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Goodbye, GM
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?
It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.
So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.
But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?
Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:
1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.
The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.
President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.
2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.
3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.
4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.
6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).
7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.
8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.
9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.
Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.
100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.
Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.
So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
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My friend just bought a GM Vibe. Did you know that it gets 30 mgh highway?! I didn't. When I think of GM I think of gas guzzlers and that makes me think of war and being manipulated by the oil companies. GM represents a huge failure in leadership and marketing. It's too bad the workers will also take a hit.
It is a sad day indeed for a global icon. The demise of GM is going to be felt around the world and in particular in the UK where the Vauxhall GM brand is going to be decimated. The next few months for the car industry along with the internal crisis of the UK Government are going to be a rough ride for all in this part of the world.
Norm Murray
American car companies' lack of vision breeds customer disloyalty. The economic downturn is only part of the problem.
Chinese and Indian cars are heading this way, where do Ford, GM and Chrysler fit it in the long run?
Once upon a time there wa a light rail system...locally the Key system...but in the 1930's GM bought it and scrapped it........karma.
Wall Street demands short term profits or the stock price quickly suffers and the top management is forced out. GM is not allowed to structure their costs for long term profitability. The car czar Rattner from Wall Street is pursuing this approach. He does not know the auto industry but has been given the power to demand Bankruptcy under his terms. He got rid of the CEO and board of Directors and replaced them with his loyalists.
Wall Street forced the auto industry into a Depression and the rest of the economy into a recession through their financial corruption which froze credit. Wall Street speculators suddenly changed the public market by tripling gas prices and making cars from GM and Chrysler unpopular overnight. Wall Street created the credit freeze which shut out most loans for sales and leases.
Now Wall Street car czar Rattner is forcing the dismantling of GM and Chrysler under conditions created by Wall Street. The "lean" Chrysler will have permanently lost 2/3rds of their market share because of Rattner (see Chrysler's president Senate testimony this week). This week the GM CEO said 98% of the American market cars will be built in America but when more candid a couple weeks ago said they are going to ramp up imports from China.
Obama needs to dump his Wall Street appointees who are wrecking our economy.
http://www.gregpalast.com/grand-theft-auto-how-stevie-the-rat-bankrupted-gm/
I saw Xerox suffer under this mentality. Wall Street is the devil.
A $2 per gallon gas tax also suffers from planned obsolescence. As the market drives gas prices up, the tax becomes proportionally less effective, and Congress doesn't have the stones to raise gas prices when consumers are already feeling the pinch. What we need is an equivalent, per-dollar gas tax that will rise to match the scarcity of our non-renewable natural resources.
We need to realize that it is entirely possible that our industrial civilization will fall apart sometime in the future and that even later in the future our descendants will need fossil fuels to re-industrial.
We must stop using up all this precious resource. We need to switch before we've used it all up. We need to leave enough for a future society to pass through the fossil fuel burning stage on its way to a post fossil fuel civilization. Not to do so is putting all our technological eggs in the basket of this industrialization. Imagine if there *was* an Atlantis 12,000 years ago and they'd used up all the fossil fuels *then*. Where would we be now? Still living in the disease and squalor most people lived in when London burned in the 1660s.
I'm not sure civilization will fall apart, but you correctly point out that our current trajectorty is taking us down the path of failure. What's so disturbing about the American Industrial Complex is that its focus on the automobile has blinded us to all the other possibilities. We have been in the grips of Big Oil and Big Car for way too long. The Europeans have been far ahead of us for decades and we should have been shifting our infrastructure to high speed rail and public transportation a generation ago.
We have become a spoiled and arrogant people determined to have everything we want.....we just don't want to pay for it.
With GM in bed with the oil companies, visa vis fuel guzzeling cars, why not tax the oil companies to make up what we have to do to strengthen the economy? With gasoline climbing back up close to $3 p/g and more in some states and oil companies making record profits, how come no one is talking WINDFALL PROFIT tax anymore? Remember, every dollar people have to spend on gas, is a dollar not spent at Wal Mart or anywhere else. CapItalist oil companies TAKE subsidies which is really 'socialism' which they abhor, ;yet they pay little if any tax when we compare their income to taxes actually PAID. Still they get away with takiing all people's money out of circulation by gas prices and take our taxes in the form of subsidies as well. Why not tax them like a socialist state since they TAKE our money as if they're nationalized in a socialist state? The economy isn't going to bounce back if the greedy oil companies are taking all the money out of our pockets.
We should have a very heavy gasoline tax to encourage driving less and moving to alternative fuels and modes of transportation.
However, to prevent the tax from being regressive, the collected money should be equally divided and paid back to all licensed drivers. If you exclusively take mass transit and buy no gasoline, you make money. If you are an average consumer of gasoline, you break even. If you drive 20K miles a year in a Hummer, you pay.
Companies are in business to make a profit for sure - otherwise they wouldn't be in business at all - The Unions broke GM - Period!!
