis in this case was truly accurate and as our big businesses go again with their hands open, begging government while bribing Congress we see again that our capitalist system is profoundly flawed and not even truly capitalist or "laissez faire." In a "laissez faire" system which might actually be better, the US government would just tell Ford and GM to kiss its ass and fail because being a good businessman is about reading trends and knowing that SUVs were unsustainable. However our government has always rewarded corruption and bad business practices at odds with the capitalist, "free market" principles which the same government always espouses.
So yeah funny enough in some ways I want more "free market." What we have in the United States is a charade. Whenever someone in the US says "free market" what they really mean is free to stomp workers' rights and disregard environmental concerns secure in the notion that when they completely screw up they will be able to screw their employees (while the government protects them from employee retaliation) and get a huge government bailout from the tax money paid by their now laid-off employees. It total bullsh&% and I can't take it anymore.

Labels: Corporatewelfare auto industry Congress taxpayers

posted by travellinguist @ 7:36 AM