"Just Say No!" -Nancy Reagan

I'm getting really sick of these huge businesses asking for handouts when they don't really deserve one; I fail to see why General Motors deserves to be bailed out of a financial crisis that was completely foreseeable. Sorry you idiots thought SUV's were the wave of the future! Sorry you felt that focusing on blind-spot side-mirror technology was more important than researching environmentally-friendly solutions to our nation's rising gas prices! Sorry you had the chance to buy into those solutions in 1996 and killed the electric car instead! All this proves is that they were willfully ignorant of what the consumer really needed, even when the writing was on the wall--but it also proves they knew this day might come. GM and Ford have been protecting themselves under our current administration, since the current administration prefers hydrogen and petrol in lieu of more efficient solutions, like hybrid electric technology. I hardly think they should be rewarded for their narrow-minded thinking, or get bailed out because no one wants an overpriced, gas-guzzling SUV anymore, unless they've given birth to more than four children.

For the car companies to say "It's not fair" is the most unfair thing of all; that's how Capitalism works, assholes, or if you want to call it something else: NATURAL SELECTION. If you can't keep up with technology today, if you don't have the foresight to hire people who will plan for the future, if you think you deserve a handout after failing miserably, then you are smoking crack. Why should the government bail out huge businesses that FAILED? They're a big part of our economic problems right now--they don't need handouts, they need a giant dose of reality. Bailing them out doesn't sound like democracy, it sounds like a high school teacher playing favorites to a 6th-year senior who has no interest in graduating. I understand that people work for these companies, and it's not their fault they picked a lemon; but even if GM gets the bailout they think they deserve, it's only putting off the inevitable: those workers are going to have to pay for that bailout in their taxes, and in their future layoffs. They can start taking advantage of the worker re-training programs now or later--it's easier said than done, but if the future is changing, we must change with it. Either that or get left behind holding onto an ideal that cannot be sustained, ie; Socialism.

Someone said it better on www.openmarket.org:

"We can't let American capitalism, the engine of our growth and the growth of economies around the world, be corrupted into a hybrid form of socialism. We can't allow companies to reap all the benefits of profit without taking the lumps that come with failure--capitalism for the gains, but socialism for the losses. Sometimes businesses, even really big ones, need to go out of business to allow for renewable and sustainable business growth."

Hear, hear.