A Different Kind of Crazy

I don’t care what anybody says. If your car has four doors, it IS NOT a coupe. You can call it whatever you want if it makes you feel younger, hipper and/or more relevant, but understand it’s not a coupe. A coupe has two doors. Sedans have four. If it makes you sad to discover your are the proud owner of a sedan when you thought you bought a coupe, I’m sorry. But the world is full of sadness. Deal with it.

General Motors, once the icon of American industrial prowess, has been given 60 days to restructure itself or face restructuring by a bankruptcy court. Chrysler has been given 30 days to finalize a merger with Fiat, or face the same fate - or worse. After four months and 25 billion taxpayer dollars, it’s finally come to this. There are a lot of people in Michigan who don’t understand why much of the rest of the country seems indifferent to the potential loss of such a significant part of the American identity. I’m not sure I understand it either, but I think I can explain it.

Forget about perceived and real quality issues, a stunning lack of design creativity and the fact that most people simply don’t believe the industry has any effect on them, the principle problem with the automotive industry boils down to a simple lack of respect. I grew up in Oshawa, a car town. Everybody in town either worked at, or knew someone that worked at the General Motors plant in town, or the Chrysler plant 20 kilometers away in Ajax. Every single elementary school kid took a tour of the GM factory, riding around on the little electric cart, past the paint bath, around the stamping machines, and alongside the hoist line where they bolt the engines into place. And we all saw the same thing. A lot of (mostly) guys walking back and forth over the same three feet of concrete, tightening the same four bolts, spot welding the same four hinges and inserting the same four floor mats, eight hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year. Then we found out how much a lot of these (mostly) guys got paid to tighten the bolts and weld the hinges and insert the floor mats. We compared their shiny late model vehicles to our not-so-gently used imports and their suburban brick houses to our half-century-old dwellings on the edges of town. And we came to the obvious, inescapable conclusion that many - if not most of these (mostly) guys got paid pretty darn well for what appeared to be fairly unskilled labor. There it is. That’s the truth. People think they understand how the automobile manufacturing process works. Steel goes in one end, cars come out the other, and trained monkeys could accomplish whatever happens in between. So when General Motors asks Congress for $15 billion to continue operating, what many people hear is the zookeeper asking management for more bananas to placate the monkeys lounging around the pen on their coffee break.

Face it. Nobody understands what a credit default swap is. Nobody understands how collateralized debt obligations work. Most people don’t want to. They figure those things were created by people infinitely smarter than they are who obviously deserve every penny of that seven-figure bonus because they must know what they’re doing. If we can’t get them to fix the mess, who will? But cars? People understand cars. They think the machines do all the work and the people just sit around cracking jokes about the posters in their lockers and scheming about how to con additional sick days out of the company for $55 and hour. And when they hear that forty thousand more of those jobs are on the chopping block they can’t wait to hear about the next round of pink slips. Fair or not, that’s what the American auto industry is up against. Repairing that image may be more difficult than dragging these companies back from the edge of financial oblivion.

And before I hear any whining and complaining about how the government is interfering in private businesses, if you don’t want the interference, don’t take the money. If you’re a recording artist and you borrow money from the record label to produce your album, the label owns you long after you’ve paid that money back. They tell you what to play, where to play, how often to play and how much to charge for tickets. If you want to maintain your artistic integrity, produce the album with your own money. If you want complete control over your company, don’t come to Washington with your hands out begging for billions of dollars in taxpayer money.

Several weeks ago several GOP senators hit the Sunday morning talk show circuit to rip the administration over their handling of bank bailouts. To a man, they said that what the government should be doing is temporarily taking over failing banks, replacing the management, wiping out the bad assets, selling off the good ones and returning it to private hands as soon as possible. (Not one of them would use the word nationalization, but a duck is a duck even if you call it an elephant.) So, early last week Treasury Secretary Geithner went before Congress seeking the very same powers to intervene in failing institutions deemed too big to fail that the afore mentioned senators had peddled during their media blitz. But apparently a good idea is only a good idea if it comes out of the mouth of someone with an (R) next to their name. Suddenly Republicans were “very nervous” about giving powers of intervention to the administration they had demanded intervention from two days earlier. I agree that we don’t want to make a habit out of federal involvement in private business, and that the ideal way to deal with institutions that are “too big to fail” is to prevent them from becoming too big to fail in the first place. But in some cases, that genie is already out of the bottle, and provisions to allow a rapid, orderly restructuring of a failing company prior to its failure seem like a reasonable idea.

