Dec 05 2008
Crooks & Liars
Yesterday I heard Monica Crowley discussing the following story regarding how a top Congressional Democrat’s personal wealth is heavily tied to the auto-industry bail out:
But nobody’s been a bigger advocate for Motor City interests than Dingell. And for him, the stakes aren’t just political, they’re personal.Â
“There’s an actual conflict,” said Ryan Alexander of the nonprofit group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “His personal financial health, you know, the wealth of his family is tied up in the car industry.”Â
Dingell’s wife Debbie once worked as a lobbyist for GM.Â
When she married the congressman, she became a senior GM executive at an undisclosed salary. And we found the couple has extensive GM assets.Â
Dingell’s current financial disclosure filed in May lists GM stock worth up to $350,000, options worth up to $1 million more, and a GM pension fund. In 2000, among the Dingells’ GM assets were stock options worth up to $5 million.Â
And in 1998, the congressman reported selling GM stock options worth up to $1 million dollars.Â
Dingell wouldn’t agree to an interview.Â
The fact is Dingell should just recluse himself from the entire subject due to his financial ties to GM, which was just on Capitol Hill with its hands out trying to get into the taxpayer’s pockets. As many have noted GM should be shedding useless costs (like job Debbie Dingell holds) and the UAW should be accepting cuts before anyone touches the federal treasury. No one can seriously claim GM can’t run leaner from top to bottom.
So why are the hard working middle class voters bailing people like this out for mismanagement and wasteful spending?
GM, for example, is a global company, not a US company. Their company HQ is in the US but they have manufacturing in China, Russia, Brazil, Hungary, and other countries.
Why isn’t GM going to THOSE countries to ask for a bailout? Wouldn’t a failure of GM hurt those countries too?
What guarantee do we have that GM won’t use bailout cash to upgrade old or build new facilities overseas? If people think the cash will be only used here in the US, then they have no idea of the scale or the scope of GM.
And I posted about the Dingell conflict of interest here a couple of weeks ago in a rant about the Democrat’s increasing culture of corruption and the press that enables it by keeping quiet about it.
Bankruptcy is the only rational option. Every other course leads to first partial and then full nationalization, and that will be an even bigger disaster. (I invite anyone to show me how nationalization could work over the long run.)
The car companies are not collapsing, they have collapsed. Past Tense. There is no going back to the old business model, there is no “saving” of them possible, there is no viable business plan for them going into the future. They are fundamentally flawed at every level.
The “big 3” need to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch. Some pieces of them will be useful. But the vast majority needs to be gone. Will there be severe consequences to the rest of the economy? Of course there will! But those consequences are coming no matter what, they cannot be avoided now. It’s just a question of how many tens of billions of dollars will be thrown away before we admit the inevitable.
As for the workers, give every displaced worker a one time $250,000 cash payment. That will be far cheaper then trying to save the useless, bloated, dinosaurs.