by Dave Lindorff

By the way, as Congress zips through a bill giving $25 billion in loan guarantees to Ford and GM "to develop fuel efficient cars," why is nobody asking about the $7 billion the government gave to GM back in the late 1990s to develop a hybrid diesel engine?

GM took the money, and then failed to deliver. "Sorry" was about all the taxpayers got from that boondoggle. And what will we get for this latest handover of an amount equal to half the annual federal budget for education? At best we'll get some GM cars that get an extra 20 mpg. But there's no guarantee it'll happen, and the past record of GM, Ford and the auto industry is it won't. The money will just be forgotten, like the last $7 billion.

In fact, the car companies are lobbying to get the 20 mpg target eliminated from the bill before Congress. For that matter, Chrysler, whose owners are planning to end car production in the US and just make the company an importer of Japanese and Chinese cars, is trying to get in on the deal. The bill actually says the money is for "retooling" old factories to accomodate newer high-mileage-getting cars. It's easy to see how that will end up being spent on a lot of things that don't have anything to do with higher gas mileage.

Here's another stupid throwaway to shareholders of taxpayer money, only, as in the case of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, it's not current taxpayers who will foot the bill, since nobody's talking about raising taxes, but rather about lowering them. It's future taxpayers, like our kids, who'll be paying through the nose.

It looks to me like Congress and the president have simply given up on the whole idea of governing, and have decided that their job is simply to shovel money as fast as they can to the rich and hope they themselves get out before the whole system collapses in rubble and chaos.

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