A Look Ahead for The Auto Bailout

Brooks starts out rather snarkily today, but then rather remarkably goes all gushy about the team Obama is putting together: Finally, there are many people on this team with practical creativity. Any think tanker can come up with broad doctrines, but it is rare to find people who can give the president a list of concrete steps he can do day by day to advance American interests. Dennis Ross, who advised Obama during the campaign, is the best I've ever seen at this, but Rahm Emanuel also has this capacity, as does Craig and legislative liaison Phil Schiliro.
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Believe me, I'm trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haut-bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb. The events of the past two weeks should be reassuring to anybody who feared that Obama would veer to the left or would suffer self-inflicted wounds because of his inexperience. He's off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.

I am still waiting for David Broder's Bush bounce. Broder is the "dean" of reporters in D.C. so he can't be wrong.

trifecta, the problem with Broder's bounce is that Bush bounced into a trash can and can't get out.
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Not his fault.

There were no WMD's. The world did not end due to the lack of spending 700b. The auto folk don't need 25b to design and sell Hummers, 600 HP Corvettes, 500 HP Mustangs, and a fleet of Hemi powered ugly cars. In addition they shouldn't just sit there with their mouths open when asked for a plan, about private flights, and salary reduction. The delay is justified.

Andy
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I respectfully disagree about Harry Reid. First of all if you are going to champion a bailout for the auto industry you might want to tell them to bring a comprehensive plan BEFORE you convene a lameduck session. Secondly there was a bipartisan group working on a compromise and they said they were making progress but he cut them off at the knees. Thirdly at some point he is going to HAVE to bring a bill to the floor when he doesn't know if he has enough votes. The Repubican Senators have realized that all they have to do is talk sh!t and Harry Reid will back down. The stock market is going to continue to tank until a deal gets done and what Harry Reid needed to do was give the same brow beating speech that Barney Frank did the other day about how the Republicans and Blue Dogs voted for the Wall Street white collar bailout but found religion with the much smaller blue collar bailout. Even with the CEOs botching every thing pr wise like i said on another thread, the bailout isnt about them. They are multi millionaires many times over and if the Big 3 go under they will find another job within 24 hours paying them more millions. Its about the 3 million rank and file who arent making 6 figures and have mortgages and healthcare for their families to worry about. Its about the tax payers who would have to underwrite both the pensions and the unemployement funds for those workers. For them to call a lameduck session specifically to pass an auto bailout and then to not get it done BUT find the time to make sure Joe Lieberman keeps his gavel is just a frikking farce.
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As to Andrea Mitchell, she can get on my nerves by arguing points that I don't agree with but when it comes to breaking news she is usually pretty reliable. She is the one who broke the news about HRC being up for SOS in the first place and it was funny that everybody questioned her but she actually turned up to be right, again, also.
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Those staffers at SI have WAY more backbone than Harry Reid. They are making SI choose rather than making themselves sacrificial lambs. And really its the right thing to do because there is no guarantee that any of them will get another job any time soon.

mithra5
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The world might not have ended but the Dow has lost half of its value in since this time last year. And what a lot of people know but are scared to report on is many companies bank on this time of year because of christmas which is the single biggest season for buying every year in this country so when Dec 25th passes and the numbers come in that people didnt buy worth a damm this year because they don't have any money to spend and no credit to fall back on and if nothing has changed as far as implementing the 700 billion dollar bail out and an auto bailout as well, the economy is going off the cliff to start the new year. When it happens remember I said it here first.

I just gotta get my Lieberman hate on for a minute too
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Much has been made about Barack Obama saying he "wanted" Lieberman to caucus with the Dems and that because he said that the Dems hands were tired and they felt they had to give him the chairmanship. Well I recall last week Barack Obama saying he wanted Congress to get the auto bailout done. Hmmmm maybe he doesn't have as much clout as we thought huh?

While the Joe's of the world clamor for Obama to be president already, we get this:
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Those declines have come despite reassuring comments from Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who told National Public Radio a week ago that people were no longer worried about the possibility of a major bank failure. “I've got to tell you,” he said. “I think our major institutions have been stabilized. I believe that very strongly.”
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Yes, Mr. Paulson, because your predictive track record is so very strong I now feel fine. No reason to pay attention to this Krugman guy, who tends to actually be right more often than he is wrong:
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How much can go wrong in the two months before Mr. Obama takes the oath of office? The answer, unfortunately, is: a lot. Consider how much darker the economic picture has grown since the failure of Lehman Brothers, which took place just over two months ago. And the pace of deterioration seems to be accelerating.
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Most obviously, we're in the midst of the worst stock market crash since the Great Depression: the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has now fallen more than 50 percent from its peak. Other indicators are arguably even more disturbing: unemployment claims are surging, manufacturing production is plunging, interest rates on corporate bonds — which reflect investor fears of default — are soaring, which will almost surely lead to a sharp fall in business spending. The prospects for the economy look much grimmer now than they did as little as a week or two ago.
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Yet economic policy, rather than responding to the threat, seems to have gone on vacation. In particular, panic has returned to the credit markets, yet no new rescue plan is in sight. On the contrary, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, has announced that he won't even go back to Congress for the second half of the $700 billion already approved for financial bailouts. And financial aid for the beleaguered auto industry is being stalled by a political standoff.
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Paulson actually acts as if he is shell shocked and hamstrung by ideology: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called the financial crisis now plaguing the world economy a "once or twice" in a 100 years event, even as he warned Thursday against imposing too-strict regulations to prevent a repeat calamity..

