GM Paradise Lost

Emma Rothschild wrote a neat little book about the US automobile industry in 1974. She called it 'Paradise lost'. Sound familiar today when GM and Ford are on the cusp of bankruptcy? It took a Brit to calmly tell the decline of the US auto makers. She made a jolly good case as to why Volkwagen's Beatle could take away in the early
1960's up to 15 per cent of motor car market share in the US, and this at a time when motor gasoline was cheap! The buyer wanted fuel efficiency, not gas guzzler, and didn't give a fig about dinosaur like features like fins and long bodies and cumbersome motors. Sound familiar? It should, for the same complaints are with us today in a severe recession for GM and Ford. There was time when GM's CEO could arrogantly boast, 'What's good for GM, is good for America!' Not anymore! And this has been true for quite a long time as Korean, Japanese, and European carmarkers have shaken the pillars of Detriot's supremacy and smugness. Who remembers, too, when UAW president Walter Ruether urged GM's CEO to support Harry Truman's proposed single payer healthcare package? No one. GM didn't want anything to do with healthcare for all Americans, so wily Ruether got a contract and a promise that GM would look after GM's workers' health as employees and pensionners. Shortsighted GM is now stuck with the albatross of healthcare premina which it gladly put around its own neck itself. Why? Senior management were basking in GM's salad days and had no thought for the future nor any idea of social responsibility. Who remembers another Ruether initiative? As the US was building Fortress America to defeat Hitler and Italy and Japan...the Axis, Reuther came hat in hand to Washington asking that automotive assembly plants be turned into aerocraft factories. He got turned down, and today, the taxpayer is saddled with an inefficient semi private company called Boeing & its ilk, which basks in government largesse and cost overruns and gross inefficiencies. GM missed out as not only an automaker of note but a future aerospace and defence contractors. So today shrinking like violets they're a shadow of themselves, the for plain and simple truth, for over a half century its warts were there for all to see and they did little or nothing but continue business as usual which now has landed them on the edge of collapse and chapter 11. Sheds no tears for management but pity the poor working stiff!