Chrysler Returns to Corporate Welfare Trough
24th February 2014
Back in late 2011 after the Occupy Wall Street protests, Fiat-Chrysler chief executive officer Sergio Marchionne gave a speech in Toronto to decry what he called “the most inane displays of greed.”
The reference was to behaviour he had observed while serving on various company boards over the years.
Just two years before that speech, Chrysler sought (and received) $2.9 billion from Canada’s taxpayers and $12.4 billion from the U.S. government, amid a doomsday scenario for the automotive sector. It was rather cheeky of Marchionne, then, to try and take the side of the “99 per cent.” Chrysler has always been a poster boy for the sort of avarice that some companies inflict on 100 per cent of taxpayers: the ever-constant demand that governments ante up money or a company will shift production to another jurisdiction.
And ‘progressives’ everywhere will criticize capitalism for this.