Problem with that is there was none at the time and the auto business would have had to shut down.

before I came to you guys I did some googling of bankruptcy, and I didn't see any mentions of requirements involving other people injecting money.

I want to be armed with as many facts as I can get. Thanks very much for your time.

The industry would have just shut down. I would tell the teabagger to go F himself. That I don't respond, associate with or acknowledge a racist and a bigot. Why waste time with a POS.

the private money would have been for a bail out, yes? isn't that different from the bankruptcy thing?

what I'm trying to address is these clowns thinking that a bankruptcy would have been better...but wouldn't that have meant shutting down the whole company?

see, I don't want to be asking these questions of the teabagger.

He and his billionaire buddies stood to make billions off a bankrupted auto industry.

Amy Goodman interviewed Greg Palast on "Democracy Now!" this a.m.

The whole banking system was on the edge of the abyss, and had to be bailed out themselves. They couldn't take the risk.
At the time cars and large suvs, trucks were not selling, they had to have clash for clunkers program to get rid of inventory and selling at a loss.The govt was the only realistic source for a loan (bailout).

to sell off some of their operations to outfits like Bain, which would have then either dismantled them for profit after borrowing them into insolvency or sent them to China to profiteer on near slave labor.

It would also have neatly destroyed the pension system, throwing former workers out in the cold, with nothing but Social Security and bare bones Medicare to live on.

Romney would see this as a double gain: operations to be picked clean by his own company plus "unprofitable" workers cast aside completely, broken cogs to be thrown out with the garbage.

CEOs have no idea that their ideal world would be Dickensian in it's utter cruelty and lack of respect for human life. They never do see the human cost of their actions as they destroy jobs and with them lives.

And this is how you answer your right wing friend. Ask him how he would like to spend his own life: working for a living wage or living in total penury with nothing better to look forward to, ever, the fruits of his labor stolen again and again until he is too sick to work.

If the Republicans get in again, this is the process they will continue to pursue, the degradation of labor in favor of capital and the beggaring of 98% of American citizens.

Ask him if he would be more likely, or less likely to make a major purchase knowing that he is now working for a wholly-owned susidiary of Bain Capital.

They can't or won't answer the question.

I lost all hope of being able to get him to make sense when he started spouting about Obama not having 'christian values' and being a muslim.

I pounded him into the ground at that point and apologized to everybody else on the thread for not being patient. He didn't come back.

Thanks to all for your help. Your comments helped me to put Governor Granholm's comments into focus.