"The plan is for the government to lend some $25 billion to the automakers in the first year at an interest rate of 4.5 percent, or about one-third what the companies are currently paying to borrow, the report said.

Under the proposal, the government would have the option of deferring any payment at all for up to five years, the article said."

Never a mention about the automakers bringing this on themselves.

How? Oh, let's see.  We'll make a lot of trucks and SUVs, and set up our pricing structure so that we can't make money off cars, but do off the gas-guzzlers.  We refuse to solve our problems with managing retirement health care costs for thirty years, putting it off until we finally toss it to the government as we get backed into a corner.

Cerberus buys Chrysler after Daimler bought it earlier, and now has its hand out, and that's not even a publicly-traded company.  Its a private hedge fund, basically, which appears to have made a bad bet and now wants the government to back it.

(Oh, and by the way, Chrysler already got its bailout.  It was stuck in the housing bill.  You didn't know that?  Well its in there - go read it.  That's right, a private company got bailed out at your expense - in the housing bill - to make cars!)

"Too big to fail"?  Gee, that net keeps getting wider and wider doesn't it?

It would be one thing if this was the first time.  But if you remember, it wasn't.  Chrysler was saved from going under once, and before you say "but the government didn't lose money" you must also add that the automakers learned exactly nothing from this adventure, in that they utterly failed to get their labor and production costs under control.

Build cars in Detroit?  That's nice.  How come Toyota and Honda have plants in the United States and manage to build them for less?  Probably because they don't have the UAW problems and legacy issues.

Well, the automakers had their chance to solve this over the preceding 30 years, and instead of doing so they "levered up" into cheap gasoline by building a production structure that required sales of huge gas-guzzling vehicles to soccer moms in order to turn a profit.

When the inevitable "last sucker" was found and the business dried up so did they.

People complain about CAFE standards but the truth is that business failure is the only medicine that works.

GM, Ford and Chrysler had 30 years to tool up to be able to profitably produce both small and large vehicles so they wouldn't get nailed by the inevitable shift in fuel costs, a shift that, by the way, they were all aware was coming.

Why did they act as they did? 

Because Chrysler was bailed out instead of being allowed to fail the first time.

Time to cut the cord.