Not many days ago there was a revelation in the massive board room of the Ford Motor Company.
The mood in the room was serious when the head honchos of finance, manufacturing, marketing and sales trooped in and took their seats. Black & white photos of Henry Ford stared down upon the execs, and there was disappointment in Henry’s unwavering gaze. “What have you morons done to my great company?” Henry seemed to say. “We ruled the world once, and now we can’t even hold our own in Michigan! We survived the Great Depression and World War II! Now the Japs and the Koreans are beating our brains out. I’m disgusted with you boys.”
The chairman didn’t look any happier when he arrived. Dispensing with the usual upbeat patter, he launched right in: “Our stock’s in the tank and we’re bleeding money like a hemophiliac. Americans aren’t buying SUV’s anymore. In fact, if our marketing people are right, the SUV, our stock-in-trade, our beloved cash cow, is dead as a dinosaur, croaked by $4 a gallon gas.”
A couple of executives burst into tears. Another cursed the Arabs. Someone else claimed the sudden spike in the price of gasoline was a plot hatched by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. “The CIA should have killed that bastard. Isn’t that why we have a CIA – to take out the enemies of Big Business!”
“Actually,” the CFO said, “the CIA has outsourced the killing of foreign political enemies to Blackwater. According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s a growth industry with an almost unlimited upside.”
“Gentlemen,” the chairman said. “We can point fingers until the sun goes down but that’s not going to help us out of this mess. I love the Expedition as much as you do. The idea that three generations of a family or an entire little league team can travel comfortably together in one vehicle, each with his or her own cup holder, is quintessentially American. But, whether we like it or not, the world has changed. What we need now is a new idea.”
For a solid minute it was so quiet you could have heard a fly fart. The chairman waited for his brain trust to come up with something; Henry Ford waited.
The VP of Marketing spoke first. “What about bringing back a Ford classic, like, I don’t know, the Fairlane? Americans loved the Fairlane. We can create an entire campaign around a theme of nostalgia.”
“Most of the people who remember the Fairlane are dead or living in nursing homes,” the head of manufacturing said. “If I heard the chairman correctly, we’re looking for a new idea, something fresh, out-of-the-box, and by box I don’t think he’s referring to a coffin.”
Around the table heads nodded in agreement, although every man in the room would have given his left testicle to revive the Fairlane from the automobile museum. Or if not the Fairlane, the Falcon or the Galaxie or the Torino or the Ranchero. The past was sweet, predictable and comfortable; the future was bitter, unpredictable and anything but comfortable. The Indians and the Chinese were growing more powerful and uppity, testing nuclear weapons and hosting the Olympic Games, snapping up US Treasury bonds like the sky was the limit, asserting their new-found power at every opportunity and thumbing their noses at the US of A. What kind of world was it when Chinese communists beat American capitalists at their own game? A perverse and twisted world, that’s what.
Rising slowly to his feet, the VP of Sales said, “I know this will sound crazy, but what if we design and build a line of high-quality, fuel efficient cars.”
“We’ve already got the Focus line-up,” the VP of Manufacturing growled, “and nobody’s buying.”
“That’s because the Focus is shit,” someone said. “If I understand the concept here, we’re talking about taking Toyota and Honda on at their own game, about blowing the roof off fuel efficiency and really getting behind the whole hybrid deal.”
“Holy shit,” said the CFO. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing!”
“We do it in Europe,” the chairman said. “But the question is -- can we do it here? Are Americans ready for a sea-change at Ford Motor Company? Are we ready?”
“We’re about to become European,” the VP of Sales said, his voice laden with sadness.
“It’s the death of the great American road, the death of everything we hold near and dear, the death of life as we know it.”
Henry Ford glowered at them. “No shit, Sherlock. If you jackasses were worth all the money you’re making, you would have figured this out ten years ago and Ford wouldn’t be swimming in the piss hole with GM and Chrysler. There’s nothing worse than a businessman with no vision and no balls, except an entire nation that can’t read the writing on the wall even when it’s written in bright red ink.”
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
I Believe the World is Flat...I Believe...I Believe...
Which is more shocking, the hypocrisy of Wall Street bankers or the stupidity of our President?
When the good money is rolling in furiously and in amounts almost impossible to count, Wall Street types have no use for government regulation or oversight. It’s only when the bankers’ relentless greed turns south that they run to Daddy Fed with both arms extended. What a contrast to the distaste most banker-types feel for aid for displaced workers, single mothers, and people with mental problems; those folks must fend for themselves in order to build “self-reliance.” Heaven forbid the poor become dependent on taxpayer assistance!
Large-scale corporate welfare is hardly unusual, though government rescue of Big Business is always cloaked in the guise of keeping the economic system functioning for the good of the “nation.” We’re assured that a taxpayer bail-out is in the best interests of average people living in average towns, but we know better, don’t we?
