Sam- I am in complete agreement. Let them file and restructure. It is the only way for them to actually rebuild and get on the right track.

These jackass CEOs of motown iron have been gladly shipping jobs out of the country for years under nafta, cafta, gatt and wto.  Michael Moore was one of the first to blow the whistle with his movie "roger and me" but got nowhere.   The big three detroit auto manufacturers have a history of treating their workers badley which breeds bad union politics to counter it.  Bad for business, bad for production quality and bad for the families of the workers (a complete adversarial system of very poor management). 

Compare this to the Japanese manufacturers that have built plants here who pay less, provide less benefits and have much happier, more loyal workers workers. WHY?  They do not have special parking places for management, no elevated lunchrooms with waiters, napkins and gourmet food for management folks at lunch, no luxury offuices for management.  Plus, they reward innovative thinking for ways to lower costs and increase quality.  These folks use effective worker centered management which encourages involvement and personal investment in quality by workers.

The best solution proposed was to provide large, variable catagory income tax breaks for buying a new car.  The biggest tax break would be 100% write-off of grosss income for a small high mileage car, with less but significant for larger and more expensive cars.  Foreign cars would get a reduced tax writeoff if they were assembled here.  The % of parts manufactured in this country would be figured in with the most tax benefits going to auto made of the most parts in the USA and assembled in the USA.  This would quickly clear the lots, help rebuild the detroit 3, and quick start the economy, plus save fuel.  The laws could be changed to push huge tax wtrite-off for the new batch of electric cars coming out staring in 2010, when we will possiobly see the GM Volt, which is going to be an awesome, affordable car with this kind of tax plan.

We need to say goodbye to nafta, cafta, gatt and wto, and start taxing the hell out of any corporations that move production outside of the USA and start prosecuting and putting the banksters in jail that print and distribute fraudulant Fiat money.

I wonder how much money they spend lobbying congress ...Ya know this is all about corporations reverting and re-establishing themselves as global players, didn't GM just move to Russia ? meanwhile the only thing keeping corporations in America paying a living wage with benefits, is a union that's in bed with the government..

All we really need to do is STOP paying federal taxes.

Calgon, Take Me Away !!  LMAO

Agar, I completely agree with all you say, but it’s also a question of being between a rock and a hard place (or giving in to corporate blackmail, again!)

October saw the biggest drop in consumer spending on record (prices in fact dropped, raising the specter of deflation), whereas the rest of the world is also slipping onto recession. Things look grimmer by the day.

One in ten jobs relies directly on the auto industry. Allowing them to go bust would have a devastating impact on the rest of the economy. 

I loath the very idea, but as things stand can we afford not to bail them out?

I say let the auto-makers file for bankruptcy. Right now they are just not competitive and produce the wrong product and a bail-out will merely buy time.

The idea that filing for bankruptcy equates to these companies disappearing is just not accurate. They would reorganize under Chapter 11 and end up with restructured organizations. The only issue that argues against this is the impact on the consumer who would be reluctant to purchase their cars if they knew a bankruptcy was likely and the answer there would be for the Feds to get involved in ensuring that warranties would be honored as part of any reorganization.

A bail-out is throwing good money after bad unless there is a fundamental restructuring of the corporations - which includes lowering labor costs.

The average consumer has a schizophrenic attitude when it comes to the moving of jobs overseas. Yes, we all decry the jobs that have been lost - including our manufacturing base. But we all want our consumer products cheap and these are not mutually compatible. We cannot price consumer products manufactured in the US at prices based on overseas manufacturing because the labor costs in China, India, etc are  a fraction of what we pay workers here.

We cannot have our cake and eat it!

Preston & Others,

Youre smarter than this...

These CEOs were/are Incentivized by the Banksters, the Israeli Dual Citizens & their Lackey Sellouts, Through the Unconstitutional US Tax Code, TO move their jobs overseas.  Wall Street & majority Shareholders,  corrupt the system by rewarding high Earnings (PE) profits at Any cost,  fictional or nonfictional, and these clueless CEOs, today with hat in hand, reaped these outrageous salaries as a result. This same Tax code is brought to you by an illegal Federal Reserve.

