The symbol of American faux-macho is now Chinese

Remember after the 9/11 attacks, when the Hummer became the must-have vehicle, the tough guy symbol to end tough guy symbols? It was one thing to slap a photo of Osama Bin Laden in crosshairs and a bumper sticker reading "These colors don't run" on the back of your Ford Expedition. But to do that on a Hummer meant you were REALLY an American patriot. You were Protecting. Your. Family.™ Never mind that you lived in Nebraska and had about as much chance of being hit by terrorists as you had of stepping out of bed and falling into the ocean. After all, the Hummer was Ah-nuld's vehicle of choice. It was big, it was badass, and in a Hummer you owned the road, your dick became bigger, and you could bully all those pussy-asses in their Civics.

I wonder how all those super-patriot Hummer owners feel now that the brand of the vehicle they love has been sold to a Chinese company:

The buyer is the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company, based in Chengdu, G.M. said Tuesday. The price was not disclosed, but industry analysts had estimated that the Hummer division would sell for less than $500 million.

The deal, expected to close in the third quarter, would make Tengzhong the first Chinese company to sell vehicles in North America, though Hummer’s operations would remain in the United States.

“The Hummer brand is synonymous with adventure, freedom and exhilaration, and we plan to continue that heritage by investing in the business, allowing Hummer to innovate and grow in exciting new ways under the leadership and continuity of its current management team,” Yang Yi, the chief executive of Tengzhong, said in a statement released by G.M. “We will be investing in the Hummer brand and its research and development capabilities, which will allow Hummer to better meet demand for new products such as more fuel-efficient vehicles in the U.S.”

[snip]

Tengzhong is a privately owned company, but Tuesday’s deal required preliminary vetting by Beijing officials, who retain the right to veto any effort at an overseas acquisition by a Chinese company and who give special attention to deals of more than $100 million.

Tengzhong is known in China for making a wide range of road equipment, from bridge piers to highway construction and maintenance machinery. But even before the Hummer deal, the company had been moving more into heavy-duty trucks, including tow trucks and oil tankers.

“Over all, we’re pretty pleased,” said a Hummer spokesman, Nick Richards. “If you think about the qualities we’d want in a new owner for the brand, this buyer really met all the criteria. They’ve got a proven track record in international business, and they’ve got a long-term vision for the brand. They’ve got the capital to invest in more efficient vehicles, which is what’s necessary to grow the brand.”

If the deal is completed, it would be the first acquisition of a well-known American auto brand by a Chinese company, after many months of speculation about such a deal. Chinese automakers have already purchased the MG and Rover brands, two of the most famous names in British automotive history.

As a Chinese company, Tengzhong could face a challenge in presenting the deal to American Hummer owners. The brand has long sought to emphasize patriotism, stressing that the Hummer H1 was essentially the same vehicle built in the same factory as the Humvee that carries American soldiers into battle in Iraq and elsewhere.

It should be noted that the Hummer that we see on American streets is no longer the one that was made for the U.S. military, so there's no need for wingnuts to have the vapors about the capacity for manufacture of American military vehicles being sold to the Chinese. But the symbolism of the vehicle that more than any other embodied the faux masculinity and toughness of the Bush years is now just so much detritus to be sold off to China for a relative pittance.

The countdown clock for Republican Senators asking for bailouts for Toyota and Nissan begins

Remember how opposed Republican Senators were to any kind of help for the U.S. automobile industry, claiming that the carmakers' woes were due entirely to the "greed" (sic) of rank-and-file UAW members? Now that it's Toyota and Nissan -- companies with factories in the states of those same Republican Senators -- who are tanking, let's see how long it takes for these same Republicans to demand help for the factories in their own states:

Nissan Motor on Monday joined Toyota, Mazda and Mitsubishi in forecasting a loss for the current financial year, and announced it was cutting 20,000 workers in one of the most aggressive cutbacks so far by a Japanese company since the start of the global downturn.

What part of "If you don't have a job, you aren't going to buy a car" -- or a house, for that matter -- do Republicans not understand?

