I have been someone occupied by vehicle offers and such things these days. Part of it has to do with some equipment locating firms interested in my Failing 1250 water well drilling rig. Another part of it is all of the news articles about the government vehicle credit of up to $4500 if you dump a sufficiently old enough vehicle for a sufficiently new enough vehicle. The main catch is the dumped vehicle cannot be resold, it must be scrapped.

I haven’t found many articles explaining how the government was actually going to get the vehicles from dealer lots to shredders. Perhaps they are going to higher the same group of people the Chinese buyers did several years ago. You haven’t heard that story? Shame on you.

Back when China started building the world’s largest hydro-electric damn some engineer did the math and found out they needed something like twelve years worth of the nation’s steel production during the four year, or whatever it was, construction cycle of the damn. This sent Chinese steel buyers all over trying to find rebar quality steel at an affordable delivered price. They got shut off in quite a few places because they tried to buy it all at once. Eventually, some enterprising businessmen obtained a “ portable” car shredder and a fleet of dump trailers.

The businessmen found or bought a nationwide listing of auto wrecking yards. They focussed on the yards along west coast and worked their way east doing something of a north south sweep. Their primary target was family owned wrecking yards which had been in the family for generations. They waved a briefcase full of cash in front of the owners and got them to cart every vehicle older than 1980 forward for shredding. The scrap metal was hauled to and/or loaded into shipping containers, where it found its way to into a plant in China which was simply cranking out rebar as fast as the scrap arrived.

Given the “buy American” clause tied to most of the construction packages funded by the Stimulus Package, it makes sense for the government to try helping out the environment by basically sweeping every commuter/work vehicle more than 10 years old off the road and into a steel recycling plant that is cranking out rebar. I don’t fault them for making the attempt, I only fault them for not putting out a story of how they (or should I say “we the taxpayer”? ) are going to get the vehicles purchased under this program from the dealer lot to the plant cranking out rebar.

Of course this program is supposed to help bail out the world wide auto industry as well as stimulate the economy and help reduce green house gas emissions. It does beg the question though…do they really expect taxpayers to buy GM vehicles?

We’ve been bent over the kitchen table quite profusely by GM.

You will recall that GM and EDS were at the very tip of the “IT offshoring” trend which basically kicked two legs out from under the three legged stool the world wide economy was sitting on. The current generation’s great-great-great-great grandchildren are STILL going to be paying off the financial industry bail out when they reach retirement age, thanks in large part to GM.

Now we have a “new GM” and are supposed to forget all of the sins of the past. The “old GM” is now a worthless smoldering hulk which screwed each and every investor it ever had, along with shareholders and its employees. Granted, the UAW is almost as much to blame for the catastrophe as GM management, but a lot of the previous management is still in place at the “new GM”, not so much of the UAW.

How can any U.S. citizen, or for that matter, any global banker who bought those government bonds backing the money given to GM while they went through bankruptcy, ever forgive or forget? The next four generations are going to be paying off the GM debt alone. Oh, it isn’t just the money we loaned them. Just how do you think the “new GM” managed to “get solvent”? They jettisoned the pension plan! Just where do you think that pension plan landed? On the back of the U.S. taxpayer! Oh, don’t expect any Union backed or operated pension program for its members to ever be able to actually take care of its membership during their retirement years. There are too many hands from Union’s upper management reaching in that till, it will never be flush with cash.

Even if we magically got the Union’s upper management to stop funding their personal lives via “investments” the pension/retirement fund made and forced them to use regular investment channels, just where would it be able to park its money? It really looks like it is going to take us 60 years to financially recover from eight years of Bill Clinton. Teacher’s retirement funds and 401-Ks got clobbered by the DOT-BOMB scam he unleashed upon the world. Then we got bent over once again by the Worldcom/Enron/Adelphia/et. al. scams brought on by Clinton era policies. Oh, some didn’t self destruct until W. was at the helm of the Titanic, but the iceberg was waiting and all of the lifeboats had been sold in order to pay for hookers at the Democratic convention. We no sooner start to recover from these debacles, then we get to see just what the Clinton era mortgage industry deregulation coupled with its policy of pushing sub-prime mortgages out there did for us.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve watched my retirement account lose multiple digits of value thanks to the Clinton era and GM. There is no way for me to thank former President Clinton for focusing on his cigar bobbing fetish instead of what was good for the country. I can, however, thank GM. So can you.

Buy something else.