Left News and Views

From Michael Moore:

Members of Congress, here’s what I propose:

1. Transporting Americans is and should be one of the most important functions our government must address. And because we are facing a massive economic, energy and environmental crisis, the new president and Congress must do what Franklin Roosevelt did when he was faced with a crisis (and ordered the auto industry to stop building cars and instead build tanks and planes): The Big Three are, from this point forward, to build only cars that are not primarily dependent on oil and, more importantly to build trains, buses, subways and light rail (a corresponding public-works project across the country will build the rail lines and tracks). This will not only save jobs, but create millions of new ones.

2. You could buy all the common shares of stock in General Motors for less than $3 billion. Why should we give GM $18 billion or $25 billion, or anything? Take the money and buy the company! (You’re going to demand collateral anyway if you give them the “loan,” and because we know they will default on that loan, you’re going to own the company in the end as it is. So why wait? Just buy them out now.)

3. None of us want government officials running a car company, but there are some very smart transportation geniuses who could be hired to do this. We need a Marshall Plan to switch us off oil-dependent vehicles and get us into the 21st century.

This proposal is not radical or rocket science. It just takes one of the smartest people ever to run for the presidency to pull it off. What I’m proposing has worked before. The national rail system was in shambles in the ’70s. The government took it over. A decade later, it was turning a profit, so the government returned it to private/public hands, and got a couple billion dollars put back in the treasury.

This proposal will save our industrial infrastructure — and millions of jobs. More importantly, it will create millions more. It literally could pull us out of this recession.

And Mike is not the only one who thinks buying out the auto industry is a good idea.

Rob Weigand over at Seeking Alpha had this to say:

There’s been a lot of cyber ink and hot air devoted to the question of whether or not the U.S. Government should get involved in General Motors’ (GM) difficulties. Here’s my two cents on the issue: Don’t bail out GM with loans – you’ll never see a nickel of that money again. Instead, the government should execute a hostile takeover of the whole company, hire one or more private equity firms to turn the company around, and bank a profit when GM’s stock can be sold to the public again in a few years.

…

We need to break free of labels like “socialism” and “nationalization” that are limiting our thinking right now and recruit some of our most highly-talented American entrepreneurs to help us fix the monumental problems our country is currently facing.

Ralph E. Shaffer and Norma Jeanne Strobel at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune agree that a government takeover could save our economy. Here’s what they said:

When Fullerton resident H. Gaylord Wilshire sought the Southern California congressional seat in 1890, he ran on a very simple platform: “Let the Nation own the trust.” The part-time farmer and full-time reformer was responding to economic abuses of his era not unlike those of the current period. Just as the economic grievances of millions of American farmers, workers and small businessmen might have been resolved in the 1890s by nationalization, in 2008 government ownership of financial institutions and giant corporations could end our current economic crisis.

I really don’t know how you can say it any plainer than that. Wake up Washington and do the right thing, for a real change.