What's wrong with the U.S. car industry in a nutshell

Before settling in for a day of cartoons yesterday, we caught some of CNBC's program Saving GM, which focused on the development of a new version of the old Chevrolet standby, the Camaro, for 2010. (You can watch it yourself here and here.) And it struck me how this portrayal of the money and effort that GM was spending to try to revive an old brand name from an era radically different from today was the essence of what is wrong with the U.S. car industry.

In the 1960's, when the Camaro made its appearance, it was a sporty car for people who couldn't afford a Corvette. It was a time of muscle cars, cheap gas, and plentiful jobs, and upward mobility. Today we live in a time of uncertain and volatile fuel prices, wars for oil, and a contracting economy. And instead of going full-bore with developing the next generation of transportation that does not rely on the petroleum-fueled internal combustion engine, General Motors is looking back to the 1960's and focusing on restyling an old car so they can market it as "If you just buy this car, we can turn back the clock." Swell. Yes, they have the Volt being hyped for a 2010 release, but frankly, we do not have the luxury of expending automotive R&D dollars on revamped muscle cars.

So while General Motors is trying desperately to turn back the clock to 1967, Toyota is looking way, way ahead into the future:

Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy in an effort to turn around its struggling business with a futuristic ecological car, a top business daily reported Thursday.

The Nikkei newspaper, however, said it will be years before the planned vehicle will be available on the market. Toyota's offices were closed Thursday and officials were not immediately available for comment.

According to The Nikkei, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells equipped on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. The automaker later hopes to develop a model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle, the newspaper said without citing sources.

The solar car is part of efforts by Japan's top automaker to grow during hard times, The Nikkei said.

Americans have this peculiar need to have a car that's "fun to drive", though with increasing congestion on our highways, I'm not sure that there are many places left in the country where driving is "fun." And while I'll admire a cool-looking car as much as anyone (though my idea of cool-looking runs more towards this than pale imitations of 1960's muscle cars), when it's time for the rubber to hit the road, give me a fuel-efficient car that I can rely on to be on the road more than it is in the shop. Perhaps there are enough baby boomers in midlife crisis to buy this misbegotten beast that GM is betting enough of the ranch on to pay Dale Earnhardt Jr. to test-drive it. But if this is what GM's vision is for turning the company around, then we just wasted $7 billion on them.

And you can't for one minute blame this boondoggle on the UAW.

And it's about damn time, too

I simply don't understand the kind of vitriol that's being directed at auto workers in the UAW, simply because they've been able to earn a living wage. It's astounding to me that hardly a peep was uttered when AIG spent a chunk of it's bailout money on a fancy resort junket for its executives, or when financial company execs walked away with tens of millions of dollars in golden parachutes, but let auto workers try to hang onto their pay and health insurance and pensions, and everyone screams bloody murder. It's sort of like the outrage directed at teachers. Instead of demanding that ALL workers get the kind of benefits that used to be standard as part of the employer/worker compact, too many Americans subscribe to the "misery loves company" doctrine, demanding that their fellow workers join them in the race to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

It's not the fault of the workers that Detroit continued to crank out gas-guzzling SUVs, marketing them as a kind of hybrid of macho terrorist-thwart and child protectant against rampaging tree-huggers driving Corollas. And it's not the fault of the workers that Detroit once again, having learned nothing from the oil crunch of the 1970s, found itself caught with its gas-guzzling pants down when gas rose to $4/gallon last summer, unable and unwilling to retool for the future.

But as someone who now drives to work on New Jersey highways, and has noticed since the storms of last weekend that NOT ONE FUCKING SUV DRIVER IN THE STATE has made even the slightest effort to clear the snow off the roof of his/her behemoth, thereby putting everyone who drives behind them at risk from the massive flying shards of ice that fly off their vehicle roofs at 70 miles per hour, I say about the end of the line for SUVs in Ohio and Wisconsin "Good riddance." Not to the workers, but to the vehicles which their management made them continue to crank out long after the market for them collapsed.

