Anyway

{ 6 } Comments

1. William Slade | Dec 13, 2008 at 4:01 pm | Permalink

   Per­haps that is the dumbest thing ever writ­ten con­cern­ing the bail­out. These products you say are worth­less. because no one is buy­ing them, are value added com­mod­it­ies which are unsold due to buy­ers unable to prop­erly secure credit or cash
   to com­plete a trans­ac­tion. They would be sold pen­nies on the dol­lars before the scen­ario you sug­gest would occur.

2. Brian LeRoux | Dec 13, 2008 at 5:15 pm | Permalink

   Wil­liam Slade: you sir, are a troll. Attack­ing a per­son in a per­sonal man­ner rather than intel­li­gent dis­course wastes valu­able intel­lec­tual band­width. Begone.

   These ‘products’ are worth­less because they are being recog­nized as value­less. They do not solve a prob­lem for the con­scien­tious cit­izen of our planet. Those who wish to live in har­mony with them­selves and their environment.

   I need food, water, etc.

   I do not need to spend money on gas to get to work because I walk.

   I cer­tainly don’t need to secure credit and, I sus­pect, with some care and thought about your place in this world you will real­ize you do not need to either. Invest­ing in the know­ledge eco­nomy is a smart thing to do and the smartest com­pan­ies, people, organ­iz­a­tions will (con­tinue) to do this. Its up to all of us to edu­cate people about this too so we do not con­tinue to invest in the destruc­tion of our envir­on­ment and eco­nomy. We’re all in this together like it or lump it.

3. American Made | Dec 13, 2008 at 5:54 pm | Permalink

   Keep in mind that many “for­eign” cars are made in the US these days. You don’t see Subaru ask­ing for a bailout.

   The “big 3″ were los­ing money long before the eco­nomy went south. The major­ity of their rev­en­ues comes from out­side the US were they actu­ally sell cars that have good gas mileage that people want to buy. For some reason they don’t want to make/sell the same value cars in the US.

4. Rafe | Dec 13, 2008 at 7:30 pm | Permalink

   All of the auto­makers in the world have the sup­port of their national gov­ern­ments. Sweden is keep­ing Volvo and Saab afloat even though they’re sub­si­di­ar­ies of US com­pan­ies now.

   Any bail­out should be con­di­tioned on these com­pan­ies trans­ition­ing to mak­ing products that are bet­ter suited to the mod­ern, con­scien­tious con­sumer, but let­ting these com­pan­ies fail and these jobs go away when the employ­ees have no skills that will gain them sim­ilar employ­ment any­where else seems like a bad for­mula given cur­rent con­di­tions. It’s tough for people who have sal­able skills to find jobs right now, sud­denly put­ting a mil­lion people with sim­ilar skill sets on the street would be very bad for those work­ers and bad for the eco­nomy as a whole.

   I’d rather see a good bail­out that cre­ates appro­pri­ate incent­ives for the auto industry, but fail­ing that I’d prefer a bad bail­out to no bail­out at all.

5. Lauren Wood | Dec 14, 2008 at 9:30 am | Permalink

   FWIW, I’m in favour of sup­port­ing the employ­ees in strug­gling indus­tries (not just the big three auto com­pan­ies), whether that means assist­ance with relo­ca­tion expenses, retrain­ing, or reas­on­able, tem­por­ary make-work schemes that pro­duce use­ful results.

6. Doug Ransom | Dec 14, 2008 at 10:48 am | Permalink

   “Any bail­out should be con­di­tioned on these com­pan­ies trans­ition­ing to mak­ing products that are bet­ter suited to the mod­ern, con­scien­tious consumer, ”

   There should be no bail­out at all. It is the respons­ib­il­ity of any com­pany to pro­duce products their con­sumers want at a com­pet­it­ive price. I think the issue with these com­pan­ies is prof­it­ab­il­ity more than product. They need to go into bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion, rene­go­ti­ate with their sup­pli­ers of parts and labour, bond­hold­ers, and stock­hold­ers, and see if they can be reor­gan­ized into a prof­it­able busi­ness, or their parts sold off to other com­pan­ies who can run a prof­it­able busi­ness. The fail­ure of unvi­able com­pan­ies is mar­kets work­ing. Cre­at­ive destruc­tion is the pro­cess that allows us as a soci­ety to have an improv­ing stand­ard of living.

   Keep­ing unvi­able busi­nesses alive with bail­out money simply diverts resources from pro­duct­ive areas of our eco­nomy to unpro­duct­ive ones.

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