Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid Want Henry Paulson To Use Bailout Money For Auto Industry

But who would the bailout really be for? The auto industry? Or the autoworker unions that are dragging the auto industry down?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Paulson today saying the rescue bill gives him “broad discretion to purchase, or make commitments to purchase, financial instruments you determine necessary to restore financial-market stability.”
Pelosi was among the lawmakers who met two days ago with the chief executives of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC. The three companies are seeking $50 billion in federal loans to help them weather the worst auto market in 25 years, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The letter increases pressure on the administration of George W. Bush to take action as he prepares to hand power to president-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 20. Obama said yesterday that policy options to help the industry will be a “high priority” for his transition team.
“A healthy automobile manufacturing sector is essential to the restoration of financial market stability, the overall health of our economy, and the livelihood of the automobile sector’s workforce,” Pelosi and Reid said in their letter.

Frankly, I think Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid don’t care a bit about Ford or General Motors. What they really care about are their political benefactors at the UAW who would be up a creek without a paddle if one or both of those companies failed.
Think about it. For the most part, foreign automakers aren’t unionized. Or, at least, they aren’t unionized here in America. If one of the major domestic automakers folds that means a whole lot of union autoworkers out of jobs and not paying dues. And that would put a serious crimp in the six-digit salaries union administrators are raking in, not to mention the millions those administrators spread around to liberal politicians and causes around the country.
Undoubtedly if a Ford or a General Motors were to fold another company, perhaps domestic, would rise to take their market share. But that company’s labor force is going to be harder for the UAW to unionize. The labor forces at Ford and GM were organized long, long ago. Under modern labor laws, which protect workers from thuggish organizers who bully them into joining the union, labor forces are much harder to organize.
And with union enrollment on the decline in America already, this isn’t something the UAW and other unions are going to tolerate. So they get their paid-off puppets in Congress (Reid, Pelosi, pretty much any other Democrat you can think of) to bail out the automakers so that they can continue to slouch along for another decade or two and, in turn, keep paying on the ridiculous labor contracts the UAW has foisted on them.