It's appalling that these people have been thrown out of work right before Christmas. It's appalling that once again, they are the casualties of short-sighted management that refused to look beyond trying to get through the next quarter. It's appalling that Rick Wagoner still has a job while the people who just did what they were told have no idea where they go from here. It's appalling that the government is giving Rick Wagoner another few billion dollars to squander in his collusion with the oil companies to perpetuate the internal combustion engine, instead of helping those who are going to be displaced by the inevitable collapse of the Big Three to prepare for other kinds of work so that they are not simply just tossed on the scrap heap of history while Rick Wagoner leaves with a taxpayer-paid golden parachute.

I want these workers helped to prepare for new jobs. But as for the vehicles they were building, well, I'm not shedding any tears. The roads here in New Jersey will be safer without them.

Employees at Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and VWplants in the south should watch their own backs

I'm sure it's tempting for workers in the auto plants in the South who are getting paid at close to UAW levels to feel smug at the plight of their brethren in the rust belt. I wonder if they realize that the reason they get paid as well as they do, instead of the auto plants in which they work being the equivalent of American sweatshops, is because of UAW compensation levels. And I wonder if they realize how they are next in the crosshairs in the race to the bottom being conducted in the executive suites:

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger realized that the existence of the union was under attack, which is why he refused to give in to the Senate Republicans' demands that the UAW make further concessions. I say "further" because the union has already conceded a lot. Its 2007 contract introduced a two-tier contract to pay new hires $15 an hour (instead of $28) with no defined pension plan and dramatic cuts to their health insurance. In addition, the UAW agreed that healthcare benefits for existing retirees would be transferred from the auto companies to an independent trust. With the transferring of the healthcare costs, the labor cost gap between the Big Three and the foreign transplants will be almost eliminated by the end of the current contracts.

These concessions go some distance toward leveling the playing field (retiree costs are still a factor for the Big Three). But what the foreign car companies want is to level -- which is to say, wipe out -- the union. They currently discourage their workforce from organizing by paying wages comparable to the Big Three's UAW contracts. In fact, Toyota's per-hour wages are actually above UAW wages.

However, an internal Toyota report, leaked to the Detroit Free Press last year, reveals that the company wants to slash $300 million out of its rising labor costs by 2011. The report indicated that Toyota no longer wants to "tie [itself] so closely to the U.S. auto industry." Instead, the company intends to benchmark the prevailing manufacturing wage in the state in which a plant is located. The Free Press reported that in Kentucky, where the company is headquartered, this wage is $12.64 an hour, according to federal labor statistics, less than half Toyota's $30-an-hour wage.

If the companies, with the support of their senators, can wipe out or greatly weaken the UAW, they will be free to implement their plan.

They really are stuffing their pockets on their way out the door

In case you had any doubts that George W. Bush is going to make sure his base, the haves and the have-mores, are taken care of before he leaves office, here you go:

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

So here's how it shakes out, and this is so-called conservative economic policy in a nutshell: executives who run their companies into the ground can get huge golden parachutes using Federal bailout money. Auto workers in unions are told by United States Senators that they have to be sacrificed for wingnut anti-union ideology.

For all that my own experience with unions hasn't made me inclined to support them, or at least not the way unions are configured today, the difference between conservatives and me is that they have always been about union busting and about corporate power. Conservative ideology does not hold for the rights of workers. When we look at how U.S. manufacturing has been outsourced to low-wage countries with no worker protections, and on the rare occasions that we hear about overseas sweatshops in which women and children work long hours for little pay and are subject to the most horrific exploitation, we know that this is the conservative dream for America -- a race to the bottom in which a few people hold all the marbles and the rest scramble for scraps. I think about the women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire nearly a century ago and I know how close we are to a return to these kinds of working conditions in a country with a shrinking job base in which ever more workers are competing for ever fewer jobs.

It may very well be that the Big Three will fold no matter what we do. And if the Republicans had only pointed out this reality -- that any bailout is only to get the workers through Christmas -- I might even see their point. But no, it isn't about reality, it's about mean-spirited corporatism. It's about putting millions of people out of work for ideology and opportunism. And that is about as reprehensible a motive as I've ever seen out of a bunch of people who've forgotten that as "public servants", working people, including auto workers, are part of that public.

