What will the 2010 Obama look like?

Well, it looks like General Motors is going to have to follow Chrysler’s lead and declare bankruptcy. Along with this new status there will be a new company name. ‘The General’ is about to be demoted as GM becomes Government Motors and the American people get left holding the bag. That bag is full of some seriously stinky shit in case you had any doubts about that. The U.S. government is the worst run and most costly business in the world and now those geniuses think they can start handling car companies? Barack Obama is probably jizzing his pants right about now because it gives him and his administration the grounds to force the automakers to make the cars he thinks they should be making. The president said yesterday that he did not want to be in the car design business, but executives at GM are already admitting that they are talking with Obama’s auto recovery team about where the company is to go from here. I think car companies should be allowed to make whatever cars they want to and let the consumers decide if those are the cars they want to buy and drive. The meaning of capitalism and freedom is to be able to choose and not have things dictated to us. It also means that a car company needs to roll the dice on its own and take a chance with the vehicles it makes.

Bankruptcy is the last thing I want to see for any company but with the exception of a few of the biggest companies in this country, no one else gets the bail out option that Washington has been offering. No, everyone else who starts a small company and can’t make things work has to suck it up and go through their ass while they try to get their shit together. I have a small business and I know that if something happens to it or me and I can’t make the payments to the bank that I owe no matter what the reason is or how hard I am trying, I get stuck with my fucking cheese hangin’ in the wind and who gives a shit right?

Chrysler and GM need to be allowed to fail and if that means they cease to exist then so be it. These companies are like dinosaurs in the way that they have been run and the congressional hearings last fall were a perfect example of that. When the chief executives rolled into Washington with their hands out asking for money they all came on company jets. The level of not having a fucking clue about how to save money and cut back is something that has not been understood at these companies for far too long.

A lot of financial experts are quick to point fingers at the United Auto Workers as the source of the problem with the big three but that is nothing more than a lame scapegoat. The unions have done nothing more than unions have always tried to do and the companies have always conceded to their demands in the past because the money coming in was so great that it didn’t matter. What American automakers needed to do decades ago was to sit down with the union and tell them there was going to need to be more concessions in order to remain viable. The fact that they didn’t do this on a serious level until just recently tells me that the profits in Detroit have been pretty obscene up until now. The real problem with American auto makers is that ‘The Big Three’ spent decades focusing on trucks and SUV’s to make the bottom line and that was fine until the price of gas started going through the roof and people stopped buying those vehicles. Not enough people were interested in buying the sedans and coupes that the big three offered because they had made such shitty vehicles for so long that they weren’t able to win back consumer confidence before the collapse began. The high gas prices and the downfall of the housing industry helped to spark the recession and delivered a one-two punch to the American auto industry that had put all of their eggs in the back of one of their pickup trucks. You can’t blame the unions alone for the troubles in Detroit anymore than you can blame guns alone for gun deaths. ‘The Big Three’ auto makers should have reined in the UAW and started to make much better quality vehicles a long time ago but they didn’t because everyone was rolling in the green and no one cared about how thin the roof was over their heads or the floor under their feet.

Besides the issues American auto manufacturers have with the UAW there is also the corporate attitude that goes with some of these companies that only people far enough down the food chain can even begin to see. Ask anyone working two or three jobs what these companies should have done in order to start saving some money and they would be able to give you a whole laundry list of cost cutting measures. Things like private jets and NASCAR sponsorships would be the first things to go away. Everything that didn’t have anything to do with the making and selling of the best, most reliable cars on the planet would be the second things to go. That would include cars like the Corvette, the Hummer line, the new Camaro, and any other car that wasn’t about being profitable. Don’t get me wrong because it’s a hard thing to say that such American institutions as the Corvette and Camaro should be discontinued seems almost communistic to me, but that is how dire the situation is for GM at this point. It still amazes me that the new Camaro was ever brought to light when GM clearly knew it was in trouble. (For that matter, I am equally amazed that Chrysler green lighted the new Challenger too.) I think it’s part of that mentality where you can’t see how bad off you are unless you’ve been there for awhile. Hard working, underpaid people should be brought in when cost cutting measures are necessary because those are the people that have learned to do without and they know what you need versus what you want.
Executive salaries and the benefit packages that go along with them are another major problem at these companies. Actually, senior executive pay is a problem with a lot of companies and has only really been brought to light in the past few years. You simply cannot continue to run a company and its assets into the ground year after year and then reward the person who ran it into the ground with a fat compensation/severance package when he or she leaves. The truth is that a lot of these people leave these companies because they have done such a horrible job that they are in danger of being tarred and feathered if they stay. Of course you have the occasional asshole that offers to run the place with no salary or maybe only taking one dollar a year or some other such bullshit. These pricks need to be ousted more than anyone else because if you have enough money to retire but you’re sticking around for the glory then you are a douche bag to the nth degree. I’d like to think I was making a difference as much as the next person but if you’re sticking it out for free in a for profit company than you’re not trying to make a difference. These people that do that very much want to be the one to turn things around so that everyone else will say “Wow, look at the great job Jim did. If it weren’t for him we would have lost the company.” Fuck that. I guess that’s the biggest difference between the movers and the shakers and the rest of us in this country. The working class people know enough to say that if they had the money to retire they would. The power hungry upper echelon of management doesn’t have the sense to figure this out. So while those people are the ones responsible for making companies great they are also the ones responsible for fucking things all up when it eventually happens, and it always happens eventually.