The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 41
At the same time GM filled its executive offices with inept or redundant managers, they allowed the best and brightest new technology or design people to go
to foreign manufacturers, they retained for decades the services of advertising
and marketing consultants whose only talent was in knowing how to waste more
money each new model year, and they built up the walls around themselves
until they couldn’t see the figurative and literal tsunami that was coming from
Japan.
Perhaps, if the 70’s gasoline crisis didn’t happen, and if the environmental
movement failed to take hold, or if the gasoline companies could have continued to lie about the negative effects of leaded-gasoline – and get away with it
– then General Motors might have been able to exist without their share of profits from the patents. But the combination of these factors created the perfect
storm that set the stage for GM’s tumble.
I readily acknowledge that others before me have cited GM’s lack of effective
action as the cause of their near demise and current shaky existence, but I
believe that no one has ever put together and articulated the reason why GM
would have permitted itself to fall into this position. Many analysts have opined
that GM would be okay if it wasn’t for the heavy pension packages that they
committed to. Some analysts suggest that as the foreign car makers open factories in the U.S. that they will succumb to the same pension problems and end
up struggling like GM. I think that GM might never have survived the competition
after WWII if they didn’t have those billions of extra dollars. I also believe that
Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, Nissan, and every other foreign
brand that establishes a factory here will not go through the same debilitating
pension mistakes because they just don’t have the extra financial wherewithal
to get themselves into the same hot water. They may fail, but it’s more likely
that they would fail from their own original stupid mistakes.
When General Motors rushed to Washington in 2008 to beg for financial assistance Presidents Bush and then Obama, and all of Congress, should have said
no; they should have told GM to get the money from their buddies in the oil
industry, which had just experienced a record-breaking profit year. In case
there’s anyone out there who is uncertain of how the oil industry makes most of
their money, it is from the sale of gasoline for automobiles. Instead of the American public being threatened with “GM is too big for us to lose,” the oil industry
should have rightly been assigned that responsibility, particularly since we were
already paying for the second and third Middle-East oil wars and providing security for the entire world’s ocean-going oil tankers.
