So we bailed out all the banks and we’ve seen how well that’s gone. Instead of using the money to fix their shit, all these companies are paying out huge christmas bonuses to their top employees and taking lavish vacations with $30k worth of massages. So now all the little guys are stuck saying. WTF?!? I thought this was supposed to fix everything and instead it’s just become a big money grab for Paulson’s friends. Now they are saying they aren’t even going to use the money for what they claimed it was for. Anyone else sitting around with the sad realization that they duped us again? That this was just one more way for the bush administration to steal piles and piles of money from the gov’t treasury and hand it to their friends with no strings attached? It’s truly sickening.

But now… now we are hearing that the car industry is failing. With the nasty taste in our mouth from that last bail out, everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs, LET THE CAR COMPANIES FAIL! FUCK THEM!! Heck, I was one of them. At the end of the day, if you can’t run your business and make a profit, you close up and go home to tell mommy you’re a failure. But the more I started thinking about it, the car companies CAN’T fail.

Now before you get the bbq pit started so you can fry me, give me a moment to explain.

Several years ago I lived up in the Endicott-Johnson area of NY. IBM was king there. They had country clubs and the entire area was thriving. The IBM employess bought cars from local dealers, picked up a pizza pie on friday night, shopped at the mall, bought a new suit, tanked up the car and bought a pack of cigarettes… do you see what I’m saying here? Now on top of that, you had factories in the area that employeed people that would supply IBM with circuit boards, glass for monitors, computer chips, whatever it was they needed.

The area was fat and happy. Lots of people lived in nice homes. Lots of businesses fed off the money their employees spent and times were good. But then IBM started having money problems. They started laying people off, closing locations, selling off the country club.. and people thought, wow. That sucks for people who work for them!

But what they didn’t realize at the time, was that this had a tremendous “trickle down” effect on everyone else. Circuit board factories started to close and lay off their employees. Pizza places closed. The mall became a ghost town.

Now, when I go to visit that area, it’s like night and day. Binghamton has become a ghetto full of drug dealers and you don’t want to be headed there at 12pm on a friday night without your bullet proof vest on. Real estate prices plummeted. The best job you’re looking at up there if you don’t work at a hospital or one of the colleges, is walmart. The entire area died.

Now if you look at this on the scale of gm failing. How many employees do they have? Now, every single one of them is going to be unemployed. So for 40 weeks, they’ll all be collecting unemployement. Then it’s food stamps, medicaid and every other gov’t program they can apply for. PLUS, they aren’t going to be paying any taxes now that they have no job. So instead of sending the gov’t money every april, the gov’t is sending them money every 2 weeks.

During our last election, all you heard was that obama was a socialist. But correct me if I’m wrong here, if people aren’t working and are just waiting for the gov’t to send them a check every two weeks… isn’t THAT really socialism?

What needs to happen is these guys making $200 million a year that are running these companies, need to be fired. Then they need to hire someone for $250k a yr to come in and knock some heads together. Employees need to realize the fat times are over. They need to make less, have less paid vacation and chip in towards their health care. All these old, retired people getting paid to sit on their asses, guess what guys. Gravy train is over. Go get a job as a greeter at walmart. They need to run their business in such a way that they aren’t spending more than they are making.

After all that has been addressed, they need to start making products that are RELIABLE, that will last longer than it takes you to pay it off! Products that are less expensive… lets be honest here. There is NO reason a car should cost you $30k. Especially when in 5 yrs you go to trade it in and they say, well.. I’ll give you $4k for it. There’s no market for your busted down hoopty now. PLUS, these vehicles need to be energy efficient. If that’s an electric car, or a car that just gets 50 miles to the gallon of gas, I don’t care. But churning out cars that get 12 miles to the gallon is fucking ridiculous. There is NO excuse.

Do I think these car companies will get their bail outs? Absolutely. $25 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the decimated tax base plus the additional financial burden of all those unemployeed people. But it needs to come with some serious oversight and retooling of their business. Otherwise it’s just going to be another bank bail out where the company remains in tatters, while the executives at the top write each other huge checks and take vacations.

You want to see the common man revolt? Put them all out of work. There won’t be enough prisons for the civil unrest that will cause. I’m not sure what the rich people at the top think this situation is going to bring about that is positive, but I’m sure not seeing any shred of hope I can cling to on the road we are headed down.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 10:41 am and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.