From today’s Globe…
DETROIT – After being skewered by Congress and lampooned on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” the CEOs of Detroit’s three automakers may end up making their return trip to Washington by car as they seek a federal bailout.
If that’s how they manage things in Detroit it’s no wonder their industry is in dire straits.
The Detroit area’s auto industry, whose livelihood depends on the health of Chrysler LLC, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp., spent the weekend e-mailing and discussing how to set up a car caravan to seek help from Congress.
A car caravan? Is that supposed to be something like a mobile Hooverville? Guys who make tens of millions of dollars a year screwing up the environment and buying politicians are going to perform their imitation of poor people begging for money by being chauffeured to Washington in luxury cars? (You know these clowns won’t be driving themselves.)
If they were smart they would have just shut up and flown business class to their next begging. But they’ve shown over the years that they aren’t smart except in the limited ways mentioned above (screwing the environment and buying pols).
In fairness The Lion notes that the story attributes the idea not to the CEOs of the Big Three but to suppliers, collateral businesses, and the UAW. But given the amount of financial incest in the industry, it’s fair to believe that the CEOs may well have had something to do with the buzz.
They’ll pull a transparent, cheap PR stunt to suck taxpayer dollars out of Washington to pay for their stupidity and failures.
It beggars belief.
(Tell the truth now. How many of you saw that last line coming?)
The story does not mention how the chief honchos of the financial industry biggies like AIG and CitiGroup managed to get to their hearings. Probably in corporate jets, but nobody complained about that. Of course they’re so wired into the politicians and the Bushies like Paulson and Bernanke that they probably only had to have their third assistant secretaries make a couple of phone calls to get the money.
Yes, it beggars belief, and it will beggar the country whether the taxpayers, scratch that – the taxpayers have had no say in this disaster – the politicians give away the money or do nothing.
One thing’s sure – someone should be going to jail, and it’s equally sure that no one will.