Auto Bailout: People Hurt By The Passing Of An Era

The automakers are now shutting down the plants that made SUV's throwing hundreds of workers out of their jobs at the holidays. While it's difficult to feel much compassion for the corporations that should have adjusted their production to the realities of the energy situation long ago, it is heartbreaking to see so many people's lives disrupted.

From today's New York Times:

Dan Doubleday, who had 22 years on the job, broke down in the plant’s snowy parking lot afterward. I was a fork lift driver,” he said, glancing at his watch through welling tears. “Until about seven minutes ago.”

“For a while we had it made,” Ms. Gonzalez said. “I just wish it would have lasted.”

And perhaps it could have lasted, if America was not first and foremost a country where the god of unfettered market capitalism, run on the backs of workers for the benefit of greedy executives and shareholders, is worshipped. No, we don't want Socialism here. We don't want the workers to have any say, any input into production and the way corporations are managed. Socialism comes though, in the end, in the form of billions of dollars in government bailouts, except that the bailouts go to the corporations, not the workers.

Wake up America!

Jim