We The People.ORG

Much as I enjoy listening to Limbaugh go off, sometimes he gets it wrong, horribly wrong. And on the issue of General Motors and Ford, Limbaugh has it horribly wrong. Limbaugh always looks for places to score partisan points, and in doing so is willing to sacrifice intelligent commentary. Hannity is nothing but a parrot, so I can’t expect him to understand this post.This post is about the need to save our industrial base and the long-term prospects of our economy, not just GM. The same can be applied to aviation, trains, steel, and the rest.

Ford’s own numbers DO show that many current buyers swelling their profits are American loyalists who used to buy from GM or Chrysler, but who WON’T buy from those companies due to Obama’s ownership. That much is true. Also, Toyota’s current troubles are contributing to Ford’s sales, but ONLY because Ford is offering obscene incentives to anyone trading in a Toyota. I wouldn’t bet against Toyota. They’ll get past this problem.

Mr. Limbaugh used to make plenty of money off General Motors, as he shilled for them with those sleazy ads that blend right in with his entertaining spiel. Limbaugh has offered cover for Rick Wagoner, the former CEO, and Bob Lutz, who has some bullshit title like Vice-Chairman and head of product development. Along with the GM CEOs of the past 30 years, these two men ran GM into the ground. GM has been dying, slow, like a tree, since the late Sixties, when they gave up trying to lead engineering and instead turned to the kind of fast-buck antics taught at the Harvard Business School and ingrained into every jerk with an MBA, it seems. When something large takes a long time to die, the end comes with an odd suddenness. That is the sudden death Rick Wagoner brought to GM.

Wagoner deserved to be shot, and it’s a shame that it took Obama to do it. This is one of those rare occasions when I will agree with the actions of Obama. He SHOULD NOT have been the agent of action, but Wagoner had to go. Wagoner made moronic deals with the auto workers union (the dead workers pool, which paid these idiots to sit around unemployed at full wages), wasted billions on idiotic “alliances” with foreign companies (all those Fiats Chrysler might bring in are actually GM/Opel/Saab products underneath), and did NOTHING to improve the quality of the cars. GM had a 25-year partnership with Toyota to build cars in a Northern California plant, yet in all that time they NEVER learned the quality system used by Toyota, a quality system that MIT says is the best in the world. In fact, Boeing went to TOYOTA to improve its manufacturing process. But GM, and that includes Wagoner, flubbed the deal. Morons. You want to know the first steps taken by Allan Mullaly when he took over Ford? He asked Toyota for help, and when they told him to pound sand, Mullaly poached Toyota-trained quality engineers, who went to work resolving all the screw-ups on the Ford Edge for a start (it’s a good car thanks to this effort), and to everything Ford would do from that point on. GM could do the same.

It’s rumored that the Bush Administration offered GM a structured bankruptcy under the protection of a capitalist system. Wagoner and Lutz wouldn’t go along with that, unwilling to relinquish control and their own cushy deals. Woe unto them for not taking the deal, because they fell into the hands of a gang of Bolshevik criminals run by Raum Emanuel. To repeat, Wagoner got what he deserved, and Lutz should be shoved out, too.

Lutz is the triumph of PR over achievement. A likable egomaniac who flies fighter jets and helicopters for fun and games, Lutz has produced nothing but weird, self-indulgent high-performance cars that do NOTHING to improve profit. He’s hard not to like, because he plays so hard at being a “man’s man,” but the idea that he’s somehow the consummate “car guy” is a load of bullshit. Car executives lead companies that know how to create vehicles that hundreds of thousands of people want to buy. GM used to know how to do this, which is why so many American families want to own a Fifties or Sixties GM car for Sunday drives. For “men of a certain age,” there’s a GM vehicle in the past that holds great memories: the hot prom date in a Camaro, that cross-country road trip in a Malibu, the Chevy II project car built up in high school and driven during college. One of our Sons of Liberty had a big block Olds 442 convertible when he was a young man starting out in business. Another Son of Liberty had a Corvair and then an Opel GT during high school. GM was part of the national psyche, a company that elicited feelings of comfort and belonging to all Americans. If you had a Buick or Olds with a V8, well, you were OK. And then they flushed it down the drain starting in the Seventies. They really ruined the dream in the Eighties, which oddly is when the size of GM peaked.

Lutz never accepted that a car company is supposed to build cars that fit the lives of great swaths of the US population. Lutz builds nonsense cars that make for great headlines with a small group of people who think 200-mph Corvettes are a smart investment of capital and engineering talent when you are bleeding red ink and no one wants to buy your sedans or minivans. Oh, and by the way, GM so completely misread the minivan market that they eventually just gave up. No one wanted their crappy offerings. Ford was forced to do the same thing because Chrysler and the Japanese had beaten them like red-haired stepchildren. And all the Japanese did was copy the Chrysler and make it better. So, please, Limbaugh, it’s not like Ford wasn’t a complete mess for most of this past decade.

