That’s right - hard earned tax dollars sent to men who have made poor business decisions.

From CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The federal government will provide $13.4 billion in loans to Detroit automakers, the White House said Friday.

An additional $4 billion may be available in February, the Bush administration said.

“The terms and conditions of the financing provided by the Treasury Department will facilitate restructuring of our domestic auto industry, prevent disorderly bankruptcies during a time of economic difficulty, and protect the taxpayer by ensuring that only financially viable firms receive financing,” according to a statement released by the White House.

The loans are designed to stabilize U.S. automakers through March 2009, at which time the automakers must show they are financially viable.

“If the firms have not attained viability by March 31, 2009, the loan will be called and all funds returned to the Treasury,” the statement says.

Financing will be drawn from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, it says.

The government will put other conditions on the loans, the statement says, including limits on executive compensation and perks such as corporate jets, the automakers adhering to fuel efficiency and emission standards and opening books to government scrutiny.

This really pisses me off.

CTI group is cutting 53,000 Jobs.

Fidelity cuts 1400 jobs.

JpMorgan is about to cut jobs as well.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is considering cutting thousands of jobs on the scale of cuts at Citi and Goldman, the U.K.’s The Sunday Telegraph reported. If JPMorgan slashed 10% of its workforce as Goldman has, its headcount would decline by about 3,000.

Lowe’s sales drop considerably.
Wetwired may seem entirely too slow.  That is because our host go-daddy seems to think there was no problem when I reported it on Friday last week.  It took a phone call today for them to go “oh, yes we think there may be an issue..” No ETA, on how long it will take to fix the issue.

GM is still having issues but here is the thing, they have been pushing higher wages, out-dated tactics and vehicles, gas guzzler vehicles actually and on average the Unionized Auto Workers make WAY more than the rest of the industry. The big three auto industry pay $25/hr more than any of the other companies like Toyota.  Seriously, you’re making a GM Yukon and you make $73.00/hr?  No wonder the freaking thing costs $50,000.  They don’t need a bailout, they need restructuring.

Hosting
Now I am on a shared hosted enviroment which means a single server could host many other websites.  This is fine - I recognize there is not going to be lightning fast hosting this method.  On the other hand, when a website times out like wetwired has done over the weekend and this morning.  That’s when its not fine.

I guess the only news that brings a smile to my face is the fact that OPEC is trying to cut production again and guess what? The price of oil is still falling.

We’re expecting the job losses report to come out today - I know for a fact that a lot of companies cut back in the month of October - AMD was one of them as a couple people I know were laid off.  If you haven’t heard Dell is also allowing employees to take a voluntary severance package in leu of further job cuts.  

Oh and the other thing that really pisses me off is the US auto-industry.  They are asking for some of that 700bn tax payer bailout.  Just like the banks, the auto-industry put themselves in this position.   While I feel really bad for the workers, I think the management for the auto-industry can go fuck themselves.  I’m not paying for your mistakes and poor management - they continued to tool up to sell more and more non-fuel efficient vehicles.  They continued to hold back innovation in an effort to continue to make profit.   I want the US auto-industry to crash hard.

Yeah, looking more bleak for the Auto industry, but I’m personally glad that the detroit industry is having a hard time - they have not been playing the game right, they have purposfully held back technological endevors that would jump the industry into the future.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — A merger between U.S. automakers General Motors Corp. and Chrysler is likely on hold until after next week’s presidential election, as the U.S. Treasury Department said it will not provide the automakers with aid, the Detroit Free Press reported Friday.

GM had asked the Bush administration and Congress for a loan of about $10 billion to help keep the struggling company operational. It said that it could possibly use the aid to fund a merger between it and Chrysler, which is owned by Cerberus Capital Management.

Many experts have said both companies would need to merge to stop their recent bleeding. GM (GM, Fortune 500) has only about $21 billion in cash and Chrysler has $11 billion, although most of that was borrowed.

GM said Wednesday that overall sales were down 11.4% worldwide in the third quarter compared to the same period a year earlier. With auto sales plummeting globally, analysts say the merger would save the companies billions of dollars in redundant expenses.

But that would also mean tens of thousands of jobs lost. Analysts have estimated that the total job loss in a GM-Chrysler merger could be as high as 90,000.

The really bad part is that the American worker is getting hurt by the morons that run GM.