Keep your crumbling politics out of our crumbling economy

A few months ago, I voiced my displeasure with the $700 billion bailout passed by the federal government to “save Wall Street”. But the feds went ahead and passed the bailout anyhow, which gave virtually no oversight and no checks or balances to distributing this massive sum of money.

Now, the “Big Three” American automakers have come forward and sought financial assistance, which was flatly shot down by Republicans in the U.S. Senate. They were asking for $25 billion, which is still an obscene amount of money, but only 1/28 of what went to Wall Street and less than 1/3 of the $85 billion that went to insurance giant AIG earlier this year.

When massive amounts of public money were going to the insurance industry, which is widely known to be a key fundraising constituency for the Republican Party, the bailout went through without a whole lot of scrutiny. But when the auto industry asked for assistance, the Republicans in the U.S. Senate immediately blamed the United Auto Workers union for a host of problems and promptly killed the deal.

Something doesn’t quite pass the smell test here. Maybe it was union busting. Maybe it was scratching the back of a major fundraising base while simultaneously screwing a political opponent. I unfortunately tend to believe it was an unsavory combination of both.

I’m not saying that the government should throw open its doors and bail out anyone who asks; that would be insanity. But the potential loss of a major American manufacturing industry will have a devastating loss on the national economy, with the very jobs we’re trying to create being allowed to dissolve forever. Not only do we lose the economic impact of the car manufacturers themselves, but we also lose the jobs of everyone who produces everything in the supply chain nationwide, not to mention dealerships and service centers. The full force and effect of such a job loss could be cataclysmic.

What makes an insurance company like AIG worth three times more than all three American automakers combined, anyhow? No one has really been able to explain to me how the apocalypse would have come if we hadn’t bailed out AIG, a company that most people had never heard of until they collapsed. Aren’t there a ton of insurance companies out there to keep the industry afloat?

And where is the oversight? As part of the auto industry bailout, there would have been a federally appointed ‘car czar’ who would have had far-reaching oversight powers. Somehow this wasn’t good enough for Senate Republicans, who miraculously had no problem basically giving a blank check to Wall Street and the insurance industry with no one looking to see how it was spent. The hypocrisy makes me sick.

I’m not saying that the auto industry bailout should have been rubber-stamped, but we need objective and non-partisan leadership when deciding who gets help and who doesn’t. The actions of the Senate Republicans smack of self-interest and bad politics in a time of national crisis, and that’s just wrong.