California on the Brink

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Perry Winkle

"Let" does not indicate desire. There are pragmatic benefits to letting the inevitable happen and then rebuilding.

Bailouts reward poor performance. Rewarding failure is the road to ruin, as we're now demonstrating spectacularly.

I agree. I don't think we should EVER bailout ANY company. In the situation we are in, however, not bailing out the banks would have been a complete disaster. I just think people need to be going to prison as well. Here is a link to something I watched about this recently... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...eakingthebank/

In addition, it's fucking ridiculous that ANYONE in a failing company should be allowed to get ANY kind of a bonus. I don't give a shit if they have a contract or not.

And let's not forget, this has going on for a long time, giving people bonuses when the company loses money. We need to completely restructure the business model. But then, you know, everyone whines that we're interfering in the private sector. But the private sector isn't interested in changing. And why should they? They win, no matter what. So, we are in a viscious cycle. What to do, what to do...

We have become too complacent as a society about the corruption and greed in business and government. They get away with too much. We have privatized the profits and wealth, and socialized the debt. THAT is WRONG. The people at the top make risky choices, take home boatloads of money, then when it all goes south, they get to keep all that money while everyone else suffers. And those people knew it was going to crash. They had to. And now we are counting on those same people to get us out of this mess? AND they get to make boatloads MORE money in the process of cleaning up a disaster THEY caused? WTF?

I do not think it was very smart to give so much money to failing automakers either. IMO, we should have given money to people who are creating the cars of the future, like Tesla Motors, and it would not have cost NEARLY as much. The guy at Tesla said a billion, just ONE billion, is SO much money, they could do a LOT with it. But GM needs 30 billion MORE, in addition to what they have already gotten? I really don't see the justification in giving ANY company more than what it is actually worth. And I believe GM, at the time we gave them the first injection of money, was valued at about $1 billion. WTF?

We should have also spent the money of infrastructure, and creating new green tech companies, stuff like that. I believe this administration has handled the situation VERY POORLY.