In an attempt to transform itself from the party of “no” to the party of “no, but,” the GOP released an 18-page pamphlet last week entitled “The Republican Road to Recovery,” a blueprint to a Republican alternative to President Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget proposal. The blueprint was long on wind and short on numbers, but GOP leaders promised more details would follow later this week - on April 1 to be exact. Yes, the Republican party intends to release its budget alternative to the public on April Fool’s Day. Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

I know I for one am waiting with baited breath on the edge of my seat to find out what magical mystical mix of tax cuts, defense spending and tax cuts will get us rolling along the Republican road to recovery. And that mix is apparently still up in the air. Several Republican representatives have reportedly been working on a fairly detailed proposal for several weeks and are not particularly happy with the 18-pages outline released last week. They still intend to introduce their own bill to compete for irrelevance with the official blueprint. But Indiana’s own Mike Pence is optimistic. “I hope the (Democratically-controlled) Congress will adopt our proposal,” he reported said with a straight face. When reminded that his party holds a significant minority of seats in both the House and the Senate, Congressman Pence replied with the following: “I have always believed that a minority in Congress, plus the American people equals the majority.” Apparently Mike Pence has already forgotten how he ended up with a minority in Congress. If he had the majority of the American people... well, you get the picture. Photocopy it and send it to Mike.

And now for this week’s episode of I Don’t Think That Means What You Think It Means. In response to a statement about currency reserves by the Chinese government last week, Minnesota representative Fox Mulder - I mean Michelle Bachman, sorry, introduced a bill to prevent the United States from adopting a currency of legal tender other than the current form. What the Chinese finance minister actually said was that due to the recent instability of the U.S. dollar, the International Monetary Fund - and the Chinese government in particular - might want to consider adopting some other, more stable form of reserve currency other than U.S. dollars. As it stands right now, foreign governments, sovereign wealth funds and international institutions and organizations can invest in and hold cash reserves in whatever currency they choose, be it dollars or euros or yen or chocolate covered pretzel sticks. The minister was making the point that if the U.S. economy does not stabilize, it might be in the best interest of international investors and agencies to convert their holdings to a different form of currency. But apparently, Ms. Bachman interpreted the comments as some kind of demand that the United States adopt the currency of some foreign nation as legal tender here, and rushed to counter the non-existent threat with legislation to the contrary. When did the State of Minnesota become the People’s Republic of What-the $@#&?

Finally, comedian Stephen Colbert has been declared the winner of NASA’s online poll soliciting a name for the new wing of the International Space Station. Originally, the space agency wanted to name the new module “Serenity,” I assume after the spaceship of the same name in the science fiction film of the same name which crashed into a planet while being chased by cannibals. But instead of just naming the module Serenity, NASA decided to be cute and put it to a public vote, stacking the deck for the name they wanted. But Colbert got wind of the contest and pitched it to his viewers, who, by the time voting closed, had pushed him over the top with 230,539 of the 1.1 million votes cast. Of course, NASA never saw it coming. The agency left themselves an out in the contest rules however, stipulating that regardless of the outcome of the poll, they would be free to choose whatever name they wanted, whether it came up in the contest or not. So the comedian and the space agency are at a standoff. Colbert has threatened to “seize power as space’s evil tyrant overlord if NASA doesn’t abide by the contest results. NASA refuses to announce a decision for at least another week, but rumor is they are considering placing Colbert’s name on one of the toilets in the new wing. I think that if it comes down to it, Colbert will be more than happy with that compromise.