Okay which turkey video is funnier? Has WKRP finally lost their crown.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iafzqOCaxA4
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http://wonkette.com/404521/check-out-the-hot-new-sarah-palinturkey-grinder-bloodporn

wvng -- I think there are many leaders in D.C. who are frozen not only by ideology, but by having lived in the status quo for so long.
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It's almost like after 9/11. Nothing after it will be quite like it was before the event.
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Our politicians are a lagging indicator of the public's will. The inertia will take a while to overcome. Momentum will build. American political leadership is reactive rather than proactive.

Congress's muddled maneuvers on Thursday only made investors more anxious, pushing the Dow Jones down another 400-plus points and the broader S&P 500 index to an 11-year low.

Doesn't anyone see the irony that thousands of 'free market' Capitalists are lamenting the lack of government action in order to distort a market in favor of failing ventures?

Note that I'm not arguing against any bailout, but the rank hypocrisy necessary to claim adherence to Conservative principles and decry helping consumers as "socialism" needs to contuinue to be called out. The last thing we need is for 8 years from now, the ghost of St. Reagan comes to claim credit for a recovery that will occur naturally.

Gunny, I'll have to watch when I get home. However Les Nessman commenting "Oh the humanity" on WKRP was one of television's funninest moments.

Paul Dirks
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It goes back to the saying that their are no atheists in foxholes. When the economy is great its pretty easy to be a "free marketer" extolling the virtues of small government and little to no regulation. But when those same "free marketers" are faced with their own employment mortality they have a "battleground conversion" to big govt liberalism. Its always that way. And then after the "leftist librul" president gets the economy back on track, they will go right back to being small govt conservatives calling for an end to all this big govt librulism. Ah the circle of life

Thank, PNNTO, for the details. The poor man has to be paid for inconvenience and the deprivation he suffers. No wonder the industry is in trouble. Too many prima donnas in executive jets, private dining rooms and visits to golk vacation resorts to cajole dealers.

PD: Paulson is still cautioning Congress against "over-regulation". Mr Double Standard is alive and well while Mr Worker (except for Joe the Plunderer)struggles on.

Obama may yet say something public about the current situation (I sort of hope he does, but don't want to see him get sucked into being responsible for what happens in the next two months, when he has only the bully pulpit). The dow dropped in the last hour, and he couldn't have known that was going to happen. Seems poised to go up today. oops. I don't have a very good predictive record, so I shouldn't say that.
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I've been wondering if it was Obama who convinced Paulson to hold over the remaining $400 billion for Obama's administration.

SG and wvng: Some better insight as to why nothing got done yesterday on the bailout...republicans are the reason not Harry Reid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/washington/21lameduck.html?hp

Maybe someone can direct me to the tool that make your text a link.

Thanks

bitter-
Heard yesterday that the CEO of Toyota here makes 1 million, vs. 22.5 for GM's CEO (I think it's GM's)
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I really do think it would be very wise for these guys to set a 1 million limit on their income for say 2 years.

Andy - even Scarborough pointed out this morning that it was the Republicans who held this up

Andy, the tool is a Firefox plug in called Make Link. I don't know if Explorere has anything similar.

Andy
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In that article it rightly points out that lame ducks are normally useless exercises in futility. So as I said before why would they call a lame duck session knowing full well that everyone would expect them to pass a bailout bill if Reid didnt have the numbers? If you are going to call a lame duck you have a responsiblity to bring something to the floor otherwise all you are doing is setting everyone up for a fall when you don't get anything done. If they had brought a bill to the floor or at the very least allowed the bipartisan group that was working on a compromise continue to negotiate the market wouldnt have tanked at the end of the session yesterday. By the way did you hear that McConnell isn't even speaking to Harry Reid anymore? I wonder how Reid thought the auto bailout vote would go knowing he couldnt even negotiate with the Minority leader. What a dumbazz.

Kathy -- The whole executive compensation thing gets me wound up the way Joe Lieberman gets SGWhiteinfla wound up. I worked for a company where the CEO took the stock price from $65 per share and ran it down to $5.99 before he was fired and got his 21 million severance check, while the "employees" only got a 3% merit raise based on our "performance." What hypocrisy.
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This link demonstrates large bonuses are ineffective predictors for success in the compensation world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html

Explorer is a Microsoft product. They don't lead the league in innovation; only market share and patches.

Gunny, WKRP by a mile. The Palin episode will fade when she fades (please god let her fade) but WKRP's turkey drop will live forever. I laugh just thinking about it.
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However, if SNL picks it up (hard to imagine that they won't), and really plays up the slaughter in the background, I may have to reconsider.
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Speaking of really playing up the slaughter, I've been around both large industrial scale and small scale poultry processing operations. Even had a board committee meeting once with Polyface, Inc. America's most famous farmer as they were processing chickens. That was a hoot. But anyway, the magic fingers plucking machine would be the thing to have in the SNL background - the birds dance mightily as they are plucked, and it is very noisy.
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Might give WKRP a run for the money.

Kathy: a few years ago I worked with (not for) a large Japanese company for two years. Their executives travelled economy; stayed at middle-cost hotels (and they are in the top tier of companies) and the only real compensation I saw was a good entertainment allowance: food and drink - mostly beeroo(!).Their paper products sold worldwide at prices that we (US) could not match for equal or better quality.

I would say that excutive compensation should be a starting point for severe cuts.

Obama is not just cooling his heels. President-Elect Barack Obama‘s transition team is exploring a swift, prepackaged bankruptcy for automakers as a possible solution to the industry's financial crisis, according to a person familiar with the matter.