The Former Big Three

What’s good for General Motors is good for the country. Remember that old slogan? I bet a lot of people believed it too.

The Former Big Three have been in the news a lot lately. To anyone paying attention, they have been in decline for a generation. Their various management teams have given many reasons for this, but I noticed that not one of them has blamed bad management. This is curious because they were never short of kudos when passing out bonuses to each during the past 30 years. If management is responsible for good decisions that lead to profit, then it stands to reason that they’re responsible for bad decisions that lead to bankruptcy. Aren’t they?

There was a media frenzy for a few days when the Former Big Three CEOs flew to Washington D.C. in corporate jets asking for handouts. They were turned down, but I think that the trip, the public hearings, and the subsequent rejection were theatre, just part of a show. The audience was us. Once they received their public drubbing and voiced some mea culpa spin, as per script, the three CEOs were back again a week later, flying commercially this time, with a “plan” on how to use the money that they were asking for, while at the same time asking for more money than the previous week. Does that mean that they didn’t have a plan the week before? Auto manufacturing CEOs asking for billions of dollars from the government, bold as can be, with no plan other than to keep themselves employed. It’s hard not to laugh out loud. It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t all the sad pilot for another reality TV show. But the governments in both Canada and the USA are actually now considering giving these clowns some money. Your money. My money. The money that we chose to spend buying someone else’s cars.

I figure that what was really going on was that those three CEOs were jealous of the confidence game that the financial sector had been able to pull off a few weeks earlier. I’m sure the three of them got together and said that if those slippery crooks on Wall Street could fleece people for years, lose the money, and then ask the government to save them, then damn it, we should be able to do the same. And a car or truck is a much simpler concept to explain to some corn pone Congressman than a tranche of worthless mortgage-backed piece of paper.

I love irony. Around the time of this phony public spectacle, Honda opened a new plant in Indiana. Two weeks ago, Toyota opened a new plant in Woodstock, Ontario employing 1200 people. The government is probably going to take money from the paychecks of those guys at the Toyota plant, and from you, and from me, and hand it over to the management teams that caused the decline and collapse of North America’s largest industry (other than the illegal drug trade, that is). Why do our governments think that this cabal will do a better job now? They don’t think that at all, of course. It’s all just a big lie and everyone knows it.

The thing is that I would be in favour of helping the North American auto industry but only under the following condition. All management at GM, Chrysler, and Ford above the level of shop foreman should be immediately fired without severance and replaced by Toyota and Honda retirees, who could then teach a new generation of North Americans how to design and build cars. Them, I would trust with the money.