JS online Excerpt:It’s no wonder why Rep. Paul Ryan wants to divert the $25 billion previously earmarked for fuel efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles. If it's anything that might help the Janesville plant land a new vehicle or helps the UAW in any way to retain jobs – he’s against it.
Local and state officials had said Janesville would have been particularly suited to the $25 billion in Energy Department retooling funding, because a key factor in getting funding was the improved mileage of the vehicles that would be made at a factory. Virtually any kind of car would get much better fuel economy than the Chevrolet Tahoes, Suburbans and Yukons assembled in Janesville.
JS online Excerpt:Ryan never bothered to make that statement with the Wall Street Bail-Out, and there was much more money at stake. On one hand Congress asks the Big 3 for a plan that must include streamlining and cuts in wasteful spending, etc. Now that they got the plan, Congress (Ryan) uses it against them. What did they expect?
If GM and Chrysler were to merge, for instance, "you could see tens of thousands of job losses," Ryan said. "That's the frustration throughout this," he said. "If we give them these loans, it still results in massive layoffs and plant closures."
Republicans Still Running The Show
Obama: Auto Execs Should Go Excerpt:It sure looks like Republicans are still running things. It’s the same old story from them – trash fuel efficiency and environmental incentives just so someone get a loan – and the democrats are an embarrassment for going along with this charade.
A breakthrough on the long-stalled rescue came Friday when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, yielded to President George W. Bush on a key point: allowing the aid to come from an existing fund set aside for the production of environmentally friendlier cars.
The Big 3 are troubled American assets. They deserve a bail-out under the TARP.
Obama: Auto Execs Should Go Excerpt:The blame game, particularly calling out chief executives by name was absent from the Wall Street bail-out. Asking for Wagoner’s head will not bring back 2,000 jobs to the local GM plant and is certainly no replacement in lieu of support from Democrats for organized labor. The UAW should ask ‘what have you guys done for us lately?” This is beginning to smell really bad.
One leading Democrat in Congress, Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, was far blunter. Rick Wagoner, the chief executive of General Motors Corp., (GM, Fortune 500) "has to move on," said Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.
Chicago Tribune Parent Company Files Chapter 11
Tribune Co. Filing bankruptcy:They'll figure a way to blame it on the UAW - somehow.
"Factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm - a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt," said Sam Zell, chief executive of Tribune, in a statement.
Homeowners Still Walking Away From Overvalued Homes
CNN Money:Why keep paying a $200,000 mortgage bill at any interest rate - on a house that’s now only worth $160,000?
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More than half of delinquent homeowners whose mortgages were modified earlier this year ended up redefaulting within six months, a top bank regulator said Monday.
Anybody See Capitalism Lately?
Capitalism, according to the Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, is "An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."When was the last time a middle to large size private or corporate owned development used their own accumulated profits solely to fund their projects, advancements and expansions without lobbying government, local or otherwise, for some kind of a hand-out, subsidy or grant under the guise of a “private-public partnership?” It pays to be a lobbyist.
Obama doesn’t Plan To End War On Iraq
AlterNet Excerpt:What is it that happens to candidates once they win the presidency? It seems like they experience a mind–altering event sometime between Election Day and Inauguration Day. It’s like as if they’ve been blindfolded and taken on a ride deep into a dungeon somewhere under the Capital or the Washington Monument by a team of faceless secret service agents where the president-elect learns the secrets of the Masters Of the Universe or gets a mind-washing from an ancient 300-year-old Freemason still guarding the sacred algorithm of world supremacy. Whatever happens, one thing remains consistent. The candidate tends to become the person he promised not to be. Obama seems to be no different.
The New York Times is reporting an "apparent evolution" in president-elect Barack Obama's thinking on Iraq, citing recent statements about his plan to keep a "residual force" in the country and his pledge to "listen to the recommendations of my commanders" as Obama prepares to assume actual command of U.S. forces."
America has been beaten out of everything that matters to economic prosperity and progressive enlightenment. From technology to financials to steel to smokestack industry, there is little to claim or offer the world except military superiority.
4 comments:
Think You Will LOVE This -- I do !
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus7-2008dec07,1,1601588.column
If the link wont work, search for this:
David Lazarus:
Why were Wall Street workers not asked for concessions?
Thanks for the link. No question, there is a huge double-standard delivered by Congress between Wall Street and the Big Three. Republicans are using this fiasco as a battering ram against union workers and democrats are playing along. In the meantime, Wall Street institutions are flushing hundreds of billions down the toilet.
and the MEDIA which is owned by Wall St pushes their message.
If the fact that the conditions imposed on the
B3 were never considered for Wall St, AIG, Bear Stern, the banks, Freddie or Fannie is mentioned at all on FOX, CNN or any news station, someone will quickly say, "I agree" and they move on to continue bashing working class institutions.
The Media owned by Wall St dares to say that it is EPA standards that crippled the auto industry even though they admit that foreign and in fact boast that non union companies building fuel efficient cars in the south are doing fine.
Now I am glad there will be oversight on the Big 3 who have refused to build fuel efficient cars because of B3 ties to the oil industry,(something the workers refuse to recognize). Nothing, not even the destruction of the B3 would stop them from raising the value of the stock they own in oil. What did they care if the pensions of their workers were lost? And the worker's, because of corrupted unions, insisting the car hogs they built were great and we should all "buy American" even if we could not afford the gas because that was patriotic.
No, someone has to face reality for the B3 and their unions because the workers will not believe they have been sold out by both and keep on believing that they can convince America to buy gas guzzlers.
But Billions more money has gone to the ruling class to save their credit economy, and their predatory lending institutions without oversight just like Halliburton was allowed to war profiteer. Bush's last gift to the ruling class so that he can destroy social security ands any hope of reforming the US medical/pharmaceutical/hospital industry complex.
It is time the workers begin to say that a credit economy does not serve the interest of the working class. Lay a way, time payments, what ever, but not interest credit anymore. We have to move back to contracts we can read and understand, reject 53 page mortgages and indecipherable insurance policies. We are all a part of this. We are told we are stupid because we did not read, don't know and can't understand until it is to late. We must say in return, it is your duty not to sell what does not make sense and cannot be understood. We have to change this economy back to where people are served not preyed upon by credit predators.
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