And the US Congress Critters here, do Nothing to protect US jobs leaving and having to compete with child & slave labor in China, making $10 a day, 7 days a week. 

This is ALL by design. World government, Religion & Currency. All thats required is to collapse the existing system to bring it about. Youre seeing that now. This is not happenstance or a coincidence, but an Engineered event. Youre only seeing the beginning, just wait until the main performance..

AIG offered nothing to we the people, nor did the other Wall Street firms who stole from the US treasury courtesy of Israeli Dual Citizens: Bernanke & Paulson.

Wal Mart has Destroyed 100,000 USA Mom & Pop businesses, defer local taxes for decades & use illegals to build the stores, who further tax the US social systems with their Illegal families when brought here: (Schools, hospitals, prisons) while the Illegal workers drive down US Labor costs or steal US jobs.

If one would like to see how Wal Mart works, & the Destruction from Wal Mart, here is a good expose into it.

http://judicial-inc.biz/wal_mart_health_care.htm

I dont defend the indefensible.  The corporate jets shoud go, no doubt,  but here are US Tax Bailout dollars at work.

Irate Congressman Demands Resignation of AIG CEO

11-19-2008

"A leading critic of AIG today demanded the company's CEO resign in the wake of the disclosure of yet another "Junket" at a resort spa. In a letter to AIG's CEO Edward Liddy, Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said the decision to hold an event for independent financial advisors last week at a luxury Phoenix resort was "outrageous" given an earlier pledge by Liddy to curtail such events. "

keepthefaith;

If the cake comes from China, we don't want to eat it! That is one very good reason to buy US. 

Preston,

I don't like your idea to create incentives to lower prices on undesirable cars, instead we should create incentives to lower prices on desirable cars. It is the fat cat unions who have insisted on making our workers slow or lazy and too expensive to compete in a global market.

Nonsense.

There are Tariffs Imposed on US goods in China, Japan and those we trade with, yet we dont impose the same protectionist tariffs here on their goods, & we allow them to build production facilities HERE.

The US Can compete globally,  with some changes mind you, but the Banksters want to destroy The US Manufacturing & Production sector. 

Yes, Unions have outlived their usefulness, but they brought us the 40 hour work week,  safety & Child protection laws, Pension & Healthcare. Thaey are now in some ways, part of the problem but not THE Problem.

We already have a solar powered electric car developed by GM & Toyota a decade ago.  The  Electric Toyota RAV 4 is still on the road today.  The product was bought by Chevron and the car was Killed, this back in the late 90s and early 2000 models.  80mph and 300 miles per charge. Done, Dead, Killed.

Naomi Klein: Bailout is ‘multi-trillion-dollar crime scene’

David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Raw Story
Wednesday, Nov 19, 2008

The Bush administration has already handed out almost half of the $700 billion in bank bailout money authorized by Congress but has not even filled the mandated oversight positions to review how it is being used.   Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, has described the handling of the bailout as "borderline criminal" because of this and other problems. Klein spoke to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on Monday to explain her accusations.

"We were all reassured that there was going to be transparency, accountability, legality," Klein stated. "But now we’re finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this. … Essentially, what the Bush administration has done is said, ‘We dare you to challenge us and be responsible for the Great Depression.’  Klein sees 3 areas of borderline illegality.

The first is that rather than being used to get banks lending again, the bailout money "is instead going to bonuses, is instead going to dividends, going to salaries, going to mergers."

The 2nd is that, without Congressional authorization, "the Treasury Department pushed through a tax windfall for the banks, a piece of legislation that allows the banks to save a huge amount of money when they merge with each other. And the estimate is that this represents a loss of $140 billion worth of tax revenue for the US government."

The 3rd problem, which dwarfs the $700 billion bailout itself, is that "there’s another $2 trillion that’s been handed out by the Federal Reserve in emergency loans to financial institutions, to banks, that actually we don’t really know who they’re handing the money out to, because, apparently, it’s a secret."

"If the Fed has accepted distressed assets as collateral in exchange for these loans," stated Klein, "there’s a very good chance the taxpayers aren’t going to be getting this money back. … So that’s why we’re calling this the ‘trillion-dollar crime scene’ or the ‘multi-trillion-dollar crime scene.’"