Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Generally Clueless



General Motors is investing one billion dollars in Brazil! Thank you American Taxpayers! The Latin American Herald Tribune ran the story.

Anyone notice Cadillac (GM) ws a major sponsor of the Super Bowl?

Must be nice they are doing so well.

Wait a minute~ General Motors was the biggest whiner @ the recent Big Three begging for bailout sessions.
They were hurting the most- on the brink of bankruptcy. Finally, they were able to declare themselves a bank, as they have the GMAC lending wing of the company, & got $9.2 billion bailout money.

So all that song & dance was just that- 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."

As they say in Brazil: Siempre mamones!

So long suckers!

Shhhhh! Business as usual~ (GARY MYERS DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER) reports:

"TAMPA - Super Bowl MVP Santonio Holmes will get his brand-new Cadillac, even if financially troubled General Motors would just as soon nobody knows about it.
Holmes picked out Cadillac's most expensive model Monday as his reward for winning the MVP: the Escalade Hybrid Platinum with an $85,200 sticker price, according to Cadillac spokeswoman Joanne Krell.
This time there was no Cadillac on the field Sunday night during the awards ceremony and no Cadillac in the hotel ballroom Monday for the MVP news conference. Usually the MVP marks off on a board which car he wants. There was no board, either. It was all done in private.
There was no mention of Cadillac or of Holmes winning the car at the news conference. It was at the request of Cadillac, commissioner Roger Goodell told the Daily News Monday.

Cadillac has a multiyear contract with the NFL to sponsor the award but knows how bad it would have looked to make a big deal of it this year. This is the eighth year it has been the sponsor.

"Given the current business environment, it was much more appropriate we not do that," Krell said in a phone interview. "We made the decision not to actively participate in the Super Bowl. We congratulate the MVP, it is a great achievement. We are very sensitive to the federal assistance loan we have received and we want to carry on our fiduciary responsibility. The Super Bowl was not a place for us to be this year. That is not to say it's not a great platform."
Holmes will get his car, she said.

There went $85,200. But we should not be upset.... no one else actually had the money to buy such a vehicle.... certainly not the 200,000 people who lost their jobs, just last month.

By the way, to the folks at General Motors- when the mandate of change came with the bailout money, they did not mean to be covert about wreckless expenditures- they meant actual change.

4 comments:

Dr. Know said...

Tantamount to crack-heads with your charge cards.

Christopher said...

Brazil is such an interesting nation with regard to their auto industry.

A huge, sprawling nation of 160 million, Brazil uses no petroleum based fuel. They converted over to corn-based fuel and all their cars, SUVs and trucks are powered by corn.

Whether this is good or not I'll leave to people smarter than me but what I'm intrigued by is, Brazil is not controlled by OPEC or Saudi Arabia.

Fran said...

I found this '06 article about Brazil using Sugar Cane for fuel.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/10/news/ethanol.php

"Brazil's (sugar cane based) ethanol yields nearly eight times as much energy as corn-based options, according to scientific data. "

(This was 3 years ago) - Today, less than three years after the technology was introduced, more than 70 percent of the cars sold in Brazil, a number expected to reach 1.1 million this year, have flex fuel engines, which have entered the market generally without increases in automobile prices.

Ha! WITHOUT increase to price!

For the US, I do think electric is the way to go, because any burning of fuel- be it ethanol, biodiesel etc, there is still the issue of emissions, particulates, smog & the ozone layer.

But we need to do *something*, even if it is a variety of different options in different regions.
Hybrids are a beginning- hiking up the fuel efficiency, and that needs to happen as a requirement. Even Toyota has had better technology available, but no incentive to move forward, because no one else matched the Prius, mpg wise.

Anyway, I am still floored that GM is spending $$$ in a wreckless way, and dragging it's heels on
bring back the EV1 electric car, or some vastly improved efficiency- while keeping jobs/money & the auto industry here in the U.S.

Christopher said...

Oh, it's sugar cane?

Wow, even more intriguing. Now, think about it: if a country the size of Brazil can get off the OPEC teat, why can't the USA?