re: #251 Guanxi88

The thing that really pisses me off about this whole deal, of which the Auto bailout is but a part, is that these measures, intended to stave off the catastrophic, seem thus far to have done nothing but feather the nests of certain groups at the expense of the taxpayer and the rule of law. We saw it with the banks, the mortgages, now with autos, and soon with healthcare.

I agree. After all these months and all these billions of dollars, the “bailout” has completely failed to achieve it’s state goal - to keep these companies out of bankruptcy. It has been a completely, utter, miserable, epic and total failure. The only thing it has done is given auto executives, sitting atop piles of stock options that would be rendered utterly worthless the moment the companies entered bankruptcy court, a window in which to convert those options into sellable shares that they could slowly dump into the marketplace without running afoul of monthly limits on sales by executive shareholders. You can bet, too, that there are a number of Congress members who hold large blocks of stock in these companies that have likewise been dribbling shares back into the market under SEC radar, in hopes of coming out the end of the process with something rather than absolutely nothing. These sales, in turn, have shoved the stocks into penny territory even more rapidly, eroding corporate bargaining power, but greed triumphs over good corporate citizenship any day.