SUV's at altar, Detroit church prays for bailout...

[foxybrownsgc.livejournal.com]

A picture is still worth a thousand words....and one word that comes to my mind is 'sad'....



Read the article here:  http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN0746551320081207

I LOLed...

[cakemaven.livejournal.com]

(no subject)

[coldblossom.livejournal.com]

This is what gets me: the Big 3 are on their knees begging for a taxpayer-funded bailout while Congress grills them on how their business practices have failed and this gives them no confidence that the automakers will be able to turn their business around anytime soon.

They're all hypocrites, I think.

Our economy is crashing down around us and Congress is demanding accountability from the auto/financial industries, but who is demanding accountability from Congress for the mess we're in? Who is grilling them for their failed practices? 

I know that there are "investigations" slotted for some to-be-determined period in 2009, but no one in Congress or the media is even whispering about the root causes of this collapse other than in the general terms of  "the housing industry" and "Wall ST."

I don't care who is responsible, whether they are Republicans or Democrats or whatever. I care that they are exposed and fired. This should have been aired out during the elections so we didn't vote-in the people who got us into this mess, but of course the media ran interference for the Democrats on this one since they stood to gain so much from this election. Obama hasn't even mentioned it.

Its just so frustrating to see the government growing bigger and bigger before my very eyes. To see my country's finances collapsing. To see people losing their homes and their jobs. But among all of this, the very people responsible for the bad policies that led to this collapse are hiding. I email my local rep as well as my state senator (McCain) daily now telling him no more bailouts, no more pork, no new taxes, and that I want to know how we got to this point.

I really think that nobody is listening.

(no subject)

[coldblossom.livejournal.com]

(is it just me or is LJ running very slowly right now?)


One of my co-workers (a gearhead) sent this to me. He found it on one of the car sites he reads:

Editorial: Maxine Waters is Insane

In the House Financial Services Committee hearings on loans to the auto industry, Rep. Maxine Waters hectored the CEOs of Chrysler, Ford and GM. The California democrat attacked the execs on behalf of “small” independent auto dealers on “Main Street.” “Is there a commitment by any of you to give support to these small independent dealerships that include a lot of minority dealerships that are going to close down?” Never mind how they replied. Implied but not stated: The Big Three are guilty of, at best, racial insensitivity. At worst, racism. It’s untrue, unfair and outrageous.

Rep. Waters is upset that GMAC, Ford Credit and Chrysler Financial Services are calling in notes– as opposed to perpetually extending credit– to minority car dealers. In the interests of fairness, let’s keep in mind that this is the same Congresswoman who, in 2003, informed us, “We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae.” So no surprise that Waters’ tirade about the domestics’ dealer reduction and consolidation plans misses the entire purpose of exercise: reducing surplus dealers to survive.

[...]

at the moment, GM’s eight domestic brands account for 24 percent of the U.S. market. The General has well over 6k dealers. That’s down from the nearly 8k dealers back when GM’s brand portfolio accounted for over 35 percent of the U.S. market. But it’s still well over 4k more dealers than Toyota.

There is an upside to the domestics’ ubiquity: they are far better represented in rural areas and small towns than Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai and the rest of their transplanted competition.

Reading between the lines of Ford CEO Alan Mulally and GM CEO Rick Wagoner’s testimony in the hearings, both domestics [rightly] view their small town dealers as a strategic advantage. During his testimony, Mulally referred to Ford’s small town dealers: “We are woven into the fabric of every community that relies on our cars and trucks and the jobs our company supports.”

All of which means that Chrysler, Ford and GM are closing/losing proportionally more dealers in big cities than smaller cities and towns. Ford CEO Alan Mulally’s prepared remarks to Congress admitted as much, revealing that Ford has reduced dealers by a greater percentage in “large markets.”

There is no getting around the fact that the vast majority of minority-owned car dealers operate within large, urban markets. While there’s no reason to believe that minority-owned dealers are any less well-managed than other dealers, and many are indeed profitable, there’s also no reason to suggest that the domestics are targeting minority-owned dealers for closure. They’re simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To satisfy Rep. Waters’ desire to protect African-American dealers, to exempt them from the inevitable cull, Chrysler, Ford and GM would have to discriminate against both rural dealers and well-managed non-minority-owned urban dealers.

Of course, that’s exactly what Rep. Waters wants. She wants to make any loans to the domestic automakers contingent on their continued support of dealers that are part of their problems in the first place.

Read the rest at the link above.

This is exactly what I was talking about in my earlier post: people like Maxine Waters, Barney Frank, Pelosi, Reid...the whole lot of them and plenty of RINOs, too, don't belong in office anymore when they blatantly refuse to listen to the wishes of the people (we're their bosses, not vice-versa) and do what must be done.

There is this spot on my office wall that is starting to look worn. I should probably find a new spot to beat my head against.