OMFG

just a heads up, this is bound to be a profanity laden post.

Obama thinks we should help the Detroit. Bush thinks we should help Detroit. party leaders on both sides think we should help Detroit. the House overwhelmingly passed the measure. it then died in the Senate.

the Senate is supposed to be the senior house. the one that deliberates and works in the best long term interest, while the House is more short sighted. typically. in this case the House passed a bill thats good for America in the long term, and the Senate killed it.

what really pisses me off is that the trickle down from a fall of GM and Chrysler will be devastating to the US economy, and the world wide consequences look pretty grim to me as well. Ford seems to be able to stand on its own for now, but its not on the firmest footing either.

sure, half of Americans dont think we should bail out the auto industry, but they may not understand the workings of all this. supposedly Representatives and senators do. but they seem to be willing to allow our biggest manufacturers go bankrupt and possibly fail altogether. would you buy a car from a bankrupt automaker?

ive yammered on before about how Chrysler paid back its loan in full plus interest when it got a bailout a couple of decades ago. back then congress saw the risk in allowing them to fail and have only a few companies control manufacturing. every market share that Detroit loses goes straight to Europe and Asia. weve already lost our once world leading steel industry to foreign ownership and some products cannot be made here. i cant imagine allowing the US auto industry disappearing and having to buy foreign cars.

sure they may manufacture here, but all the profit goes back to corporate headquarters in Tokyo, Seoul, Frankfurt, Beijing etc. its a situation that i dont like to think about and the immediate effects of losing all those jobs will have dire effects on the economy.

this case exemplifies the 'inaction is tantamount to death' saw. the Senate has done nothing and now it is up to President Bush to do something by executive order. im fairly optimistic that he will. and this is a situation that i never thought i would be in: cursing congress and pulling for Bush with a month left in his term.

im incredibly disappointed in our lawmakers for not making this work. theyve been working on a deal for weeks. hammering away to get something we all could agree on and in the end they kill it at the last minute and allow domestic industry to flounder a fail. its fucking ridiculous that they couldnt come up with some way to help Detroit. something. but the venerable Senate flipped Detroit the bird, and now the Democratic stronghold and union capital that is Detroit is depending on a president Bush. this unlikely alliance is a result of the fact that if the companies go down, thats big businesses failing, thats the union failing, and thats real people suffering. which is why its so fucking mind blowing that the goddamned Senate fucked us all.

and dont get me wrong, i dont think Detroit is innocent here. until the last 5 or 10 years, theyve been laggards who deserved to lose the market share that they did. but theyve improved by leaps and bounds in the last decades. when gas went through the roof, SUV sales plummeted. this formerly profitable market dried up. no they shouldnt have put all their eggs in that basket, but it was making them money while they developed new cars. then their credit dried up when the banks went up in smoke, and now, in the midst of a restructuring and retooling process, they are left without the capital to keep the progress theyve made going.

ive said it before and ill say it again. its the reason this gets me so fired up. were all in this together, people... im pulling for us...