Republicans want YOU to make less money

Remember during the campaign when John McCain made the claim that he wants EVERYONE to get wealthy? So...was he full of shit, or is he really not a Republican? Because it's clear that the LAST thing Republicans want is more wealth for everyone. In fact, the Republicans are making clear that they want Americans to join their overseas counterparts in the race to the income bottom.

John Aravosis notes how bizarre, and how, well, anti-American the Republican doctrine of race-to-the-bottom is:

Since when is an American political party behind the proposition that it's unfair for Americans to make more than foreigners? And that if we do make more than foreigners, we need the government stepping in to cut our salaries? Is this really the position the Republicans want quoted back at them during the next election? Not to mention, what will the impact be on an already anemic economy of cutting the wages of hundreds of thousands of American workers?

And Michael Moore, who now looks like a seer instead of a blowhard, having made the cri de coeur for the rust belt nearly twenty years ago with Roger and Me, also points out what the Republicans stand for:

They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers start building only cars and mass transit that reduce our dependency on oil.

They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers build cars that reduce global warming.

They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers withdraw their many lawsuits against state governments in their attempts to not comply with our environmental laws.

They could have given the loan on the condition that the management team which drove these once-great manufacturers into the ground resign and be replaced with a team who understands the transportation needs of the 21st century.

Yes, they could have given the loan for any of these reasons because, in the end, to lose our manufacturing infrastructure and throw 3 million people out of work would be a catastrophe.

But instead, the Senate said, we'll give you the loan only if the factory workers take a $20 an hour cut in wages, pension and health care. That's right. After giving BILLIONS to Wall Street hucksters and criminal investment bankers -- billions with no strings attached and, as we have since learned, no oversight whatsoever -- the Senate decided it is more important to break a union, more important to throw middle class wage earners into the ranks of the working poor than to prevent the total collapse of industrial America.

We have a little more than a month to go of this madness. As I sit here in Michigan today, tens of thousands of hard working, honest, decent Americans do not believe they can make it to January 20th. The malaise here is astounding. Why must they suffer because of the mistakes of every CEO from Roger Smith to Rick Wagoner? Make management and the boards of directors and the shareholders pay for this.

And so we return to where we were this morning, when I wrote about how this is the culmination of nearly thirty years of Republicans getting away with fostering class warfare within the very class it's been systematically decimating for the past three decades. The only question is just how much economic ripple effect Americans are willing to put up with for the pleasure of seeing their fellow workers suffer through the holidays.

What kind of people are we, anyway?

Republicans hate unions so much they're willing to see the entire country go bankrupt if it means breaking the UAW

There is a legitimate debate to be had about unions as they often manifest today. Only the most confirmed corporatist would say that workers should not be able to form groups to fight for better pay and working conditions. And to be sure, being a member of a union is not always an unalloyed joy for union members. My own experience as a member of unions hasn't exactly made me go rah-rah for unions.

In high school, I worked at a supermarket. I was required to join (yes, really) the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, which was the union representing the entire store. The union wasn't able to protect me from the thugs who regarded the store as their own private playground and decided a 4'10" high school kid was fair game, and when the union went on strike one summer after I went to college, I had to spend my summer sitting out on a picket line or else never be allowed back to work at that store.

Later on, I worked as a marketing assistant in a company in which certain departments were part of the Newspaper Guild. Mine was one of them. After a few years, my supervisor wanted to promote me into a management position, and the union blocked the promotion. Even though I was going to be replaced with someone who would be in the union, the union insisted that I remain in the union. So this was a case in which the union blocked my advancement.

That said, I wonder if there had been a strong union for IT workers, if we would have seen the kind of outsourcing that has made IT a relatively unattractive career option. So from my perspective, unions are a double-edged sword. But there is no doubt that the automobile industry has been the bedrock of American manufacturing, and the UAW is what kept the auto industry from being the equivalent of a sweatshop, and that allowed the middle class to grow and thrive during the years following World War II. Because it is the rare corporation that believes its employees are anything other than interchangeable, expendable, mindless, soulless, parts.

