I think I see him standing on the bow of the Titanic pretending to fly…

Kurt.

The very LEAST we could do is vote EVERY SINGLE ONE of the MFing incumbents out of office, REGARDLESS of party affiliation, JUST VOTE NO to ALL of them. (Except Ron Paul, I think he’s the only American left in Congress)

This has got to be one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Why why why? The world is confusing THIS is insanity. At least we know things will never change and Robert lots to write about for a very long time. It’s like picking the captain of the Titanic to steer a fleet of cruise ships while the Titanic is taking on water, MADNESS!

Someone needs to do a rehash of the NY Central/Pennsylvania RR merger. We know what happened there.

Yup. I’ve been saying “this has Penn Central written all over it” since first hearing of the idea. We can only hope that American Leyland turns out as well as Conrail.

I’m not saying Wagoner should be shot, I’m saying our priorities are totally wrong. We get rid of the cream of the crop, and then eat the rest like pigs. Which probably explains why Wagoner got to lead GM in the first place.

Or something like that.

“Both sides have agreed that GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner would lead the combined automaker.”

Oh, the humanity.

Chrysler on the other hand can’t as openly easily be bailed out becuase it is held by a cash flush Private Equity firm known for stripping and flipping companies. With a call on Cerberus’ $7B in loans they need to sell, lest they wind up actually spending any of their own money on this deal.

But what happens if nobody bails Chrysler out? They’ll have to either a. Invest their own money into turning Chrysler around or b. Declare their limited liability holding bankrupt and file for CH11 protection. Unfortunately for Cerberus, Delphi’s CH11 has shown that the evil host company doesn’t just get to walk away from its criminal negligence obligations, which leaves option b still draining precious money from the good dogs Cerberus. So if no bailout is offered to Chrysler they are still assured funding from their rich masters.

And bailing Cerberus out on their own is no less politically unpalpable than paying off Cerberus’ debts to J.P. Morgan, et al. and then facilitating the certain doom of the US auto industry.

That leaves the other question. Why would GM want Chrysler? They know they will not be allowed to fail. If GM goes down they take Ford and Chrysler with them and anyone mildly involved governing or managing knows that. GM is guaranteed a bailout. There can not be a financial motive for this. Not only will GM get less money by merging with Chrysler than they would on their own, they’ll lose epic amounts of money immediately after that. Come on, even Rick Wagoner is not that stupid.

On second thought, maybe that’s not the colloquialism I was looking for.

How about “Keep it stupid, simple!”

Yes, that seems to work.

My only hope is that they keep the majority of the Chrysler designs (mainly dodge/jeep) which I feel are vastly superior to the GM versions (G8,CTS…and probably Malibu excepted)

I think we’ve covered the whys behind this deal. But I sure as Hell can’t wait for the official explanation.