Bailing Out General Motors

The proposed General Motors bailout brings out both the social liberal and fiscal conservative in me; even libertarian conservatives would rather G.M. go in to bankruptcy and, possibly, falter in the end, to no profit to the American people, but my suspicions of hard-line market economics summons up visions of soup lines and Spam (the real kind, not the emails). All those American workers losing their homes and freezing for want of heating oil, which can only go up when O.P.E.C. and Big Oil find a new way to chingle us. (Yes, "chingle." Slang Spanish for "butt fuck," which is what Congress and the multinationals have done to us during the long-running -- pre-Bush II -- laxity in oversight and grossly carte blanch deregulation of the finance industry who probably made all of the last two or three presidents shill men for bullshit and thievery.

So part of me says bankruptcy (where is their stock right now, $4 or something?), and part of me says bailout. This latter is repugnant in the extreme. Each time I pass a pickup or SUV I scream, "Guuuuuuzleeeeer!" I see Arab shiekhs shrieking with laughter, lighting real Havana cigars with hundred dollar bills. So why should we trust anything Congress does. They're just whores for K-Street. When a company has been manufacturing Monster Vehicles for decades, fanning the flames of consumption by massive Madison Avenue ad campaigns, loses ground to smaller, cheaper, less gas-consuming autos and starts bleeding its reserves, why should we come to the rescue? You'd have thought they learning NOTHING by the Volkswagen craze that overtook the entire nation in the 50's. My own father, who once joked that they looked like the object of canine rutting (and had a cartoon of that simile to prove it) bought a Beetle. I got it second hand and only had a relapse once, a Firebird, one of the heaviest autos on the road. Guess what happened to Pontiac?) Who?

Nope, I come down on the bankruptcy unless Congress can aid the workers with low interest loans and extended unempoyment insurance, plus job re-training and severance benefits at some level. I know ecolibs will say, "The Chrysler deal paid us back." That's the point: Chrysler is one of the Big Three asking for bailouts. As Lincoln said (in a different context): "Too many pigs for the teets!"