In the decades since Ronald Reagan's election, we've seen a successful effort on the part of the GOP to create class warfare between the middle class and the have-lesses, even as they've done everything possible to eviscerate the middle class. A thriving middle class is antithetical to the GOP's philosophy that plutocracy is the natural order of things. Reaganomics was never about a rising tide lifting all boats, it was about a rising tide allowing the plutocrats to further stuff their pockets and leave the middle and working classes, the poor, and immigrants, treading water and scrambling for an insufficient number of lifejackets. This year we've seen the true face of the GOP, as Wall Street firms were given a blank check, which they then used not to save jobs but to stuff the pockets of their executives with year-end bonuses, and now we've seen the GOP refuse to help the automobile industry.

Richard Shelby, protecting the foreign car makers in his state, gives lip service to the very valid point that giving an industry that has shown it doesn't know how to run its businesses a blank check before they submit a plan may be pouring money down an empty hole. But it is South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint who 'fessed up on All Things Considered on Wednesday about what this is really about:

I'm not trying to get rid of unions, but they appear to be an antiquated concept in today's economy, and if a company cannot be competitive with the union structure that they have, then we have to recognize that. The taxpayers should not be obligated to prop up these union bosses who have put the American car companies against a wall, with these contracts and the threat of strikes over the last several decades, that have essentially put them out of business. And they want the taxpayers to pay for that. And that doesn't make any sense. We have to force this management out, or force some dramatic changes, and we've got to save these companies.

[snip]

These car companies are in real trouble, and they should have been planning to restructure for a long time. But the political aspect of this is that most of this is being done to protect unions, it's not to protect the workers. And what I want to do is make sure we have jobs for these workers and we have first-class American automobile companies, and we're not going to do it with the barnacles of unionism wrapped around their necks.

"The barnacles of unionism." Now I'm someone for whom union membership WAS a barnacle. But when we look at the kinds of exploitation that have taken place in American manufacturing, from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to the conditions endured by immigrant workers in the meatpacking and service industries, it's hard to see that "unionism" is the problem. "Unions" as they are currently structured, in which you essentially work for two sets of management instead of just one, may very well be. But "unionism" is not what has killed the U.S. auto industry, it's the short-sightedness of management, which never, ever put any real effort into making energy-efficient cars, and which continued the short-term strategy of cranking out profitable SUVs, only to find themselves caught with their pants down when fuel prices spiked this year.

It isn't union members who designed the Dodge Aspen and Omni, and the Chevrolet Citation and the Ford Pinto, and the various other dogs that Detroit cranked out until finally finding big bucks in small trucks and SUVs. It isn't union members who decided that the quick hit to be had from the Hummer was worth doing. Union members make what the designers design. So to say that it's the fault of UAW members that automobile industry doesn't make vehicles that are competitive in quality and durability to those made by Honda, Toyota, and Nissan is simply a flat-out lie. Back in the days when Detroit made Dodge Darts and Chevy Novas and Buick Skylarks and other cars that you could drive for 200,000 miles, no one cared that the auto workers were well-paid. So who's fault is it, exactly, that everyone you know who drives an American car has had problems with them? The people who build them? Or those who designed them? The people who build them? Or the executives who saw R&D as just a cost center?

But the GOP's hatred of unions and its advocacy of unfettered corporate power and greed is so strong that they are willing to allow the entire nation's economy to collapse, if it means dismantling the almighty UAW.

As I write this, Dow futures are down 264 points. Thanks, GOP.

The UAW is making concessions. OK, management, now it's your turn

The UAW has thrown down the gauntlet by going ahead and making concessions:

The United Automobile Workers union said Wednesday that it would make major concessions in its contracts with the three Detroit auto companies to help them lobby Congress for $34 billion in federal aid.

