By John W. Lillpop
Although the economic meltdown has led to wild desperation in the auto industry, who would have imagined that a major U.S. corporation would be so tone deaf as to use bail out funds extracted from U.S. taxpayers to fund operations in a foreign land?
That is exactly what General Motors plans to do!
As reported in the Latin America Herald Tribune, in part:
"General Motors plans to invest $1 billion in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its home market, said the beleaguered car maker.
According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the government and will be used to 'complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012.'
'It wouldn't be logical to withdraw the investment from where we're growing, and our goal is to protect investments in emerging markets,' he said in a statement published by the business daily Gazeta Mercantil."
Speaking of logic, what a pity that former President George W. Bush refused to apply logic before sending $17 billion of "good money after bad" in January.
Most Republicans warned the president that auto makers would be unable to repay the so-called loans, and that the American taxpayer would be left holding the bag, again.
The next big question: Will the Obama administration, ever eager to please labor unions, be foolish enough to add to the insanity by granting even more bail out funds to GM?
