Praise for Kucinich

Finally! A member of Congress who gets it. I was scanning some blogs this morning and saw this from Michelle Malkin:

Believe it or not, I am going to say something nice about Democrat Rep. Dennis Kucinich. He voted against the bailout every time. In a ready-for-YouTube exchange, he snorted when Kashkari said, (paraphrasing here) “taxpayer money shouldn’t be poured into businesses that are going to fail.” Kucinich retorted that Kashkari would be hearing that line played back to him for the rest of his career.

I haven't heard it stated more clearly. Goes to show you, too, that fiduciary responsibility is not a left or right issue. It is, by definition, apolitical.

The discussion in Congress should be about how to support GM, its workers and their communities as it goes through the bankruptcy process, so that they emerge from bankruptcy as a solvent enterprise, as many corporations do.

Charles Krauthammer describes what a bankruptcy scenario means in real terms. He seems to think that certain Congressional Democrats actually want to own to force the production of "green" cars, as well as to rescue the UAW contracts that have given GM a cost per worker nearly twice that of their Japanese competitors.

Government has no successful record of running auto companies. That is the business model that brought us the Yugo and the Trabant, cars that eastern Europeans stopped buying as soon as they were no longer forced to do so. And also Fiat, which hasn't been able to compete in the world for decades. I wonder what kind of car Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank will design?

Echoing Krauthammer weeks ago, former GE CEO Jack Welsh explained in an interview on CNN that rescuing the credit markets was tolerable because it these markets are part of the underlying infrastructure on which the global economy runs, but he drew line at bailing out manufacturers. He gave two reasons: The slippery slope of choosing who among thousands of companies are entitled to government largesse, and the fact that the market and our bankruptcy process is well equipped to deal with failed companies, either by killing them outright for asssets or rescuing them through restructuring of debt, opex and capex, to attract new investment.

And for my liberal friends who accuse me of surfing too many Krauthammers and Malkins, even the venerable Nicholas Von Hoffman, writing in the Nation today, notes:

Nevertheless, the projected $25 billion loan may only be a postponement of the inevitable. If the car companies continue to use up cash at the current rate, this loan will be used up in a year, after which GM, Chrysler and Ford will be back asking for another loan--unless you believe that the three will have righted themselves in the next twelve months and come close to breaking even. That is not a reasonable business assessment.

Since there is a high probability that the automakers will be in the same condition a year or so after this infusion of public money, the Obama administration will have to decide if the industry gets another loan and then another after that, and so on. Each successive loan will be justified as saving the jobs of the hundreds of thousands of people dependent on the automobile industry.

None of this, of course, should have to be explained, and is not really controversial at all. It's basic economics and business sense. But with a near filibuster-proof Senate, will union-beholden Democrats listen to reason?