The surprising move by the U.A.W. could be a critical factor in the automakers’ bid not only to get government assistance, but also to become competitive with the cost structure of nonunion plants operated by foreign automakers in the United States.

At a news conference in Detroit, the U.A.W.’s president, Ron Gettelfinger, said that his members were willing to sacrifice job security provisions and financing for retiree health care to keep the two most troubled car companies of the Big Three, General Motors and Chrysler, out of bankruptcy.

[snip]

Democratic Congressional leaders have said that they want to help the automakers and that they were heartened by the gesture of contrition that the executives made by driving to Washington — rather than flying on corporate jets, as they did two weeks ago — and by the more comprehensive plans submitted by the companies.

But the political climate on Capitol Hill is still doubtful for the automakers, and only seemed to worsen on Wednesday with a new CNN poll showing a majority of Americans opposing a taxpayer rescue.

I'd like to believe that the root of this opposition is rage at the spectacle of auto executives taking private jets to beg for taxpayer money from Congress. But I'm not convinced, and the re-election of Saxby Chambliss in Georgia underscores the fact that American working people are still more willing to become soldiers in a resentment war against other working people than against the people who are implementing policies that are creating this relentless chase to the bottom.

"Why should they get good pay and benefits when I don't?"

That's the line used when protesting the benefits packages that unions have gained over the years for automotive and state workers. Instead of wanting to gain these benefits for themselves, American workers who have seen their own benefits cut -- who have been forced into HMOs and seen their premiums skyrocket anyway, who have seen their employers eliminate 401(k) matches and defined benefit pensions, who have seen salary freezes -- seem to prefer having other workers join them in this march towards financial oblivion than to lobby to have their own benefits restored.

While working Americans were having the rug pulled out from under them over the last eight years, there was little rage directed at management and Wall Street fatcats getting six-figure bonuses every December -- the guys who developed and sold these derivatives based on bogus mortgages. There's STILL more rage directed at the blue collar worker who simply wanted the "American Dream of Homeownership" and didn't read the fine print, or even the person who was baited-and-switched into a subprime loan at closing rather than walk away, than there is towards the decision-makers who got us into this.

I'm not sure why we as a country want to drag others at our economic level down with us if we are among those on the slide to the bottom, rather than joining together to fight to sustain our standard of living. Perhaps we just feel so hopeless that it's easier to just say misery loves company and accept it, focusing resentment on those who have even less.

Yesterday I was listening to Bloomberg radio in the car on the way home, and the anchors were talking to someone who was discussing the cutbacks that Wall Street executives who were going to see their bonuses cut this year were going to have to make -- not renewing their country club memberships, sacrificing a vacation, it's really going to hurt the Hamptons.

My heart bleeds.

Funny how THEY aren't having to feel that a job with a cut bonus is better than no job and no bonus. And they say auto workers feel entitled.

But now the UAW has made its concessions on its own terms -- a good-faith effort to bow to economic reality. Let's see if this changes public opinion. Somehow I think not.

Don't you love it when one sentence tells an entire story?

There's a beautiful simplicity to the notion that a single sentence can tell you everything you need to know about a place, a person, a problem.

Poets are masters of this, like Lord Byron:

She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to the tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

But you don't have to be a poet to appreciate just how perfectly this sentence encapsulates the problem with not just the auto industry, but with every industry now seeking a federal bailout:

The CEOs of the big three automakers flew to the nation's capital yesterday in private luxurious jets to make their case to Washington that the auto industry is running out of cash and needs $25 billion in taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy.

These are the people who would have rank-and-file auto workers slash their pay and benefits in order to keep their jobs. These are the people who ran their companies into the ground by refusing for thirty years to learn from Toyota and Honda how to make reliable, fuel-efficient cars. These are the people who never realized that Americans don't want to buy cars that are essentially junkers after three years; that some of us like to see how far into the six figures of mileage we can get. Instead they cranked out trucks and SUVs, turning the practice of guzzling huge quantities of Middle East oil into a patriotic gesture and gesture of testicular fortitude: "Built Ford Tough." Chevy trucks were "Like a rock" and part of "an American revolution." And now they want us to pay for their idiocy.

