As expected, The Daily Show had a bit of fun with the whole GM bankruptcy story. Stewart wondered aloud how they received $20B and still went under and then moved on to jabs at Mark LeNeve and GM's new website.
Of course, when all the fun was over, Stewart got serious, or at least pretended to be for a moment. He asked why the government thinks it's a good idea to invest in money losing companies instead of cash cows. "Why not buy into McDonald's or Google," he asked.
Seems almost logical, unless of course you happen to be one of the tens of thousands of people across the country who depend on GM for a job.
msdaisy says:
01:28 PM, 06/ 3/09
Stewart is right; GM should have filed for bankruptcy a long time ago. Instead they waited for the deadline and burned through $20 billion dollars of taxpayer money with nothing to show for it.
brn says:
03:38 PM, 06/ 3/09
Stewart knows why the money goes where it does, but he's a comedian first. Let's not take him more seriously than he takes himself.
stovt001 says:
09:10 PM, 06/ 3/09
Agreed with brn. The only thing that bothers me is that all along people have been saying even with bailouts GM would end up in bankruptcy. Now that it happened, people seem shocked. Make up your minds.
charlesb says:
09:57 AM, 06/ 4/09
Isn't this guy a dwarf or something?
blueguydotcom says:
10:41 AM, 06/ 4/09
How many people ARE employed by GM/Mopar? Just curious if it exceeds 1 million people.
estreka says:
12:33 PM, 06/ 4/09
Not even close. In it's heyday, GM had around 350K employees (I think, anyone wanna confirm?). Now they have 243K. That's worldwide, btw. You'd have to do some math to find the number of Americans hired.
Chrysler has 58K. Again, far fewer Americans.
So combined, you're talking 300K employees. I'd probably say just under 100K are American.
To put that in perspective, we've been losing 600K jobs every month. So basically, we're losing 2 GMs and Chryslers every month.
Even if you take suppliers like Delphi (147K) going out of business, you're still probably talking less than the monthly 600K. And you're certainly talking less than that report last year of millions upon millions of jobs lost. Aren't lobbyists great?