Mood:
incredulousTopic: Dumb Congressional Tricks
While Congress is getting ready to give the Big Three $15 billion dollars, GM is going to invest a billion dollars in BRAZIL!
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=320909&CategoryId=12396"General Motors to Invest $1 Billion in Brazil Operations -- Money to Come from U.S. Rescue Program
By Russ Dallen
Latin American Herald Tribune staff
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 U.S. 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.
Meanwhile, he cut the company's revenue forecast for this year by 14% to $9.5 billion from $11 billion, as the economic crisis began to cause rapid slowdowns in sales.
GM already announced three programs of paid leave, and Ardila added that GM Brazil "is going to wait and see how the market behaves in order to know what decision to take" with regard to possible layoffs.
For Ardila, the injection in Brazil's automobile sector of 8 billion reais ($3.51 billion) recently announced by the federal and state governments of Sao Paulo "has already begun to revive sales," which fell by 12% in October.
The executive said that the company will operate a "conservative" scenario in 2009 with an estimated production of 2.6 million units, and another more "optimistic" that contemplates sales of 2.9 million.
This year sales will reach 2.85 million vehicles, which represents a growth of 15% over last year."
The reason for this bailout is supposed to be revival of the AMERICAN car industry. Instead, we're paying money to revive a GM operation in a country that doesn't even like the US.
Brazil's government supports Hugo Chavez, the Communist dictator of Venezuela, and says "me, too" when Chavez talks about waging war against us.
Do you think those people will hesitate to nationalize that GM plant in Brazil? I don't. They'll do it just to humiliate us. And we should make GM cancel that transfer of American tax money to a hostile regime as a condition of the Big Three Bailout.
I remember the wave of nationalizations of US-owned businesses overseas - and now, the taxpayers of the USA are so badly off that we have to give foreigners whose government is openly hostile to ours a billion dollars. It's time to cut that out. Then we need to reconsider whether or not we can afford to prop up the United Nations.
