Reply #195: At the moment, saving the industry is more important than the agenda

[Still Sensible]

Have these auto companies made mistakes? No question. While many of us have wanted them to become more energy efficient and more ecologically responsible for a long time, the marketplace led them to focus on trucks and SUVs over the last decade. GM made a profit most of those years. I know all three of these companies make decent trucks and SUVs and, because I travel a lot and rent a lot of cars, I can tell you that by and large US cars are incredibly inferior--in everything from fuel efficiency to performance to comfort.

It seems that many here would like to take advantage of the opportunity that the current financial crisis affords to allow these companies to go under so that new entities--in the image our green desires would like to see--in their place.

That would be wrong!!!!!!!!!

Manipulating circumstance, at the expense of many peoples' livelihoods, to advance a political and social agenda--no matter how desirable that agenda may be--is flat out irresponsible in my view. And it would be little different from what the Bush GOP has doing for eight years with their agendas.

I believe the right approach would be to provide the companies these bridge loans to protect our neighbors' jobs and not make the recession worse. Do it under guidelines that require a business plan that ensures the taxpayers get paid back, that require the companies to move toward the greener, more ecologically responsible approach we desire, and not reward the executives for their past shortcomings.

And please, could the media quit equating the bridge loan plan being considered with the money-down-the-craphole financial bailout? It angers me that that the political atmosphere is such that somehow these two things are equated, despite the fact that what is being discussed for the auto industry is in fact twenty times less money than the financial bailout and would be loans with real oversight--compared to what looks like is going to end up being outright theft of the public treasury in favor of the banks.