The best thing that could happen to GM? CEO Whitacre, who is a government appointee who came out of the telephone business, and Bob Lutz, who is about 900 years old, are shoved out the door on the same day.

No matter what jerks like Limbaugh and Hannity want to say–funny, but they both took money from GM BEFORE the takeover–GM has the engineering and manufacturing depth to be among the world’s best car companies, but for several decades it has been run by jack asses who have squandered the company’s position in the world. The government will need to fund the revival of this company. They won’t make it, otherwise.

A strong leader with engineering capability could turn GM around in three years, but it will take that much time and that much money. Americans need to decide if they want a vibrant manufacturing base in the US, or if they want to be slaves to the ant hills of Asia. You decide, folks, because we are at the crossroads.

Also, and I write this with Mr Red in mind, all the assembly plants across Southern states are NOT a sign of healthy industry. No, foreign companies use cheap Southern labor just as they would in Mexico. So guess what? You’re being treated like Mexicans from Aguacaliente by the Germans, Japanese and Koreans who have plants in the old Confederacy. And remember, labor wages are NOT the source of wealth in any form of manufacturing. It’s the jobs of engineers, managers, designers, and various other highly skilled individuals who make the wealth from industry. If you surrender those “premium” jobs to the Japanese, Germans, and ultimately all such jobs to the Chinamen, then America is a slave ship. I know folks who have vast inherited wealth and they are selfish enough to say they don’t care. But will they really be “safe” if the rest of America is turned into a slave ship? I don’t think so.

Ford has ONLY turned around because of Allan Mullaly, who was recruited out of Boeing. Mullaly got the shaft at Boeing, being passed over for the top job after his exceptional engineering management put Boeing back on top of civil aviation. Some would tell you in private that the Mullaly-Ford marriage was brokered by the Bush Administration. Why? Billy Boy Ford, who is one of the biggest dumbshits on the face of the planet, and who did so much to run Ford into the ground in the late Nineties and early part of this decade, wanted to sell off his family birthright in a partnership with Renault. The feds stepped in and stopped this because Renault is in part owned by the French government. Also, Billy Boy wanted to turn over all control of the company to the Lebanese-Brazilian-Frenchman, Carlos Ghosn, who runs Nissan-Renault. Not smart enough to get the message, old Billy Boy then wanted to partner with one of the Chinese car companies, and was willing to share intellectual property rights with the Chinamen. In other words, Billy Boy Ford, who is a classic guilt-ridden rich white man, was willing to sell his family company and his country down the river to protect his own worthless hide. “Intellecutal property rights” means all the secrets to making a safe, reliable car. In other words, in one fell swoop, the Chinamen would have all the knowledge that has taken a half-century to build, from work in the US and Europe, of tens of thousands of highly educated, capable men and women. The core of our civilization would be handed over for a pittance. In one purchase, financed by all the Chinese-made laptops Americans love to play with, the Chinamen would leap forward a half-century. Smart, huh?

Ford was in worse shape than GM is now, though with the government in control, GM is on a sharp downward trajectory.

We’ve done it to ourselves. Why is it so close to impossible to find decent men to lead these companies? Because crooked Republicans and Democrats alike have given away our industry to Japan, and now to China and India. You don’t think Henry Kissinger, the guy who brokered the Nixon visits to China in the early Seventies, hasn’t made millions from his own investments in China? Uh huh. he and his crooked NYC banker pals have become fabulously wealthy selling America down the river to China.

Beyond Caterpillar, Boeing and the military-industrial complex, which is now separate from the rest of our industrial base and funded by the government, we have nothing here, and thus no breeding ground for industrial leaders. Fifty years ago, there would have been several dozen potential candidates to take over and run GM or Chrysler. And any one of those men would have been fully capable of doing the job, with an engineering degree, instinctive understanding of supply train and assembly, and a solid grasp of financials and retail sales. Now all we breed are MBA assholes who know how to sell products made in China and cash out for themselves. All we have are crooked bankers and Wal-Mart. And by the way, Wal-Mart is making millions in China.

If Limbaugh and Hannity and Beck were the “great patriots” they profess to be, they’d be stridently objecting to the sale of Volvo to the Chinamen, a company called Geely. As stated above, if the Chinamen get ahold of any of these companies, they will be able to quickly produce vehicles for sale in the US. They will eventually flood the market, and will wash away the US industry, a good chunk of the Korean business, and the weaker Japanese companies. The Europeans will no doubt put up barriers, but that will only last so long. Fiat will go down with Chrysler if the Chinamen are allowed to enter our markets after being GIVEN all the math and science it takes to build a safe car.

You want to have a country that means something? Then you better start demanding proper action on industrial policy in the US. Otherwise, you will be selling products not only MADE in China, but engineered and designed there, too. And you will be a slave working on a foreign-owned plantation. Wake up.

Tags: Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Rick Wagoner, Toyota