These are of course the words the CEO's of Ford GM and Crysler would have like to have used when they flew their private jets to Washington to demand their fair share of free public money.And lets not forget they don't want the money for their benefit NO it is for the good of America! (Yeah Right)
before you read the rest of this it is worth knowing a few facts:
World No1 sucessful Car Maker Toyota CEO earns $1Million None of the CEO's of the failing Ford, GM or Crysler earns less than $8million
For the good of America, the auto titans argued to Congress, their businesses must be saved...while holding the gun of jobs at our backs.
GM even put out a YouTube video about the potential job losses (which stock analyst Henry Blodget rightly called "propaganda terrorism") saying that between the Big Three, there are:
239,000 employees
775,000 retirees and surviving spouses dependent on pensions and benefits 610,000 workers employed by suppliers 740,000 employees at 14,000 dealerships One of every 10 jobs-13 million people-are reliant on the US auto industry, the video claimed, and if all of the Big Three's US operations ceased in 2009, nearly 3 million US jobs would be lost, with a huge blow to the economy.
"We can loan $25 billion now...or lose $156 billion later. What will WE do?" it concluded.
It's Not About the Jobs That's right America: It's your problem. Just like the banks and insurance companies and everybody else we've been bailing out because they're "too big to let fail."
After the roughly $2 trillion already committed to stemming the credit crisis, an additional $25 billion in public money for the automakers (on top of the $25 billion loan program created by Congress in September to help them develop more fuel-efficient vehicles) seems almost trivial.
But it isn't.
Not only is it a moral hazard to reward unprofitable business practices, it's fundamentally wrong and anti-capitalistic.
It wasn't about the jobs when the automakers sent so much of their manufacturing overseas; that was about the bottom line.
It wasn't about the jobs when they built, and then destroyed, the EV-1 electric car program.
It wasn't about the jobs when they made decades of shoddy vehicles consumers shunned in favor of better products from foreign manufacturers.
It's only about the jobs when it costs them. For over 50 years, the Big Three have fought anything that was good for the public but which might cost them some profits, like installing $25 catalytic converters to reduce emissions, adding mandatory seatbelts, or making a serious investment in cleaner, next-generation vehicles. Then they're willing to spend millions to fight it.
They have staunchly opposed fuel efficiency standards for decades, and ignored the impending threat of peak oil even as oil prices drove them out of business. General Motors began dismantling urban mass transit in the US in 1922, and has disrupted countless attempts at public transit ever since.
GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz even had the gall to call global warming a "a total crock of sh*t."
(For a painfully detailed history on the Big Three's shenanigans, check out Taken for a Ride by Jack Doyle, and the 1996 documentary film of the same name by Jim Klein.)
Even as the automakers created those all-important jobs while building their businesses, they also committed the entire country to an unsustainable infrastructure of far-flung suburbs and endless roads.
We're about to pay an enormous price for that.
As it turns out, what has been good for GM is not good for the country in the long term.
