Love Tom Friedman. He hits the nail right on the head again with a Scathing report on GM and the others. He has an excellent idea for what should be done IF the government decides to bail out the pathetic US automakers.
The devil inside me (or maybe just the free market capitalist) says let them fail, and use the taxpayer money instead to send the unemployed autoworkers to school, whether it be trade school or academic school. Or, better yet, let them fail, do nothing, and teach them all a lesson. The government cannot bail out every failed business and every unemployed worker in this economic cycle. It will probably be best for us to emerge from this recession (and ALL recessions eventually end) with true innovation and grit by both strong companies with innovative leaders and by resiliant and adaptable workforces. If we keep printing money for more and more bailouts, we are going to end up with massive inflation over the next several years. Remember we had inflation of 15-18% at the end of the 1970s. That's where we will be headed.
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I was listening to NPR, showering w/ green roof run off rain water and drying off w/ my hemp towel made from ganja grown in my compost heap garden when I heard that the exec from Chrysler trying to orchestrate its bailout got a $211 MILLION golden parachute when he left Home Depot. I don't care if this guy invented hammers and windows, that's unacceptable. One could argue that he was paid fairly based on one criteria: the shareholders/board of trustees deemed it to be fair. But a lot of their profit is born from a regressive corporate tax structure, making this kind of payout obscene, unethical and perhaps soon, illegal.
GM iCar! Hilarious but probably true.
Friedman and Coca are dead-on correct. Detroit doesn't need to innovate, because the government keeps bailing them out. It will be painful, but letting them fail now will be less painful in the long run.
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