Automaker's Bailout

Here's the letter I sent to my Congressman and Senators:

Automaker Bailouts:

The automakers need a bailout, but apparently, they can afford expensive pop-up ads in AOL asking me to contact my member of Congress to lobby them to help the Automaker Industry.

It motivated me to write to you, but not in support of them. This is the same industry that has spent millions in lobbying the Congress over the last 25 years to keep CAFE standards low so that they could continue to make crappy cheap cars that use fuel like you are flushing it down the toilet. Rather than leading the world with engineering, they dragged their heels and argued that it just couldn't be done. They've been telling us for years that they can't make more fuel efficient cars.

A year ago, I started looking for a car to replace my 20 mpg Jeep Cherokee. I wanted to buy something that got better gas mileage, and had found that most cars now got worse gas mileage. So if I want to buy a car that won't bankrupt me with the fuel charges when gas gets back up to $4 a gallon, there is no smart American choice.

We can put a man on the moon, but we can't make an 80 or 100 mpg car? We can supply the world with trucks, tanks, boats, and planes during WWII, but we can't figure out how to make a plug in hybrid or electric car? We can figure out atomic energy, but we can't figure out a solar car?

Detroit deserves to die on it's own capitalistic rhetoric, if nothing else. In February of this year, Bob Lutz, GM's Chairman, made a very public statement that global warming was a crock. This was probably just after he approved of taking another couple of mpg's off of the efficiency of the latest truck they make. These people are the problem, not part of the solution. They are why we are so addicted to foreign fuel, and why we are having such a hard time with energy consumption in this country. Hard core proud capitalists are the first to invoke "too bad" or "they should have known better" or "survival of the fittest" when someone else falls on hard times, but they see it entirely differently when it's their own bad decisions that endanger their industry.

If we have to bail them out, if everyone is set on doing that, I believe it should come at a high price. I think they should be forced to fast-track develop high mpg cars, as well as electric and alternate energy cars, and prohibited from ever producing another Hummer or Excursion.

In addition, I believe that if they are going to get bailed out, that their top executives, who unarguably have failed at their job of keeping their companies sound and steered in the right direction, should be limited in their compensation. If we bail them out, and then the next week, I see an article talking about how Bob Lutz got his $300 executive bonus, you should expect to get many more letters from constituents.

We've just elected a lot more Democrats to Congress and will finally have an intelligent President we can be proud of, so let's not lay a big rotten egg with the first major decision of the new Congress and President and allow these auto industry jokers to get a fat bailout without a whole lot of conditions. They should almost wish they hadn't asked for the bailout when they see the conditions. The biggest irony is that if you force them to make efficient cars, Americans will start buying their cars again, and they will get healthy due to natural market forces. You almost have to legislate good sense back into them.