I’d be the last guy to defend a CEO making 21mil a year even if his company was stumbling over bales of profit, let alone one losing billions. Hell, Lou Gehrig cap in hand had to beg for a $40k contract, so I seethe when an A-Rod winds up with a 250mil multiyear contract, and Manny turns down Torres’ offer of 40mil for two years because he—in his old age no less—wants 100mil for four years! Then there are these part time pitchers with 4.0 ERA getting 10-15mil, and those with 3.5 ERA are lionized as 20mil superstars. The Amazon Bozo who "created" an electronic catalogue, and Bill Gates who, despite better existing platforms, under bid for the IBM contract no more deserve being multibillionaires than the technical writers for Sears and Montgomery Ward and the American Marine Indians who broke the Japanese codes, respectively. The founding fathers of science—the likes of Einstein and Newton—and the computer pioneers at Xerox, AT&T and university labs got little monetary reward but no one was counting.
Nonetheless, the audacity of Congress to lecture insultingly the Big Three who at this point have never looked better relative to the great progress being made, is simply arrant arrogance and hypocritical, particularly in light of their many failings as lawmen—not to mention their blank checks to Wall Street financiers. It is actually unAmerican the way the congressional committees have behaved. They continually stick it to the CEOs and UAW with the harangue of "legacy." But that legacy also includes the entire American story of magnificent automobiles that were second to none in their time, and it took real grit to labor on the assembly lines without robots and flimsy steel and plastics. In the 60s and early 70s youthful protestors and image seekers bought foreign—they were masochistic and joy rode on the junk from Japan and Germany. It was only when the first and second oil crises hit did they begin to buy for the economy. Still the early foreign cars were a joke—Opel, Beetle, Datsun, Mirage, Corolla—that fared no better than the four and six cylinder autos of the 30s and 40s. It really wasn’t until the union free southern states cajoled the foreign companies with incredible incentives to build spanking new robotic plants did they begin to compete with the rusted out plants of Detroit which had to undergo tremendous restructuring of their plants in order to compete. Today, despite finicky Consumers Report, no one can claim there’s much difference in comparable models.
If Congress wants to turn to legacy they should lecture the consumer soccer moms, the male chauvinists with their demand for SUVs and pickup trucks, along with the southern governors promising the moon.
Copyright © 2008 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: Dec 9, 2008.
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