What I find interesting in this age of instant information, is that most Americans still have no clue what is going on in our country. Whether or not you voted for the current POTUS seems to define your apathy vs. your disdain for what is currently happening in both corporate and political America. President Obama has clearly set the populist ball in motion; from ridiculing Wall Street pay to tearing up contract’s that since our Nation’s founding had enjoyed protection under the law. I am aware that most of you readers are cognizant of this, after all, we sit in front of our screens every day reading this stuff in complete amazement, but I wanted to write this little analogy for the apathetic ones of us out there so they too can understand what exactly happened (without doing their homework, naturally).
The Chrysler and GM “Bailouts”
Imagine that you are an owner of an apartment complex (GM, Chrysler), and you took out a mortgage on it from the local bank (Sr. bondholders of GM, Chrysler). You put 30% down, have a high credit score, and even a history of success in the landlord business. Everything is going along, just fine and dandy. You have tenants (Auto workers) who pay their rent (receive a fair salary) on time, and each year, thanks to inflation, you raise your rents 4%, and it helps you to pay down that onerous mortgage you took on to buy the place. Capitalism at it’s finest, right? Well….other things start to happen.
A massive storm cloud forms on the horizon; there is a local union drive for tenants who don’t like their rent being raised (salaries not going up fast enough), and these tenants discover, that by paying a 10 % of their monthly rent check to a criminal-linked union organizer (UAW), they can go on strike and withhold payment from you, the legal landlord, until you agree not only to stop increasing rents with the rate of inflation, but actually to CUT rents each year! Make sense? I didn’t think so.
You may wonder, “How will I be able to pay off the mortgage when I will be taking in less rent money than I owe the bank each month?” The union has little sympathy, they just want to “Get what’s theirs, ‘cuz you been holdin’ the little man down for too long!”. So the tenants all sign up for this bargain of a deal, and muscle you into submission to the point that you’re barely getting by, and eventually starting to lose money each month.
In comes the mayor of the town (President Obama), who decides that you are an evil Capitalist, and that you have been systematically holding these poor, unionized tenants down for years. In spite of their accepted mandate to hold rents down, you somehow still “owe” them for past claimed ill-deeds that you obviously never committed on them. The mayor makes you somehow feel guilty for making money, and has this silver tongue that makes all of the towns people believe him when he tells them that you are evil. The town mayor has some major hang-ups when it comes to race, and he wants everyone else to feel as awkward about it as he does. Thus, he insinuates that anyone who makes money, must evil, must be affiliated with racists, and racists surely must be capitalists, thus socialism is the answer to ending racism! You have no idea what the Mayor is talking about, but the towns people are increasingly giving you the stink eye, so you give in to more rent cuts, even though you can’t afford it. The mayor still feels that you aren’t doing enough to help these tenants (each of whom are sheltered from income tax under the mayor’s plan due to the fact they make under $68k/yr) so he raises the tax on rental income to help “give back” to those “hard working” citizens who are gracious enough to let you be their landlord. Now, deeply in the red, you are faced with certain bankruptcy, you have no choice but to go into foreclosure, forcing those tenants out onto the street.
Wait…that’s exactly what should happen, but not what will happen.
What happens next, is that the leftist Mayor decides to show his generosity and give you a “Bail Out” by forcing you to take an injection of cash that allows you to fund your income deficit for another three months, and then forces you to turn over 100% equity ownership once that money runs out. The media circus falls over itself, proclaiming the mayor to be “brilliant”, “giving” and a “Messiah” who is looking out for the “little guy” and “sticking it to” those abusive Capitalists. Since he’s now enjoying more power than ever, he tells the local bank that he’s not honoring the mortgage loan they originally gave you, he’s simply taking possession of the property, and RIPPING UP THE CONTRACT! He’s going to own 60% of it and give 40% ownership to the TENANTS!! “How can this be legal?” you might ask. The bank did nothing wrong, they simply lent to a creditworthy borrower, and now the Mayor is blatantly stealing it from them! The simple answer is, it’s not legal, yet Stalin, Marx, Putin, and Chavez would be delighted at this example of a coup of private business into government control. It is truly frightening.
You might ask, “Doesn’t the bank have a legal claim on the property? After all, they still hold the title on the property?!!” Well, normally the answer is ‘yes,’ but in this town the mayor became so powerful, that even the banks balked for fear that speaking up against the Mayor would land them 5-minutes of ridicule from his press secretary (White House Press Sec. Gibbs) on the nightly news, ensuring that they couldn’t do business in that town going forward. The office of the mayor would gladly stoop lower than a cockroach doing the limbo to combat any dissenting comments from their agenda (recent examples: Jim Cramer, Limbaugh, Santelli, etc), something no mayor in the history of this city had done before. It is embarrassing to watch, yet also a modern Gestapo on free speech.
And that, my friends is how GM and Chrysler got torn from capitalist hands and placed into the hands of those least deserving (illegally, of course). Don’t worry, you are in good hands with the Government and the lard-ass, 4-hour coffee break taking, 12-week vacation taking, lazy UAW at the helm. And if you do decide to buy a car from Government Motors or Cry-slur, just remember that it will always veer to the Left.
P.S.
Note, that the mayor only takes 60% ownership while giving the tenants a generous 40% stake as a pay-back for voting him into office. By giving them this ownership, he created/enslaved a legion of “believers” and every tenant-voter will surely vote for the mayor and his political party going forward. As the union eventually fails in running the apartment complex, he will be allowed to pass-on more ownership to the union as a carrot-and-stick (as if motivation of a union worker is actually possible). The mayor ‘s agenda is grand. He now plans to let “illegal citizen future-tenants” who aren’t legal citizens of his town become legal tenants through amnesty because they too will unionize and vote for his party going forward if he does this. He even went so far as to nominate a woman to the City Council (Sotomayer) who will side with him in giving preferential treatment to these people, basing all legal decisions on race and promoting rights based on economic status. Incidentally, he declines to allow any more of the educated citizens with engineering/medical/professional degrees from China and India (H1B visas) to enter the city because they will become productive citizens who don’t need to become tenants (unionize), hence won’t likely vote for him or his party, and will show the current tenants an example of hard-working capitalists who don’t need subsidy from the mayor. This was too much of a risk to the Mayor’s “ambitious agenda”, no wonder he halted visas for them. By the way, does anyone care to move to our city? We need a few more tax payers…
-Cowboy
