Now Is the Time to Make Them Pay!

$25 billion is a lot of money. Although, nowadays, it is not that much. A bad cappuccino in St. Petersburg, Russia already costs $7; a plane ticket home for the holidays $1500 and a movie ticket in NJ with popcorn and a coke runs around $16--that is for one person!

So, with $25 billion having been put safely into perspective, it is now time to assess the true value of this "lump of money" that the automakers are beggin us for.

GM and Chrysler are incompetent. Ford has at least made efforts at breaking with its past managerial mistakes (read: American corporate greed). All three of these companies have lavish corporate dining rooms. Top managers travel about the nation in clouds of ingorance and Bush-like indifference as their companies struggle to pay their employees, current and past (pensions) and focus their thoughts, conscious and slumbering, on quarterly profits.

Ah, yes, the quarterly profit! This is an extremely inefficient tool for determining a company's performance. It's sole raison d'etre is for providing top management with the most possible opportunities (4 each year) for securing their extravagant bonuses.

Quarterly profits do not permit for management to study trends, consumer fickleness, effects from bad weather, breath, hair or anything else that might dissuade a consumer from making a purchase. Imagine, a woman gets breast augmentation surgery. The money she may have spent today on her new vehicle is now sitting rock-like upon her chest like a hood ornament.

5 months later, she goes to buy that cute little car she so liked but it is gone because not having sold X number of units in the first 4 months, the automaker decided to come out with yet another new model! The result is decreased consumer satifaction; a massively ineffecient procedure for the studying of consumer wants/needs/likes; and, a complete waste of money that had been invested in R&D.

So, back in the corporate dining room (today being T-Day the chairs will be empty), with the china polished and glistening, some of America's dumbest, greediest corporate idiots will be sitting about--and I have a dollar that says the most common accent will be Southern amongst those big-wigs--laughing how they have once again duped the American public. Again, we will be paying for their cruises, their big, fenced-in homes, their kids spending sprees, laced with ectasy and hookers, throughout Amsterdam and other party cities of Europe, their wives 45th faceliftlipaugmentationasspullup operation.

And so many former employees of those companies will be celebrating with a Spam-sculpted turkey this year because they have been laid off as a result of flagrant, corporate greed and treacherous mismanagement! Dear Joe and even Dear Fatass-Christian-Bush supporter, get a buzz today, TIVO the football game and then pack up some of that Spam and send it to the corporate headquarters of Chrysler, GM and even Ford. Let it rot in their mail rooms for a month or so, 15 tons of the stuff!

As for these low-life, slightly-in-bred cream of the country-club scene, who will always be the first to cry foul when a "colored person" is on the receiving end of government hand-outs, I say this to our in-coming President-with-a-brain: Stick to your guns about getting the fossil-fuel monkey off our backs! Get tough with these corporate Mr. Potters and link their receipt of credit to the similar conditionality that the IMF imposes on countries.

But, whereas the IMF demands macro and micro restraints and "no pain no gain" type conditions, President Obama and the Congress should demand that the US (and with the receipt of this money, these companies truly become US) auto industry become the world leader in green-techologies! We have the brain-power, despite the Bush Administrations attempts at outlawing individual and intelligent thought, to accomplish anything in the world! America is still the smartest and most talanted nation in the world!

With goverment backing and will-power, with the talant and the mandate of a young and truly smart President, we can FORCE the auto industry to bend to the ways of GOOD, BUSINESS SENSE. We will forbid them from making SUVs despite what consumers may want. It is time we realize that the greed and abuse of our nation, our environment by rude, selfish hypocrites is National Security Issue Numer One! That monkey on our backs is chipping away at our national sanity and like real-life crackheads, soon the average Joe will be offering unheard of "services" just to buy a gallon of gas so he can move that SUV 10 feet!

The industry as well as consumer groups will certainly claim that this is all anti-free market and heavy-handed goverment intervention, etc. (the words "God-less communism" will be used more than once) but these clowns have run their companies in every way that is counter to good, business sense (counter to Business 101 as taught in any Community College in the US) and so they no longer have the right to use that old crutch for support.

If they come crawling (or shall we say flying in their $36 million jets) to Washington seeking hand-outs, then they will abide by the wishes of the new Board of Directors. On this board, all Americans sit and now, we will make the changes the industry refused to make and the Bush Administration didn't require and America's auto industry 5 years from now will again be the glowing example of business genius, top management and superior products--we will again be the leaders but only this time there will be no more Edsells.

Yes, counter to current economic trends and the falling value of the US dollar, this $25 billion hand-out could truly be more valuable tomorrow than it is today. I say: GIVE IT TO'EM!