On Apr 18, 12:31*pm, Han wrote:
Kurt Ullman wrote :





In article , Dan Espen
wrote:

Kurt Ullman writes:

In article , Dan Espen
wrote:

Government HAS NOT taken over _any_ banks or automobile companies.
You're in some kind of deluded dream world.

Of course they have. They gave them money and the government has in
the past, and is currently, telling many of these companies what
they can and cannot pay in dividends, executive bonuses and other
areas.

I don't have the inclination to look any of this up, but what you are
describing is STANDARD for any large scale investor.
* *Not hardly. These are all done by the Board of Directors and the
* *Feds
have no direct reps on most of the Boards. Even so, few large scale
investors (especially in places as big as car companies and banks)
have enough votes on the board to mandate these things. The Feds in
this instance have come in as an outside entitity and told the board
what they could or could not do.

That does not constitute "taking over".
* Pretty much by most definitions.

IIRC, it was a question of letting the car companies go under, or
"invest" big money in them.

They did not have to go under any more so than American Airlines,
United Airlines, Continental, Texaco, and a long list of other
companies.
They went bankrupt, re-organized and are in business today. And
in that process, the govt wasn't there screwing the secured
bondholders
in an act that was unconstitutional and handing what should have been
their stake to the unions.



Anyone who had the inclination to "invest"
such sums would have negotiated some kind of oversight of what the board
could or couldn't do after the "investment" was made.

Sure they could, but there was no attempt to do so. Instead
the govt took over the whole process.


And, FWIW, Ford management overcame their problems without aid from the
government. *Makes me think GM management was quite a bit at fault. *Just
to make sure you understand this liberal progessive, I find wages and
benefits for UAW workers high, but "free" enterprise negotiated those,
right?

--

Yes, under rules that favored the unions. But still, I agree, GM
and Chrysler should have just taken the strikes and either gotten
the unions under control or gone bust a long time ago. The unions
were just one part of the problem. There was bad management too.