Apparently the latest round of begging by GM & Chrysler got the same result as the Sooners’ 3-point shooting the other day. As a result, GM’s boss is out & Chrysler is merging with Fiat. I’m not in the most talkative of moods today, so I’ll just pop the impending bubbles of inaccurate reaction by the Serious People:
-The right wing yelling about this as an usurpation of power will completely ignore the following: the companies came to beg for tax dollars in the first place, they cheered when the State was extracting concessions from union autoworkers, and that failed corporations get ANYTHING AT ALL is an indication of what the power of government really does. Economic outcomes being political decisions is not in and of itself socialist, in the current context its actually the most capitalistic thing one could do — that is, policy in favor of capital.
-No, this is not some kind of populist victory. In case you can’t be bothered to scroll a page, after the restructuring period they’ll still get billions (the begging is failure in that conditions are being placed on it, as compared to them previously getting whatever the hell they wanted. For them, it’s a loss). Also, once this finally shakes out we’ll have The Big One-and-a-half rather than The Big Three, and no one that isn’t looked at as a total nutjob will bring up the possibility that The Intermediate Twelve or The Relatively Small Employee Co-op’d Thirty would make more sense.
The UAW might as well have just fucking seized it. Now instead they can watch as Obama assumes that even more labor concessions are necessary out of a false sense of fairness. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Edit: right on cue…:
Is it about time the government took forceful action or do the moves smack of socialism? And why go after the automakers but leave the management at failing banks in place? (emphasis mine)
The latter sentence disqualifies the premise of the former. But let’s not let logic get in the way of a convenient media life-blood giving meme…