Where I now work, we have a performance measurement program. We set our own goals, and our supervisors sign off on them. Along with these goals go measurable ways of determining that the goal has been met -- things like bringing in deliverables on time. This is how increases in compensation are determined. Tomorrow I bring in the first milestone of my project on time, which is a step towards one of my goals.

Do these guys even HAVE goals? Is there ANYTHING expected of them? They've been running failing companies for years. Has an American nameplate represented quality at all in the last thirty years? The last quality American car (not an SUV) that I can recall was the Ford Taurus, and what did they do? They stopped making it. Just like Chrysler and the Dart/Valiant twins in the 1970's. Planned obsolesence is alive and well -- except for nonperforming auto executives. Their jobs are always safe.

What might have been

It's really hard for me to defend anyone who's Mormon these days, certainly not after the disgusting, and unfortunately successful efforts of the Mormon Church on Prop. 8 in California. Usually my attitude towards ANY religion, even Christianity, is that if that's what you need to get you through this God-forsaken level of reality, have at it. Just don't expect me, or anyone else, to believe as you do.

But Mitt Romney, of all people, has a largely sensible op-ed about the automobile industry in today's New York Times that if John McCain is reading it, ought to make him misty-eyed at what might have been, had he been able to put his own animosity aside and not listened to the Rovian wingnuts who decided that Sarah Palin would win him the election.

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

[snip]

The new management must work with labor leaders to see that the enmity between labor and management comes to an end. This division is a holdover from the early years of the last century, when unions brought workers job security and better wages and benefits. But as Walter Reuther, the former head of the United Automobile Workers, said to my father, “Getting more and more pay for less and less work is a dead-end street.”

You don’t have to look far for industries with unions that went down that road. Companies in the 21st century cannot perpetuate the destructive labor relations of the 20th. This will mean a new direction for the U.A.W., profit sharing or stock grants to all employees and a change in Big Three management culture.

The need for collaboration will mean accepting sanity in salaries and perks. At American Motors, my dad cut his pay and that of his executive team, he bought stock in the company, and he went out to factories to talk to workers directly. Get rid of the planes, the executive dining rooms — all the symbols that breed resentment among the hundreds of thousands who will also be sacrificing to keep the companies afloat.

Investments must be made for the future. No more focus on quarterly earnings or the kind of short-term stock appreciation that means quick riches for executives with options. Manage with an eye on cash flow, balance sheets and long-term appreciation. Invest in truly competitive products and innovative technologies — especially fuel-saving designs — that may not arrive for years. Starving research and development is like eating the seed corn.

Just as important to the future of American carmakers is the sales force. When sales are down, you don’t want to lose the only people who can get them to grow. So don’t fire the best dealers, and don’t crush them with new financial or performance demands they can’t meet.

It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition. I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration. The federal government should also rectify the imbedded tax penalties that favor foreign carmakers.

But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.

Note that I said "largely sensible." The automobile industry in this country and the UAW essentially created the middle class. The UAW over the years was able to obtain for its members generous pay and benefits packages that ought to be standard in any industry. Conventional wisdom has had it for years that it is precisely this rank-and-file compensation structure that ruined the automobile industry, and that UAW members bear the sole burden of cutting costs. Romney's piece unfortunately plays into this myth. A race to the paycheck bottom is no way to keep this country strong.

That said, I have to give Romney credit for acknowledging the responsibility of management pay and benefits, alongside boneheaded decisions like continuing to crank out and market gas-guzzlers even while Americans were dying in Iraq in pursuit of foreign oil. This is the industry that when faced with an oil crunch in the 1970's, gave us, instead of the Civic and the Corolla, the Ford Pinto and the Chevy Nova. This is the industry that decided to stop making the then-compact Dodge Dart/Plymouth Valiant line -- as good a warhorse of a car as was ever built -- and replace it with the legendarily awful Dodge Aspen/Plymoth Volare line. I remember a friend of Mr. Brilliant's family once trying to sell us a Chevrolet Citation -- another legendarily awful car.

