It is too simplistic, I admit. The car companies are also hampered by crap management and an inability to produce decent cars. But the legacy costs add a crippling burden to companies which are already struggling to compete.

I do not see why we should have to bail out a company that can obviously not run a business.

Quite.

I can’t buy this argument. Everything else aside, I would like to point out in 2004 the companies’ declining market share and mounting losses in their core auto operations prompted Standard & Poor’s Corp. to cut their debt ratings to “junk” status. So in 2006, GM secured a $1.5 billion loan from J.P Morgan Securities, using equipment and plants as collateral to pay back debt to investors. (to guarantee payment in the event that GM and Ford were unable to satisfy all debt payments). In attempts to justify emerging practice, Sometime in late 2006, to increase the companies’ liquidity, they chose to use secured loans since it was a more cost-effective way of funding (Since secured loans are less expensive than unsecured financing). Yet nearly ALL the debt that they have been accumulating for the past decade is unsecured. The shift to asset-backed loans – almost as a last resort — revealed the financial difficulties all three companies began facing AGES ago.
It makes me wonder if these people ever grasped basic Econ 101 theory. I do not see why we should have to bail out a company that can obviously not run a business. It just seems as if they are taking advantage of the financial crisis to save their own ass at the expense of the taxpayers…

As for aid to Georgia in general, I would bring Iran as an example. Saak is no “jeffersonian democrat” (a laughable misnomer anyway since democracy that Jefferson set up only applied to less then half of the country). Neither was the Shah. But Shah was moving Iran towards modernization, including allowing women to vote.

Would it have been better to have a jefferson in Iran instead of Shah? By all means. Would it have been better to prop up a less awkward figure then Pinochet? By all means. Unfortunately these were the only ones available and alternatives were much worse.

We know for sure what the alternative to Shah is. Dumping Georgia and Saak now might throw that country into an unstable phase and who knows what alternative might come on top.

US and the West did not come to what they are now without ugly and bloody periods. I would like other countries to be able to avoid them. Afghanistan is another great example. It seems to go through the stage of nation building. We all know what tools of nation building were employed by countries that went through that stage and we seem to be against Kharsai using these tools. Well, in this case we have to pay up of get off the pot.

I would like us to avoid stepping on the proverbial rake Carter stepped on with Iran. I personally consider this one of the best investments we can do. Anywhere we can. Since we do not have unlimited resources, we must choose where to apply them. Georgia now presents a target of opportunity. Its strategic proximity to energy reserves makes it a more valuable target with a higher success multiplier.

Naturally, this presupposes the view of historical progression towards democratic capitalism. Your mileage might vary greatly.

If somebody came onto this thread for the first time they’d assume you’d been blogging for a week, not a few years.

You yourself brought the subject of school vouchers into the post itself for no other reason than getting in a cheap shot at the Bush administration for a policy with which you disagree, one or two readers challenged you on it and asked you to elaborate on your views, and now you’re evading the questions and asking everyone to move quietly on.

Therein lies one of the many perils of blogging.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8086370

Tell us something we didn’t already know Mr. ex-ambassador. However it is interesting how he points to Condi:

“Georgian officials also perceived a July 9-10 visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as encouragement for the plan, Kitsmarishvili said. He said people in Saakashvili’s circle told him that Rice “gave the green light.”

BTW Candide, you make a nice plea for vouchers; but the challenge of educating the populace is one of those ‘too big to fail’ businesses that would likely only be made worse by such ‘free market’ experimentation.

I’ll support Sean’s off-hand comment about vouchers with an off-hand comparison: Vouchers would be like “let’s have an insurance system whereby all the sick pay into it; and all the healthy people can opt out.” I’d like to see momentum toward making more public school districts viable, rather than moving toward dismantling them – and I think vouchers would bring on the latter.

It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to the voucher cause or haven’t experienced a broken public school system: My parents put 7 of us through Catholic Grammar schools and High Schools in a big Eastern city where the public schools were racial battle zones in the 60s/70s. However, there is that old separation of church and state problem that stopped the voucher movement then — and gives reason for pause now.

Finally, you cannot mix the discussion of k through 12 School vouchers with post-12 education discussion/examples. Apples and oranges.

No. Why would it? Or perhaps I don’t understand the relevance of the question (not to mention the debate). I got my BA and MA at UC Riverside. In some respects the education I got there is better than at UCLA. The big difference between the two are facilities and funding available to students.

Hell, in some respects the education I got at community college was better than both. In fact I tell all students who are thinking about college to go to community college.

Plus k-12 education and university education are two different animals. Potential or even existing policies for the one don’t necessarily apply to the other.

But can we get back to Russia/Georgia/US please? Because frankly this debate about US education is

For example, my kids public school has a budget. The money comes from the gov’t for every student enrolled, based on daily attendance. Each day a kid skips school, the gov’t witholds the money, so the school administration is always haranguing for 100% attendance, even if kids are sick.

The gov’t gets those money by levying taxes on all people, whether they have school age kids or not. Now, I’m satisfied with my kids’ school (located in a small and quite possibly exclusive District) and if the gov’t would give me the voucher, I’d most likely bring it back to the same school. But I think that allowing me to dispose of the voucher gives me more influence over my kids education. And I can see how other parents can try to use vouchers to get their kids out of the worst schools.

Sean’s position I can’t understand. Does it bother you if more people apply to UCLA or Berkeley than UC Riverside? Or all those people paying insane money to that remediate tech school in Palo Alto? If so, why?

ivanov, you got to wrap your mind around a simple concept: NOTHING IS EVER FREE. That education you and I and others got in the USSR was paid for by in part confiscation of my family’s property and then by shameless exploitation of everybody including you. That education seems to have beenn effective since you still think the state generates its own wealth and provides free services.

1. everything that is private is always better by default.

Stop operating o kindergarten emotional level of “better”, think “more efficient”.At some point slave labor is efficient enough for Belomorkanal. Government forced and provided ed is more efficient in an authoritarian state where the state has unlimited resources to enforce and coerce

2. everything that US government does is always better for the world by default

You are out of your mind. Right after my “rant” about government massive failure in k-12 ed and after blaming a US president for a host of problems the word faces today? You seem to only see what you programmed yourself to see.

Cyrill. There is one tiny error in you logic.

You should not be talking logic after creating the glaring oxymoron above: all private is better and all that govenment does is better too.