Bad for Business

Something that I saw recently made me realize why American businesses are imploding, and makes me rather pessimistic that it will ever be changed.

To rewind a little, let’s get in the Wayback machine and return to the Carter administration. During the OPEC oil embargo, President Carter and the Congress placed gas mileage standards on automobiles. In 1988, under President Reagan, these standards were largely overturned. We didn’t really notice it at the time, because we were still enjoying a minor oil boom in America.

A large part of the reason that these standards were overturned was pressure from the automobile manufacturers of America, collectively known as the “Big 3”. Chrysler, Ford and GM. They didn’t want to spend the research money on making cars more fuel efficient. So began a decade and a half of decadence in automobiles that culminated in the nauseating Hummer.

So now, twenty years later, the auto manufacturers have come begging to the American people, hats in hands, to help keep them in business after so many bad business decisions. Yes, Congress did reauthorize a gutted version of the CAFÉ fuel efficiency standards, but it was way too little, way too late.

Carter’s CAFÉ standards called for minimum fuel mileage of American cars to be increased to 27 MPG. There would be exemptions available for vehicles used for commercial use and RV’s. If the Big 3 had followed these standards, instead of lobbying so hard to get them gutted, they would now be making vehicles that competed with the fuel-efficient marvels being produced by America’s REAL “Big 2”, the two car companies that employ more Americans than the “Big 3”, Honda and Toyota. Instead, they screwed up and now expect us to pay for it.

Having said that.

I saw a clip the other day from the appearance before Congress of representatives of the “Big 3”. In this clip, a Congressman revealed that all three of these men had arrived for their inquisition in PRIVATE JETS! Then the Congressman asked for a show of hands of how many of them would be willing to sell their private jets and return home on commercial airlines. “Downgrade to first class” was how he put it. He followed that with “Let the record show that no hands were raised.”

In other words, after years of lobbying the Republican party to convince us that they needed no regulation, and the Republicans also telling us how important “personal responsibility” is concerning everything from welfare to unemployment, these guys are willing to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to help themselves and insisting that, after being deregulated to the point that they’re killing themselves, that we need to give them money to bail them out.

Balderdash.

Let them hang, I say.

By the way, America’s corporatized media has kept insisting that they are looking to “Congress to bail them out”. Not right. It ain’t Congress’ money, folks. It’s OUR money.

Peace.

Randal