Cafferty's 4pm Q: Why do only 20% consider aid to corporations important?

[Bozita]

http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/

Why do only 20% consider aid to corporations important?
Posted: 12:39 PM ET


FROM CNN’s Jack Cafferty:

The U.S. automakers need a lifeline… but it’s not clear at this point whether the Bush Administration is willing to throw them one.

So a lame duck session of Congress could be Detroit’s best hope.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pushing for help for the battered auto industry. She says if the administration doesn’t step in to help out the automakers, “it needs to be done one way or another.”

Congress could convene as early as next week to sort this out– among other economic concerns–which could start a clash between the Democratic leaders of Congress and the President. It may not make the cash-strapped American public too happy either.

A Gallup poll released yesterday found only 20% of adults say providing loans and other aid to automakers is “crucial” or “very important” to improving the economy. That’s slightly less than the 21% who say it was “crucial” or “very important” to aid large financial institutions. Both figures are well below the 34% calling for a second stimulus plan where the money would go to individuals as opposed to corporations.

Here’s my question to you: What does it mean that only 20% of Americans consider aid to large corporations “crucial” or “very important?”

Tune in to the Situation Room at 4pm to see if Jack reads your answer on air.

[haele]

1. Well, I'm thinking it might be arrogant CEOs and CFOs who think

they deserve their multi-million dollar bonus for running the companies into the ground. Or laying off thousands of potential customers, pushing a punitive, truly elitist economic burden on "the little people" who can never make enough to count as actual people in their eyes.

If a company doesn't care about customers or the employees in the country it operates in, why should the citizenry care enough to "bail the bastards out" of the financial hole they shortsightedly dug themselves in by using their company as a private corporate atm?

Haele

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. I think we should help any troubled corporation

which agrees to fire everyone in the top 3 or 4 tiers of management without compensation, including their boards.

It is not GM's fault, or the fault of the thousands who work for GM, that the corporation is in trouble - it can be pinned squarely on bad decisions by the board, the CEO, operations management, the CFO, etc. Forty or fifty people at the top. Lop them off without their golden parachutes, THEN save the company.