By Denis Campbell

GM, a business now worth $3 billion dollars, is asking Congress for a bailout of $15 billion, be allowed to keep present management in place – the one’s who created this fiasco and for us to trust them that after dozens of years of getting it so very, very arrogantly wrong, they now know how to get it right.

These are truly a great group of guys, they are men’s men, give them a chance. These are top executives who golf in clubs around the world, take large dealers on fancy junkets and invented the term living large. But these multi-millionaire Big Three automaker chiefs agreed to take an annual salary of just $1 shaving a whopping $36 million dollars off the now $34 billion dollars they are asking for from Congress. So we saved 34 million dollars.

Not enough?

Hey they’ll also sell the corporate jet (they learned their lesson and drove to Washington in hybrids), do away with executive perks and tighten their lifestyle belts.

Don’t take the deal Congressman.

Joseph Campbell famously wrote: “you cannot change unless you change the metaphor.”

This is window dressing, it’s not changing the metaphor. Unless you change the metaphor you cannot change the company. Unless you change the company fundamentally you will not save this industry.

How is it FDR can bring the heads of the auto companies together in time of war and say you are not to build cars, you must build tanks and other machines to help us in the effort yet not one member of the Senate has yet, before a full committee or the full Senate with their vote just said, no?

What chance would I have walking into the manager at Barclays and saying, “please advance me an interest free grant of £1,200,000 pounds so I can study the mating habits of Severn River molluscs or I’ll go under and take the entire Welsh economy with me?”

Why are we not as hysterically laughing at this request/demand from Detroit, bail us out or we’ll kill ourselves!?

Here’s when and how you get my attention.

• You get a big new business partner, the US Govt, who will own 49% of your company’s shares. That means all those members of the Ford family will have to grow up and some may even have to find jobs.
• There will be no acquisitions or new business lines opened unless and until your business partners approve.
• Tell me you are shutting down, modernising and re-tooling every factory to create carbon neutral vehicles.
• Tell me that your top 50 executives in each company, that includes the heads of each division and the most senior executives will also work for $1 a year and anyone making 150,000 – 500,000 a year takes a 50% paycut.
• The executive dining rooms, private clubs, private boxes, season tickets, stadium naming right, 2/3 of the sports marketing budget, event junkets and marketing ad buys are eliminated where possible and coordinated in such a way to aim messages to consumers specifically about cars.
• Hourly workers will need to take a 10% across the board cut, middle managers 20%.

Even after all of these elements are factored in… it’s still a dicey deal to lend any company 500% of its market value. We already did that.

Only back then, nobody stopped the subprime boys from doing essentially the same thing.