As a dreary economic forecast ripples throughout the marketplace, Chrysler LLC has decided to cut its product line and cut the number of dealerships by 1/3. Chrysler refers to this as their "Dealer Optimization Plan". I'm wondering how "optimized" the thousands of salesmen, mechanics, and clerical staff are going to feel all the way to the unemployment line.
Double speak can be an artform, and sometimes it can be just plain annoying. When Chrylser referred to it's plans to cut dealerships by as much as a 1/3, in effect putting thousands of people out of work, as "our Dealer Optimization plan", I just felt dumber for having read it.
It's almost a given that companies who cause pain and suffering in the lives of loyal employees by unceremoniously firing them to increase profit margins will refer to the practice with some benign, upbeat language. They hire people to speak like that.
These slugs then go home to their spouses and families and lie about the horror that they have inflicted upon other people's spouses and families. It's a human condiditon. No one wants to admit that they've hurt someone else, especially when it's blatantly clear that they have.
So this article is less about the fact that the bottom is falling out of our economy and we're headed for a devastating depression than it is about how those who flippantly refer to layoffs as "optimizations" need to be confronted for their callous actions and subsequent lies. They need to be confronted in the marketplace of ideas, specifically here on the blogosphere, because television and newspapers are owned by the very same companies who practice this reprehensible insanity.
Perhaps when a family whose main wage earner was laid off by a company they have worked for for the past 30 years fails to keep up with their home heating oil bills, and the oil company refuses to deliver more oil, and the parents and the kids are huddled under a blanket freezing to death because its winter and there's no heat, perhaps we could find another word besides "optimized" to describe what has happened. "Victimized" comes to mind. So does "betrayed". How about "totally and completely screwed"?
Republicans, or what's left of that fractured mess of a party, always refer to telling the truth about this economic devastation as "class warfare". If progressives suggest legislation that tries to right these wrongs, they get labeled as promoting class war. Telling the truth about what'shappening is so distasteful to the right, that they have to use sweet little words and phrases to make it sound all better, and more palatable. 1984. But it's less sinister. These people aren't truly evil. They are, in the most accurate terms of the word, "Cowards". And in purely Orwellian fashion, instead of declaring "war" against them, I think they should simply be "optmized".