To pump money into these companies and let them operate as usual buys those who will pay for it nothing, and buys rank and file auto workers only time -- and not much of that. I think that Romney underestimates the very real pain that auto workers, and those who rely on auto workers for THEIR income, are going to experience if we let the Big Three go into bankruptcy, and because he is a Republican, his ideas don't call for any kind of financial assistance and/or retraining of those who are going to be casualties of decades of bad decisions and short-term thinking on the part of auto industry management. Something must be done so that the Rust Belt cities and states that rely on the auto industry don't turn into ghost towns. If that means a huge financial assistance package, free education, and even a Federal make-work program that also provides health coverage for displaced auto workers, so be it. And of course Romney refuses to go that far. But at least let the money be put towards healing the wound.

All of this brings us back to John McCain, who, if he reads this today, has to be wondering right now what might have been had he made his decision on a running mate with his head.

The American auto industry never learns

You'd think that after the oil shocks of the 1970s, the Big Three would have learned that putting all your eggs in the Behemoth Basket may generate short-term profits, but is a lousy strategy in the long run.

I don't know if it's fossilized management or a function of the American corporation's unwillingness to think any farther than the next quarter,but anyone could have seen the demise of the SUV coming a mile away. We didn't see it happening today, or tomorrow, or even the next day, but it was clear that when you have vehicles guzzling a finite resource, sooner or later something's going to give.

And now General Motors is once again taking the hit:

Playing the urban warrior in a Hummer was a fairly inexpensive thrill when a gallon of gas cost just over $1. But at $4 a gallon, driving a full-powered Hummer H3 or a big Ford F-150 would cost a typical driver, who drives 15,000 miles a year, almost $4,300 in gas. This is more than 10 percent of the median earnings of full-time workers and about $2,200 more than it would cost to drive the same distance in a Honda Civic.

By May, there were signs that the S.U.V.-era was over. For the first time, Detroit’s Big Three automakers and their trucks were outsold in the United States by fuel-efficient cars made by Asian companies. And monthly sales of Ford’s muscular F-series pickups fell by a third, bumping it five spots from its previous perch as America’s best-selling vehicle, behind the Honda Civic, the Toyota Corolla, the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord. It was the first time since December 1992 that a car, not a truck, claimed the top spot in monthly sales.

The F-series pickup has been the nation’s best-selling vehicle, on an annual basis, since 1981. But last month, the Ford Motor Company said that it would slash production of pickups and S.U.V.’s. Its full-size pickup plant in Cuautitlán, Mexico, is expected to be used to produce the Ford Fiesta, a subcompact car, instead.

None of this is going to help the U.S. automakers, who for two generations now have demonstrated that they are congenitally unable to build a reliable fuel-efficient car. The Ford Fiesta mentioned in the above article used to be sold here in the U.S. It was a hunk of junk, and I don't expect the newer version to be significantly better. The Fiesta is expected to replace the Focus, which was reasonably well-rated by Consumer Reports until 2008, when they said this about the "retooled" version:

The original Focus was agile and fun to drive, but the freshening for 2008 has taken away from that, with handling that is less crisp than before. The seating position is high and commanding, controls are clear and logically placed, and cabin access is easy. The ride is firm yet supple but the car is still noisy. Interior quality is lackluster.

The problem for the U.S. automakers is that for almost 40 years, they have ceded the fuel-efficient vehicle market to the Asian carmakers, to the point that no one in their right mind would even consider buying a Ford or General Motors compact car when for the same money you can get a proven-to-be-reliable player from Toyota, Honda, and now apparently even Hyundai has improved its quality.

Of course the last thing that American autoworkers need is the shuttering of more plants and the destruction of more jobs. But I wonder when the executives who make decisions like that to focus on gas-guzzlers are going to start paying some of the consequences of their actions instead of it always being the rank-and-file. General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner received a 64% bump in compensation while GM stock fell 19%. How many people below the CEO level would even still have their jobs with a performance like that?