Over half of the Fortune 500's Top Ten Revenue Earners for 2008 were Oil or Automotive companies. General Motors was #4, Ford #7 – ahead of both CitiGroup and Bank of America. Exxon/Mobil, Chevron, and Conoco Phillips had combined profits in upwards of $71.2 billion.
Yes, despite their large revenue figures, GM and Ford both reported negative profits. Now, along with the now privately-owned Chrysler, they are asking U.S. tax payers to give them a 'bridge loan' to 2010.
2010 was to be the magical year when the benefits of their much-celebrated 2007 contract with the UAW really kicked in. That's when retiree health care officially moves onto the union's back in the form of a VEBA, and more $14/hour, no pension, no health care 'new hire' workers replace those currently earning livable wages and receiving (fingers-crossed) a pension and health care benefits for a doing a job that causes repetitive motion injuries, workplace illnesses, and death. Popularly known on Wall Street as 'legacy costs.' This is what Legacy Costs look like:
Let's be honest about some things. First, new hires at GM, Ford, & Chrysler now earn less than their non-union counterparts at Toyota plants in the South. It's an utter joke, and a sick one at that, to say that these workers are to blame, and that they should now give up the health care they earned and need. OK, CNBC?
Second, it takes two to tango. What good is a pen without ink, a computer without software, or a gun without bullets? Big Oil and Big Auto have been dancing like devils in the pale moonlight for decades. Until relatively recently, the average American consumer was tapping his foot to the cheap fossil fuel beat right along with them. We can get awfully righteous about the Big Three's environmental stagnation, and awfully forgetful about our own, when the environmental and (more accurately) economic shit hits the fan belt. We're all addicts. Is it really that hard to believe that Big Oil and Big Auto would have a difficult time ending their codependent relationship when they're getting paid billions to stay off the wagon? In that light, it's not even all that surprising that GM would sell the EV1's battery patent to Chevron.
But the jig is up on all fronts. Sorry real America, but we don't need to drill, baby, drill. We need to tax, baby, tax (heck, expropriate, baby, expropriate) the windfall profits that the oil companies syphoned off American consumers, future generations, the planet, and their doped-up partners in Detroit, duped into believing that their fortunes are inescapably linked to Oil's. Let us give you some tough-lovin' straight talk, Motown, "He's a loser, girl, and the whole world knows it. He needs you waaaay more than you need him. And we need you now."
That's the real point here. If anyone should pony up the funding to retool and reposition American automotive to be clean, competitive, competent, and confident, it should be the abusive spouse who bought off the police (Washington DC), blackmailed the world, and coldly kindled a faux true love, symbiotic relationship with Detroit.
We've said it before, but it bears repeating. We need green cars. We need green buses, planes, trains, dams, factories, wind turbines, buildings, etc. We also need jobs that pay a living wage. Health care. The ability to send our kids to college, and the ability to retire. It seems almost completely forgotten, or for many young people never learned, that the automotive industry rivals, or surpasses, the tech industry in how it fundamentally changed this country, how we live, how we see ourselves, and how we interact with each other. It also spawned countless new industries. Ever hear of fast food? Motels? Family vacations? How many Americans over the last 100 years have earned a living doing road construction and vehicle maintenance? Ever tried taking a covered wagon from LA to Vegas? Could there even be a Vegas without a Detroit? We can make criticisms of their management decisions until the Dow comes home, but to suggest that Auto as an industry has not been and could never be good for America reeks of a kind arrogance that seems to come with all the expectations the digital and information revolution rightly foreshadows. But that doesn't obliterate the fundamental value of manufacturing and transportation. Ask anyone who's ever needed a taxi, ambulance, squad car, or hearse. Fantasizing about a mystical Knowledge Economy that craps droplets of gold and wisdom from the ether is no more viable a plan for our future than oil is. Making the actual, reality-based, actual value-creating economy work is. It has to be. For the most important reasons I can think of: our people and our planet. Casting entire industries to the scrap heap of history, when their clear necessity in the world of tomorrow would be a serious mistake. Oil, on the other hand, needs to be put into Hospice and his will needs to be rewritten to benefit all those he's plundered over the course of his life.
Yes. It takes two to tango. But when you're dancing partner is dead, it becomes harder and harder to make that dead weight boogie – especially when he's got all the prize money the two of you have won throughout the years stuffed into his locked pockets. Grab that cash and go find somebody new to get down with, Motown. I hear lithium can pop-n-lock with the best of 'em. </span>