Road Warriors

Bob Reich looks at the Chrysler bankruptcy deal.

GM just announced it was laying of 21,000 more of its workers, as a means of assurring the Treasury Department the company is worthy of more bailout money. A Treasury official was quoted as saying approvingly that the goal is a "slimmed-down" GM.

What? Having General Motors or Chrysler cut tens of thousands of jobs in order to be eligible for a government bailout reminds me of "saving" Vietnam by bombing it to smithereens. Aren't we giving these companies billions of taxpayer dollars to save jobs? If not, we're just transferring money from taxpayers to GM and Chrysler bondholders and shareholders.

I agree with those who say the United States needs an auto industry. But there's no point spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for an auto industry that's a tiny fragment of what it was before. We could achieve that objective by doing nothing.

Which, if you are paying attention, paying off the shareholders and killing UAW jobs is exactly the point of the exercise.

The only thing the last 100 days has proven is that the UAW has approximately .0001% of the lobbying power among Democrats as the banks do. But hey, it's not like tens of thousands of auto workers and dealers are going to lose their jobs or anything.

After all, tens of thousands of unemployed auto workers will only help the Magical V-Shaped Recovery!