Musings II

I saw on C-SPAN2 the speeches given after the vote to help GM and Chrysler failed. Senator McConnell said the the companies did it to themselves and had no one else to blame. I imagined the Senator at a dock from which some stranger falls into the water and can't swim, but raises a hand to ask for help. In my scenario, the Senator tells the drowning person that it was the flailing non-swimmer's fault for falling in and not learning how to swim, not the Senator's doing, just before the erratic splasher goes under the surface for the last time.

The sum of money involved was roughly $14 billion. I switched over to the Bloomberg channel to watch the billions disappear from Asian and European stock exchanges, thinking it was far more than what our car companies needed.. It was informative--most Republicans and three Democrats prevented the Senate for taking up the Bill for a vote. None of these people should be entrepreneurs. None of them even considered how much money the Government would now be obligated to pay in unemployment insurance, nor even mention how much tax revenue would be lost, or ancillary businesses going OUT-OF-BUSINESS...

Weeks ago Republicans berated Democrats for suggesting that a company should be told what to manufacture -- hybrid cars, for example--that was not Government's job to do... But in speeches, the Republicans offered one reason to vote against was the UAW not accepting a diminished wage rate equal to what auto workers in non-union car manufacturing plants were getting. THAT'S NOT INTERFERENCE --THAT'S OBJECTIVITY!
Lastly, in trying to get the list of Senators who voted against it, I ended up on a website that was distinctly RIGHT WING happy beyond ebullience. CREATIVE-DESTRUCTION was their market religion. BANKRUPTCY was their solution.

As far as I know, as mentioned on that site, John McCain was with Letterman and did not vote. Was he AWOL? Will GWB become the sugar daddy for GM? Stay tuned.