If tough love and zero tolerance for failure are good enough for Average Jane, why isn’t it good enough for Bear Stearns or Indy Mac? What happened to all the happy talk about the self-regulating free market? Isn’t the All-Knowing Market God supposed to weed out the weak, the corrupt, and the inefficient?
Hypocrisy isn’t pretty and it can’t be papered over forever. Even a people as monumentally distracted as Americans will sooner or later see the beacon of truth shining through the fog.
Ah, and then there’s George W. Bush, our man-child Prez. What can you say about a man who is so out of touch with reality? You know we’re in deep doo-doo when our energy policy boils down to a bad Dr. Phil imitation: “By golly, if we want to lower gasoline prices we’ve got to change people’s psychology. We’ve got to drill and pump and refine – in the most environmentally friendly ways, of course – even though that won’t do a thing to lower the price of gas. But people’s psychology will be changed – and that’s what’s most important. Hee, hee, hee. Yessir!”
Is Bush serious? Change the psychology by drilling for crude that -- even if found and extracted -- will not be brought to market soon enough or in enough volume to alter the price at the pump by a penny? This is Bush’s plan to deal with the cold fact that Americans have lived beyond our energy means for decades? (Are you old enough, dear reader, to remember the political whupping Jimmy Carter took for calling the energy crisis of the late 70’s the “moral equivalent of war”?)
The Georgia peanut farmer must be laughing now.
On that beautiful day when W exits the White House for the final time, never, under any circumstances, to be invited back, Barack Obama will need a gaggle of shamans, Tibetan holy men, Buddhist monks, rabbis, and magicians, to cleanse Bush’s evil stench from the walls, carpets and furniture. It will be like trying to clean a cheap Hollywood SRO hotel room after the fire department carts the body of a chain smoker to the morgue. Obama’s team will need sage sticks the size of telephone poles to rid the White House of Bush’s essence.
When the story of George W. Bush is finally written it will be short and to the point: he failed at everything he attempted, and everything he touched turned to shit.
Amen.
When the good money is rolling in furiously and in amounts almost impossible to count, Wall Street types have no use for government regulation or oversight. It’s only when the bankers’ relentless greed turns south that they run to Daddy Fed with both arms extended. What a contrast to the distaste most banker-types feel for aid for displaced workers, single mothers, and people with mental problems; those folks must fend for themselves in order to build “self-reliance.” Heaven forbid the poor become dependent on taxpayer assistance!
Large-scale corporate welfare is hardly unusual, though government rescue of Big Business is always cloaked in the guise of keeping the economic system functioning for the good of the “nation.” We’re assured that a taxpayer bail-out is in the best interests of average people living in average towns, but we know better, don’t we?
If tough love and zero tolerance for failure are good enough for Average Jane, why isn’t it good enough for Bear Stearns or Indy Mac? What happened to all the happy talk about the self-regulating free market? Isn’t the All-Knowing Market God supposed to weed out the weak, the corrupt, and the inefficient?
Hypocrisy isn’t pretty and it can’t be papered over forever. Even a people as monumentally distracted as Americans will sooner or later see the beacon of truth shining through the fog.
Ah, and then there’s George W. Bush, our man-child Prez. What can you say about a man who is so out of touch with reality? You know we’re in deep doo-doo when our energy policy boils down to a bad Dr. Phil imitation: “By golly, if we want to lower gasoline prices we’ve got to change people’s psychology. We’ve got to drill and pump and refine – in the most environmentally friendly ways, of course – even though that won’t do a thing to lower the price of gas. But people’s psychology will be changed – and that’s what’s most important. Hee, hee, hee. Yessir!”
Is Bush serious? Change the psychology by drilling for crude that -- even if found and extracted -- will not be brought to market soon enough or in enough volume to alter the price at the pump by a penny? This is Bush’s plan to deal with the cold fact that Americans have lived beyond our energy means for decades? (Are you old enough, dear reader, to remember the political whupping Jimmy Carter took for calling the energy crisis of the late 70’s the “moral equivalent of war”?)
The Georgia peanut farmer must be laughing now.
On that beautiful day when W exits the White House for the final time, never, under any circumstances, to be invited back, Barack Obama will need a gaggle of shamans, Tibetan holy men, Buddhist monks, rabbis, and magicians, to cleanse Bush’s evil stench from the walls, carpets and furniture. It will be like trying to clean a cheap Hollywood SRO hotel room after the fire department carts the body of a chain smoker to the morgue. Obama’s team will need sage sticks the size of telephone poles to rid the White House of Bush’s essence.
When the story of George W. Bush is finally written it will be short and to the point: he failed at everything he attempted, and everything he touched turned to shit.
Amen.
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