Rich S.

Bailout Beneficiaries: 8 Key Companies

Umm,,, back to the actual subject of the article: those eight top recipients are humongous organizations with thousands of suppliers/vendors/part... that depend on them for their own survival. This method of stimulating the economy is very similar to Reagan's "trickle down economics", whereby the success of the upper echelon gives the entire food chain a boost, which ultimately benefits everyone. As long as the stimulus funds are considered "loans" and not "gifts", I don't have a problem with this principle. I just hope they keep track of the loans, so we taxpayers get paid back and aren't forever saddled with this debt.

The Financial Crisis Explained

satguru sounds like a stereotypical angry liberal... If you paid attention, you would understand that the home buyers (poor, black, green) are not entirely responsible for this mess. It was Congress who forced banks to approve loans to people who did not deserve them. This affected every demographic, but a significantly higher percentage of low-income/minority buyers defaulted because they were barely able to make their payments from day one. In fact, most of those foreclosures happened within the first year. The Internet is full of data on this if you'd take a minute to research before lashing out.
I personally know two bank managers who predicted this mess years ago after being forced to approve loans to high-risk minority buyers simply because they were minorities (affirmative action, anyone?). Those buyers often had zero savings in addition to low incomes and/or unstable employment, so any financial hiccup would prevent them from making a payment. The banks would sell those loans as fast as they could, knowing they were too risky. Ironically, and unfortunately, those banks would invest their customers' money in the big Wall Street firms who were leveraging the same bad mortgages. These are global institutions and investment vehicles with many foreign investors, which is why it affects the entire world economy. It's a delicate house of cards.

The US Auto Crisis

Too many contradictions to take this author very seriously. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but I don't appreciate disinformation to boost the image of the US auto industry. He states that US manufactures continue to fail in improving long term reliability, then he claims there is no difference between Japanese and domestic cars in this regard, THEN he tells that buyers migrated to Japanese makes because "people started to realize that a car could go more than 100k miles without the transmission blowing up". The reliability of Japanese cars is considerably (and measurably) higher than US makes, as a previous commenter pointed out. American buyers continue move away from domestic manufacturers based on their own experiences with reliability, even if it costs them more upfront.
I agree that a 20MPG hybrid sounds unimpressive, but considering that many of these behemoth SUVs are driven around town by soccer moms, it represents a 40% improvement over their normal city-cycle fuel economy. The key is to convince people that they really don't need a vehicle like that in the first place. If only minivans looked cooler...