Up until last night, I was adamantly against bailing out Big Auto. From a practical viewpoint, it seems like a terrible idea -- throwing good money after bad, wasting money that could and should be used for better things, propping up a dying, wasteful behemoth of an industry that has done everything in its power to resist looking into the future ....
Then I stumbled across a little piece of propaganda making the rounds. This notion that UAW workers in Detroit make $70 an hour. I'd seen it everywhere, and I hadn't really questioned it. I figured, okay, if everybody's saying it in all the news media, it's probably true. How could they so brazenly lie about a fact such as that? Well, it turns out it WAS a lie. So I wrote about it last night, here:
Do you think UAW workers make $70 an hour?
When I wrote this, I was still against the bailout. Then, someone named LeftHandedMan posted a comment which blew my mind. Follow me over the bump.
He wrote:
I hear ya (16+ / 0-)
there are a ton of flat-out lies and bullshit being passed around.
The GOP never dreamed it would get to kill a massive part of organized labor and have an entire region of the country completely collapse on the Democratic parties watch to boot, but that is just the opportunity that has arisen for the Limbaugh/Coulter wing of the GOP.
A 25 billion dollar loan, with strings attached mandating the auto industry stay the fuck out of monkeying with healthcare reform and making them go green or else, could save hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending over the next 10 years alone.
10 to 12 million jobs lost, boom!, 200 to 1 trillion dollars in emergency social spending to deal with the collapse's impact on the region, the UAW dead and Wal-Mart the biggest employer in the region, Michigan in full economic collapse and millions of voters ripe for being in play in the next round of the Culture War.
The GOP, and the media pundits who are all clamoring for Obama and the Congress to let the auto industry die will be damning us and running against the Democratic Party as the party that 'Let Michigan Die' or 'Let Detroit Die' for a generation if the auto industry is allowed to die.
The auto industry is 4% of our GDP.
If it goes, thats several years added on to the economic crisis that we face.
And probably Bobby Jindal in 2012 running as Ronnie Reagan on a white horse to "save" America.
And that's when I realized .... this isn't about practicality at all. Sadly, this is about politics. Once again, the Rethuglican Assholes of America Party is going to exploit this any way they can, and they will orchestrate any sort of horrible debacle in order to capitalize on it later.
So if we really want to look to the future, in a truly practical way -- and unfortunately being practical now involves figuring out how to thwart the Republican Fucktards who screw everything up -- we simply HAVE to keep them from doing this.
We have to stop the Reporklicans from destroying the Big Three, and their unions, so they can come in and "solve the problem" later.
Because that's what they do. It's the Shock Doctrine at work -- again. And Obama hasn't even been inaugurated yet. Like the pirhanas they are, they're already snapping their teeth at merely the scent of a potential disaster they can push into fruition.
That is why we have to stop them, and that is why we have to prop up Big Auto -- at least until Barack gets into office and saner, and less evil, minds can take over the the country. Not because it's the "Right Thing To Do" but because if we don't, the Redorklicans are gonna run the country even deeper into a ditch AND take power because of it.
The worst thing about dealing with evil is the sheer amount of time and energy you have to put into keeping them at bay. It's a real waste. A serious waste of resources.
But unfortunately that's what we're dealing with now. Evil bastards who will gleefully destroy Detroit, and one of the last great Unions in the country, just to gain political capital in the most negative and nasty way possible.
So let's do everything we can to stop them.