Bailout Bonanza

Help Us Build Stupid Vehicles- Bailout fever has hit all industries not just finance. Our good friends, Rick Wagoner of GM and Bill Ford of Ford descended on Washington yesterday to play the Taxpayers Please Subsidize Us game. Unlike, 1979 when Chrysler received a mere $1.2 billion, these guys are hoping for at least $25 billion upwards to maybe $50 billion. First off, it can be very much argued that ultimately the Chrysler bailout of 29 years ago hardly set the industry on the correct course. Now these pigs (in Wagoner’s case a $15.5 billion dollar loss in one quarter this year) come gleefully to the trough to plead how green they have become. I don’t mean to sound like a Heritage Foundation member, but these companies should receive zero subsidies. Each knowingly has a Euro division that builds small, fuel-efficient autos; these divisions remain quite profitable. They continued to sucker the American public in marketing SUV’s with bigger profit margins. To now claim that they need this money to retrofit plants and bring new green technology is a bit much, a bit too late. When the Japanese companies like Toyota have an entire seven-story building staffed with employees working solely on powertrain and battery technology, how will these clowns ever catch up. I realize just yesterday I was trumpeting the new Chevy Volt but at what cost to American consumers and taxpayers. These guys have fought higher mileage standards with every lobbyist penny available and now they demand money to produce higher mileage vehicles from taxpayers? Throw these bums out of DC and Detroit and turn car manufacturing over to the Silicon Valley. No taxpayer subsidies for old dirty fossil fuel technology losers.


Drill Baby Drill- The House yesterday approved the Democrats' sponsored bill to lift the longtime ban on offshore drilling 236-189. The Bill now goes to the Senate for deliberation, though Congress is in short session in order to be home for the elections, so one shouldn’t expect any progress. This Bill, though sad, as politics remains the cause for the offshore drilling backslide, does encompass some new alternative energy benefits. Oil companies would lose some tax benefits and utilities would be required to 15% of their electricity from renewable resources by 2020. The Grand Oil Party (GOP) is still unhappy (176 GOP congressman voted against it) that this plan didn’t go far enough in providing more dirty fossil fuels. In reality the whole thing is a political sham to get voters off Congress-peoples asses for still developing no formal cohesive energy policy.


OZONE- Scientists reported this week that the Stratospheric Ozone layer continues to show signs of depletion. Additionally, it was reported the Artic ice shelf has the second least coverage since tracking began in 1979. So, not a exceptionally good week for Planet Earth.