Monday, June 01, 2009
http://joshuapundit.blogspot.com/
Bye Bye GM
General Motors, an American Institution went bust today,filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning.
As with Chrysler, the UAW made out like a bandit while the bondholders, including a number of retirees, took a total hosing.The entire bankruptcy and the GM restructuring plan are the product of a secretive, unaccountable Obama Administration task force.
The government now owns 60% of GM in exchange for an additional $30 billion in addition to the $20 billion GM was already given, essentially to keep the UAW afloat. The Canadian government kicked in for an additional 12.5% while the UAW will walk away with 17.5%. The remaining 10% will be owned by existing bondholders.
This is not going to be painless. Just closing of hundreds of GM and Chrysler dealerships (run by GOP donors, no doubt) is expected to cost more than 100,000 jobs.
The biggest hosing, of course, will be taken by the American tax payer and consumer. We'll be footing the bill in more ways than one.
We will see small, boxy little go-karts produced out of GM and Chrysler, stuff Americans would never normally buy but will be forced to..because there's no going to be any choice. That's what Obama's 39 MPG CAFE standards are all about.They'll do it not by making existing cars more fuel efficient but by simply eliminating SUVs and larger, more comfortable vehicles. With $5.00 per gallon gas thanks to cap and trade, no one's going to be able to afford to run a decent size vehicle anyway except the wealthy elites.
Obama will run GM based on politics, and that means the UAW and the various environmentalist groups.
GM will never be profitable again, simply because no executive is going to risk taking on the Unions and risking his job.
Once GM runs through this additional $30 billion ( and believe me, they will)they'll simply come to the taxpayers for more. And Obama and the Democrats in Congress will give it to them, because it's about votes and power, not economic recovery.
Don't like it? Sorry, folks. Those Obama Tickets you bought in November are good until at least 2010..and maybe even longer.Two Army Recruiters Shot By Muslim In Little Rock
This morning, it was reported that two army recruiters were victims of a drive by shooting this morning:Police in Arkansas say a military recruiter has been killed in a shooting at an Army-Navy recruiting office in Little Rock and a second recruiter has been wounded.
Little Rock police Lt. Terry Hastings said one recruiter was fatally wounded when a man inside a black SUV fired shots at the office in West Little Rock at about 10:30 a.m.
The SUV was stopped on a highway a short time later and a suspect was taken into custody.
The name of the arrestee has now been released. He's Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — a 24-year-old Little Rock resident formerly known as Carlos Bledsoe who was charged with degree murder and 15 counts of engaging in a terrorist act. The terrorist charges were added because th eshots were fired at an occupied building.
Not much else is known, but I bet I can tell you this man's story...criminal record, converted to Islam in prison by a wahabi Imam, and associated with a radical mosque since his release.
The enemy is definitely inside the gates.It is astonishing how many times this scenario gets repeated without any attempt to end the cycle.
UPDATE: Well, whaddya know..the first part of my guess is proven correct. Now, let's wait and see if he converted in prison.
Funny, this murder isn't getting anything near the play in the dinosaur media that the murder of the abortionist Dr. Tiller is.
You'd think the press had an agenda or something...Saudi royal: "U.S. can't be energy-independent"
So says Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington and a key member of the Saudi royal family:"You can't get rid of oil. You can't get rid of fossil fuels — gas and coal — unless you want to price yourself out of existence," Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times.
"I'd hope that the general public in the United States would be wiser than to be deceived into thinking that the U.S. can ever be energy independent," he said.
"The U.S. has rising energy needs despite the economic downturn," Prince Turki said. "If you are going to be paying for wind, electric and solar energy equivalents that cost five or 10 times more than it costs to use oil, you are going to price yourself out of the market. You are going to lose whatever competitiveness you have in your products."
"Politicians, when they do that,{promise energy independence} I think they are misleading their publics," he said.
During his election campaign last year, President Obama said, "I will set a clear goal as president. In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil in the Middle East."
In one sense what Prince Turki is saying is the simple truth - abandoning fossil fuels, especially combined with Obama's cap and trade nonsense is a road to bankruptcy.
But it's also worth remembering that the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with an estimated 400-600 years worth of supply.and that we can gasify coal at about fifty bucks a barrel or less. It's a proven technology that's been around since WWII (Hitler used it to keep his war machine running) and has been vastly improved since. And that doesn't include our resources of shale oil or America's own oil sources, which we're barely utilizing at the moment.
There's also nuclear power, something the Europeans and the Japanese embraced after the Arabs turned off the spigot in the 1970's.
And we could also try building a few refineries, which is where the real bottleneck in gasoline occurs.
Add all this to ramping up our domestic production and some basic conservation measures and and the US could achieve energy independence in a remarkably short space of time..certainly within one four-year presidential term. That would buy us the time we need and then some to develop the new energy technologies for the future. Not to mention a slew of high paid US jobs, a boost for our economy, more oil to sell to other countries and strategic leverage in certain areas where we need it.
Of course, if we did that two things would happen. First, government figures would no longer have the same access to what I like to call the Arab Oil Producers Government Pension Augmentation Plan, where Presidential libraries, honorariums, consulting fees,retainers, investments in certain financial instruments and foundations get paid for by certain cash flush oil producing nations.
Second, government would take a major tax hit,because higher gas prices mean higher tax revenues. In my native state that means the county, the state and the feds garner about 80 cents plus per gallon in taxes - the higher the price, the more they make. On power, it's a whopping ten percent of the bill locally.
In case you wondered, that's why the US isn't energy self-sufficient yet.
Tuesday 2 June 2009
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