GM management broke GM. It was profit driven sabotage. They did all they could to increase profits without regard for the future of the company. The union was in the back seat along for the ride off the cliff. Remember, it's the leadership of a company that decides what direction it will take.
Wall Street demands short term profits or the stock price quickly suffers. Wall Street forced the auto industry into a Depression, Wall Street speculators suddenly changed the public market by tripling gas prices, Wall Street created the credet freeze which shut down leases and sales.
Now Wall Street car czar Rattner is forcing the dismantling of GM and Chrysler under conditions created by Wall Street. The "lean" Chrysler will have permanently lost 2/3rds of their market share because of Rattner (see Chrysler's president Senate testimony this week).
Obama needs to dump his Wall Street appointees who are wrecking our economy.
http://www.gregpalast.com/grand-theft-auto-how-stevie-the-rat-bankrupted-gm/
No my freind, it was the capitalists who destroyed GM.
Quick buck, no planning, immediate profits, oversized exec comp.
Nope, unions had little or nothing to do with it. Their members builds the cars the company gives them, according to the company's specifications. If the company cannot design cars that fit emerging consumer patterns in terms of design, build quality, reliability and fuel efficency, then how can the people on the assembly line possibly be responsible? GM and Chrysler haven't offered us a model that can compete on those criteria against their international competitors for quite some time. They should have gone back to the basics but they were stuck in this archaic mindset for decades, and now it's too late.
Instead of bailing out GM we should have underwritten the start-up costs of a new American company, one that comes to the table with fresh ideas and knows how to implement them. Then let the workers build them. You wouldn't invest in 8 track tapes now, would you? Why? Because they're obsolete - just like GM and Chrysler's business plans!
Management, actually abysmally bad management, broke GM - period!! Simple matter - their cars suck, that truth has been affirmed by the millions of Americans who have opted to purchase the far superior in virtually every way products of other car makers, most of whom are foreign.
Mr. Moore, I respect your work but I believe you are very wrong on your assertions.
It is not GM or the other U.S. automakers that are at fault. It is the allied North American OIL CARTEL that is the villain here and the U.S. has never come to grips or solved that Rockefeller Standard Oil refinery monopoly and dynasty of the last 100 years and that dynasty, with their board interlocks and trusts that are interrelated with the auto sector, is still fully operational to this day.
The oil cartel demands of the auto sector are simple. Use the maximum amount of gasoline and diesel fuels in your carburetor's as possible to maintain and increase oil cartel profits.
Why am I watching the new GM commercial being run during high profile sporting events this weekend that fast clips their lean mean corporation makeover and there is a brief clip of the HYDROGEN FUEL CELL car? Yes the fuel cell technology is ready to roll, but the OIL CARTEL are not installing HYDROGEN GAS PUMPS ON THEIR SERVICE STATION LOTS. So this critical technology that would solve all issues from climate change to having your own personal source of electricity is under full scale suppression by the oil cartel and neither Obama or Chu dare utter the phrase!
Couldn't had said it better myself. So true.
Mike it all sounds good but the reality is GM and Ford will continue to lose US market share and China will get the lion share of any new light speed rail, wind/solar manufacturing.
We and our elected officials are owned lock stock and barrel by corporate America.
Sadly it's all about guns , gays, and abortions.
In terms of transportation infrastructure to support electric vehicles, it'll take a while but start with recharging points in major cities (San Francisco is one city where this is already happening) then expand to the highway system, connecting to the power grids. Wherever there is an electrical pole or service station there should be a recharging point. Where there is not, install a solar power station. Include on/update road signs and highway markers where the next point is (more difficult to describe than to draw on a diagram, but I think everybody gets the idea). Put the information on satellite navigation systems and road maps, in the same way you would indicate the location of a service station. (I would like to see satellite navigation systems as standard).
Of course, the wonderful irony is GM paying the karma for its systematic destruction of mass transit that it indulged in an earlier incarnation.
aka National City Lines conspiracy
(continued)
GM used to make GREAT cars. Made in America by professionals who cared about the quality of their work, took great pride in turning out cars that people loved to drive. I had a 70s model Monte Carlo which despite all the fads and fashions, I drove for 7 years (and then I gave it to my sister, who drove it for another 4 or 5). 250k miles on the clock and the thing never broke down, never had a serious mechanical fault, was comfortable, got decent mileage...as a woman who did a lot of solo long-distance driving, my car was my lifeline, my protector, my buddy and my bodyguard. When a car lets me down, when I can't rely on the warranty, when it spends more time in the shop than on the road and the manufacturer doesn't seem to care, I don't feel I owe any loyalty to them. When the car works and when it occasionally doesn't the manufacturer lives up to its promises, I am loyal.
I understand that manufacturers have cost concerns (mostly labor) but give me a car I can rely on (or at least a warranty I can rely on) and I will pay you good money for it. Anything less, the car is worthless to me. Spend the extra money to make it, I will compensate you accordingly. That is the bargain.
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