8 years ago, George W. Bush was elected for his first term as the President of The United States of America. 4 years ago, he was elected for his second term. During these terms, he took many world changing decisions that were highly controversial and widely argued all over the world. Some people will always remember him as one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States, but today, he has the chance to make amends.

How you ask? Well, today, the U.S. economy; and the world economy for what it matters, is in a recession. With the financial services and real estate sectors the first to take the hit. The slowdown has now spread to every aspect in the world economy taking down many companies on its way. And now, the shadow of death is looming on the auto industry.

GM has warned like a month ago that unless it gets bailed out, it will run out of money by the end of the year. Chrysler shortly followed suite and said that it will run out of money early next year. Ford on the other hand, said it's in a slightly better position, but not for long.

That warning has sent the U.S. law makers and economist trying to figure out a formula for helping the auto industry and preventing their collapse. After all, they sit in the backbone of the U.S. economy. These efforts accelerated after it was announced that the economy suffered its biggest monthly job loss in over two decades of around 533,000 jobs lost during November, bringing the total job loss for the year to around 1.9 million.

After days of negotiations, the White House and the Democratic Senate Leadership reached an agreement that grants the ailing industry $14B to help them in the short run, until the new administration takes office and a longer term solutions is laid out. This was passed by the House, but was killed off by the Republican senate! I found the excuses ridiculous and unreasonable for what happened, and as everyone else, was expecting a total collapse in the stock markets on Friday.

The Asian stocks started the day falling sharply, European stocks followed suite, so did the U.S. for a short time after the opening. The U.S. and European stocks started to recover after the White House said that it might tap into the TARP funds to bailout the auto industry; which is being considered among other options.

I believe that if Bush decides to tap into that fund; that might be the best decision that he took as president and might help him leave a white spot on his record. I just can't believe that anyone would allow two companies to fail risking the jobs of around 2 million Americans just because the auto workers "refused" to put a timeline for cutting their wages!!!

Some people are calling for the system to flush out its ill parts and to let the Auto industries fail and file for chapter 11 protection. I think this is utterly stupid.

I mean, no one with a head on his shoulders, would buy a car from a bankrupt company, knowing that that company might not exist in 1 or 2 years. So you are basically better off burning the company and its assets cause that's the only thing you can do with it.

Their reason behind that is that the auto companies have made bad decisions over the years, so let them now handle the consequences. Such a systematic failure can be tolerated in cases like the financial service sector, where you have 10 or 15 big players in the market, so in times of crises, you can afford to lose 1 or 2, and a couple more merge and let everyone slow down and restructure to emerge stronger. But in the case of the auto industry; where you only have 3 big players, you can’t afford to lose any! It’s like; god forbids, you lose a finger, or you lose a hand. One is much slower and harder to recover from.

So the CEOs have made mistakes, how badly do you think they will be affected? The people that made the mistakes already have hefty bank accounts that will allow them to live comfortably for the rest of their lives and leave some money for their kids to live on also. So they are not breaking a sweat over this.

If GM files for bankruptcy, it will eventually shutdown, and its 80,000 employees (this is just a guess number) will lose their jobs. The suppliers for GM, whether they supply seats, leather, tires, wires, anything, will also be badly hit. Those are the average people that the Republican senates should've thought of when they voted: Nay!

The people that will be affected are the salesmen at the auto dealerships that will lose their jobs, the factory workers that wake up in the morning to go and assemble and paint cars, the truckers that drive thousands of miles to deliver the tires or the car seats to the assembly factories, and the workers that basically package and load the paint into the trucks to be sent to the factories. It will affect the 18 year old guy who had to quit school to work as a mechanic to support his family.

So basically, the failure of GM or Chrysler, will send shockwaves through the economy and all over the world, that will not heavily affect the people the Republican senates tried to punish, but will heavily punish the millions of blue collar Americans that they claim to have wanted to protect. And this will also spread to Europe, Asia, and Africa, and will turn the recession that will take 2 years to recover, into a 5 year, dare I say, depression?!!!

In short, this is George W. Bush's last chance to make something good, something that many people around the world will appreciate and remember him for, maybe not now, but when the next crisis hits in 20 years from now and people look back at all of the brave decisions that were made in this crisis.

So Mr. Bush, make the call.

sk8er boi

Zimbabwe reveals that its annual inflation has climbed to 24,470 percent

Figure is highest in world but short of independent estimates of 150,000 percent

Price of daily national newspaper has gone up 200,000 percent in past year

Cost of chicken rose more than 236,000 percent, eggs by 153,000 percent

Is this even humanly possible! I'm just glad I don't live there! Poor them!

sk8er boi

"Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow."

 

"Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday."

Don Marquis