In a desperate panic GM spent the last week lobbying Congress to pass some kind of bail out to assist the SUV heavy American Auto Industry. It’s not surprising to see GM leading the way in factory closings, as the glut of high mileage SUV’s and Trucks fill the back lots.
In Oct. GM announced the closure of factories in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan that build SUV’s costing America thousands of jobs. Democrats have insisted that any bailout should require these auto companies to build higher efficiency vehicle if it was to consider bailing them out, and that the money should be used for retooling in the wake of $147 a barrel oil.
The problem that most law makers suggest is a recession that cannot be solved by better consumer products even though the price of oil has fallen to half of the price it peaked at. People are still not going to buy new vehicles right away for home economic reasons, unemployment, and or credit tightening. It’s just bad timing for the auto industry in America.
Ironically GM built an electric car and leased something like 6,000 of them to test the market in the late 90’s. A company called Ovonic built a lithium Ion battery which was capable of pushing the car to over 100 miles per hour and had a range of 200 miles. The project, for some reason, was scraped and these perfectly working vehicles were all smashed. Maybe it had something to do with Texaco buying Ovonic, but who really knows.
Now the same company, who had a chance to move into one of the fastest growing markets in automobiles, wants the America it shelved in order to stay the course, to bail it out… without so much as a plan to change the way it addresses the American consumer markets. It’s not surprising that Congress isn’t responding.
One thing, and I consider this a positive in America, is it’s appetite for change. Too long have the Corporations of this country kept us in a perpetual state of outdated technology. It is a historical fact that the Internal Combustion Engine and its proverbial use of gasoline ran concurrent with the invention of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. Circa 1839… I sometimes wonder if that was merely because Standard Oil and Nelson D. Rockefeller’s corporate influence.
The fact is that it is an American habit not just to produce a product, but also to destroy any competition. It doesn’t always work though. Thomas Edison led a campaign against Nikola Tesla, after firing him, when Tesla began to expand his Alternating Currency technology, using the argument the AC was dangerous because it was used at the time for capital punishment.
To most Corporations, in this era of Capitalism, the consumer represents an index point on a spread sheet and employees are either assets or liabilities. Competition is like the Archangel of the “In God We Trust” and I think people are past getting tired of it. It makes us look stupid as a society.
We are in the midst of an era of self empowerment. With tools like the internet at our disposal there is no excuse for not investigating our choices, when it comes to purchasing. This power makes up two-thirds of the American Economy and every choice we make either empowers companies like GM or not, and can empower our future and an example we desire for our generations to follow.
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