"I would add other conditions: Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.
"Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar."
That's Tom Friedman articulating much of what I've been thinking about Detroit during the past week or so. For years, really. Okay, I'm not a big fan of ethanol -- better we get used to talking about a much wider choice of fuels and much more intelligent and responsive management. Otherwise we shouldn't give a thin dime to an industry which has been so unresponsive to reality for so long.
Friedman quotes Paul Ingrassia of the Wall Street Journal.
"In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake."
Bingo! That approach should be generalized. We have been witnesses to decades of the most rotten, solipsistic management this country has seen in its history. All over the place. Including government. Should we comb through the B-schools and find out why we have become so averse to looking into the future and planning for more than immediate profits?
Jamie Galbraith writes in this month's Harpers: "'Planning' has been a dirty word in American politics for decades. For the hard-line right, planning destroyed freedom: it was the 'road to serfdom.'" Of course, planning also requires a degree of discussion, concern with national goals, and openness, all of which are inimical to behind-the-scenes work of corporate lobbyists. No wonder planning is unpopular in Washington! Galbraith continues:
Independent capacity to think? When was the last time you saw that capacity valued by a Republican administration? Over and over again, we hear people saying -- about the financial crisis, about the recession, about our industries, "Of course, no one saw this coming."
Bullshit! You saw it coming; I saw it coming; legions of economists and sociologists saw it coming; car buyers saw it coming; town dumps, if they could speak, could have told you it was coming. Auto industry profiteers saw it coming and rushed to cut off the kind of changes which would have shattered the status quo ante and diminish the size of the swag they were banking.
Steve Jobs probably saw it coming. If he didn't, he'd be just another American who doesn't deserve to be called an innovator or manager. Fortunately, there are people like Jobs around. They should be the industry chiefs and their voices should heard more often in Washington.
