Big Three Auto Makers Demanding $25 Billion Bailout

The longest-running production of the Theater of the Absurd in the history of Broadway, Pennsylvania Avenue, Red Square, or a goat path in Gallup, New Mexico reopened this week with the CEOs of the Big Three automakers going to Washington in order to personally beg Congress for $25 billion of the taxpayers' money. Maybe "beg" isn't the right word and I should say "extort" instead.

The just-mentioned intellectual reincarnation of the Three Stooges have threatened to declare the entire automobile industry bankrupt, and wreck what's left of the economy, if they aren't let off the hook for the consequences of their own mismanagement of what were once three of the most powerful corporations in the world.

I'm sure that, along with anyone else with an IQ higher than a turnip, I must be missing something here. Let me run through this one more time to just to make sure that I'm not missing anything.

Here we have three guys, dressed in thousand-dollar Armani suits, who flew into town on company-owned private jets, and they want Congress to force the rest of us to pay for their incompetent management of what was once a thriving industry? And all this is on top of the $600 billion that's being spent to either pay for votes cast in 2008 or as a down payment on votes in 2010?

If, in the unlikely events that the CEOs of the Big Three are not exaggerating and there really are 2.5 million jobs that will be lost if the latest bailout doesn't go through, the price of securing the political support of the auto industry in 2012 will be $1,000 per vote.

Regardless of how ridiculous that may seem, I'm giving even money that the auto industry will get its bailout money, and only God knows what else. As surely as nature abhors a vacuum, Congress abhors a dollar that isn't spent.

I may be wrong, but wasn't it was less than a month ago that the Democratic Party strengthened its control of Congress, in no small part by vowing to fight "obscene corporate profits" and to "end corporate welfare?"

Where I come from, $25 billion for the Big Three of Detroit looks a lot like $25 billion worth of corporate welfare. I guess that all those members of Congress who promised to fight the evils of "big business" and "corporate greed" must have had a change of heart. If they didn't, then the only reasonable explanation is that they were lying through a few thousand dollars of taxpayer-subsidized dental work.

Somewhere, Franz Kafka is laughing. And Henry Ford is shaking his head in disgust.