Chrysler, Ford and GM Try To Pull A Fannie

From the Wall Street Journal:
Ford, along with General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, are hoping to persuade the U.S. government to provide as much as $50 billion in low-cost loans as slumping sales in the U.S. market eat into profitability. A bill signed into law last year authorized loans of as much as $25 billion to help car makers and suppliers retool plants to produce new, highly fuel-efficient vehicles. This doesn’t say much about their ability to withstand political pressure and it sure doesn’t say much about their ability to learn anything from the Fannie and Freddie debacle. Do you think they could stand up to the pressure that will eventually come from Fannie and Freddie’s enablers to revert to the old model?
“The Detroit Three got into their current quandary by making decades of bad decisions, with some help from the United Auto Workers union. Yet despite the current crisis, General Motors is still paying dividends to shareholders, the car companies are paying bonuses to executives, and the private-equity billionaires at Cerberus who bought Chrysler are trying to reap enormous rewards from their risky investment. Meanwhile the UAW’s Jobs Bank — which pays laid-off workers for doing nothing — remains in place.