Our unemployment rate is the highest in the nation, and our key industry is on the point of something like collapse. What‘s more, Washington doesn’t seem inclined to help us. Not, that is, until it may be too late. Our nation is entering what may be a savage recession.
John Dingell, our longest-serving member of congress, has just lost his powerful committee chairmanship, a post he has used to both help the auto industry -- and to shield it from reality.
The dinosaurs who have taken care of us for eons are fading, and we desperately need something new. Listening to the leaders of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler testify before Congress yesterday was actually painful. They were bloodless men, setting out their case in voices largely devoid of passion.
They made sense, yes, Bob Nardelli and Alan Mulally and Rick Wagoner. They just didn‘t make a lasting impression, these men with forgettable faces and bland demeanor. They were unfailingly polite to members of congress, some of whom, such as Maxine Waters of California, seemed to want to make demagogic points without having the faintest idea what they were talking about.
The CEOs endured the insults of dim bulbs from Texas, congressmen who seemed blissfully unaware that taking General Motors down would cost their districts jobs, too, even if there isn’t a single auto plant in them. The auto barons know that, of course.
They did their logical, clerical and bureaucratic best to make their cases. Yet they didn’t seem to understand what they needed to do. They needed, deeply and desperately needed, to be Lee Iacocca, or something very like him. They needed a gruff, tire-squealing, one hundred percent American folk hero.
They needed to say “look, damn it, we’re all in this together. Detroit put this country on wheels and made all our lives possible. We built the trucks and tanks and Jeeps that won World War II.”
“We’ve made some stupid mistakes that we could kick ourselves for. But we’re Americans, and we’ve learned from them.”
When Alan Mulally was asked if he’d give up his $21 million salary, he made the fatal mistake of defending it. He should have countered that he had given orders that until Ford is again profitable, he was to be paid what an assembly line worker makes.
The men who came begging for bailout loans each came separately in corporate jets they are refusing to give up. If they had been smart, they would have driven to Washington in an Impala, a Fusion and a PT Cruiser.
Their mentality was a universe away from that of the quirky mechanic who, more than a century ago, used to stay up through the night pounding away in an old garage on Bagley in Detroit.
His name was Henry Ford, and he was creating the modern world. Hopefully, someplace in this state, someone is at a laboratory or at a computer, creating a new vision for Michigan’s future.
Let‘s just hope we know it, and nurture it, when it arrives.
Dear Mr. Lessenberry;
You complain, quite correctly, about the laughable ignorance of people like Maxine Waters.
But I question what you, and the rest of the state's media elites, have done to advance the cause of a return to profitability for the Detroit Three automkers. I have seen much more detailed coverage of the structural and regulatory problems faced by the Detroit Three in the Wall Street Journal, than in any of the Detroit papers. (You may well take the position that you are among the Detroit papers' harshest critics, but my complaint applies equally to NPR, Michigan Radio, and your beloved New York Times.)
On executive pay: have you, or NPR, or any of the Detroit papers challenged the frankly stupid notion that "executive pay" or "executive perks" have anything at all to do with the automakers' current porblems?
If, as you say, perceptions matter, what have you done to influence those perceptions with clear-eyed reporting on the nature and causes of the industry's woes?
Any serious-minded person knows that that the use of corporate jets is irrelevant to the serious issues of long-term auto company profitability. You, and other journalists like you, should be on the side of serious-minded readers/listeners/viewers.
You say that, "If [the CEO's] had been smart, they would have driven to Washington..." That might have been smart for the benefit of low-attention-span idiots, like Rep. Maxine Waters, but those executives wasting incredibly valuable hours in traffic, or in a security lane at an airport, would not have been useful in any serious way. You need to report that.
Posted by: Anonymous | November 20, 2008 at 02:45 PM
I find it interesting Jack and the coward poster Anon have no problem in attacking Maxine Waters I guess it is easy going after the colored girl she is easy to remember and scapegoat for Jack just to isolate her ignorance by name and not others speaks to the level of his sincerity and need to scapegoat.
Of course Jack and his media comrades have bent over, operated out of coma covering the auto industry in this region no doubt the advertisment dollars from the auto industry paid for many car vacations and pleasure summer cottages to silence any in depth reporting by Jack and his comrades.
Dingell, Levin, Conyers, Gramholm none of them had any clout or power ..None of these swollen ballons could float anything of value to leverage and keep this region in play.
The only victory this carnage has resulted in for Michigan is the raw cold reality of how worthless, incompetent, impotent our leaders are from those in government, unions, private industry, media and our religious venues...
Leadership in this region is as worthless as the resale value on new cars still on dealer's lots in our state...
I of course will continue to matter and make a difference.....
Posted by: Thrasher | November 20, 2008 at 04:19 PM