Here comes the “Czar” Word again

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A government “car czar” would oversee any bailout of U.S. automakers under proposed terms being negotiated by the White House and Congress for extending up to $17 billion in emergency loans that mainly aim to spare General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC from bankruptcy.

I’m rolling my eyes here.

When all else fails, find somebody’s recycled friend, associate or relative, pay him a lot of taxpayer money, and call him a Czar. That will fix everything.

Basically, Czars are appointed whenever our elected officials are about to throw away big bucks to the anger of the Dirty Masses. Apparently, they think we will fall for the waste because there’s a Czar and Czars are serious things.

Remember the Drug Czar? Look how well that worked out for us.

Usually “Czar” is reserved by our inept elected officials for use with the words “War On”.

Now “War On” generally means, we can’t fix this so we will call it a War On. Remember the War On Poverty? Look how well that worked out for us. Then there’s the ongoing War On Terror. This is the most interesting War On of all. War on a feeling. Amazing, really. We might as well have a War On Dirt, because we continually declare War On things that won’t go away. Well at least they haven’t used War On in tandem with this gift loan to the Big Three. Yet.

But it’s time to hold onto your wallet again, because we are hearing the word Czar again. This means Big Bucks unaccounted for and more government employees to “Oversee” things. I wonder who Oversees the Overseers?

Once again, appointing a “Czar” is supposed to make us all feel good that we are about to give the Big Three money we don’t have. When you sift through all the typical Congressional Hot Air, we are basically about to pay the salaries and benefits of GM and Chrysler employees–until it runs out. Then they will be back for more and the “Czar” will highly recommend it. Then we will pay the salaries and benefits again.

In the meantime, small businesses are closing down at an astounding rate, but nobody is bothering with that.

This Big Three thing has a familiar ring to it. It seems they are making the same damned promises they made in the 70s and then again in the 80s. They didn’t mean it then either.

What you will only hear in whispers is the Big Three were in trouble long before Barney and Chris allowed Fannie and Freddie to irresponsibly tank without a warning to the tax payers. Long before. Their retiree payouts were officially bigger than their entire employee payroll. The snowball is getting bigger by the day, aided by an almost incomprehensible refusal of this country to realize that sticking businesses with the responsibility of health care forever is a major root cause for loss of jobs to other countries. We think that’s how it ought to be and the health insurance industry, which operates for stockholder profit via making decisions as to who lives or dies without conscience, is doing just fine. Why wouldn’t they? Nobody ever puts a foot on their throats as to their part in this mess either. If we don’t take this monkey off of businesses’ backs we can expect more of the same.

That’s not the only Doom story involved here. In whispers, there is also talk that the bill to force unionization of yet more companies is in the tank, waiting for Barack Obama. No more secret votes on whether or not to unionize. That should work out really well for us and guarantee yet another giant flushing sound of more jobs leaving America and more non-competitive businesses bolting their doors. We haven’t yet learned why the manufacturing sector wants none of this any longer.

I come from a family that owned a union company for many decades. Times were great. Everybody shared. There was an ass for every chair and a chair for every ass. Like I said, times were great and everybody did well. Times are not great right now. Either everybody sacrifices or nobody wins. It’s as simple as that. For all the talk of sacrifices already made by management and workers, the bottom line says it’s not enough and it’s not working. No rhetoric in the world is going to change that naked fact. This patch with money we don’t have is going to fall off in six months. And the Big Three will be right back where they are today. Their history demands it. All you have to do is read the Consumer Reports April Car issue for any particular year and look at the black circles in the repair records to know that very little has changed.

Then there’s management.

I don’t know how many of you remember Lee Iacocca when he begged for taxpayer money. We gave it to him and he rewarded us in return by pimping those lemon K Cars on TV:

”If you can find a better car at this price, buy it!”.

Here’s Lee in 1984. Sound familiar?

And people believed him.

He was a hero.

There was even a grassroots call for Iacocca for President, even as he was sticking it up the collective butts of Americans with some of the crappiest cars ever produced.

I recall reading Iacocca’s book and a particular story about Henry Ford (I don’t know how many letters where after that particular Henry’s name). He said ole Henry kept wondering why he couldn’t get a hamburger as good as the one the chef in Ford’s executive dining room made. So Lee was having a bash and wanted to give Henry that hamburger. So he went to the executive chef and asked him how he made Henry’s hamburgers. The chef took a Prime NY State strip steak out of the cooler, ran it through a meat grinder and threw it on the grill.

Do you think that kind of behavior has changed at the Big Three?

Today, Chrysler is run by Bob Nardelli, the perpatual Jack Welch suck-up who left GE in a huff when he didn’t get the CEO replacement job. They fired him as CEO at Home Depot before he completely ran them into the ground, but not before they had to give him hundreds of millions of dollars in severance benefits. Today he runs Chrysler and now thinks he deserves billions of our money just because he drove to DC instead of using his personal jet. If he couldn’t keep Home Depot in the black, what makes us think he can fix Chrysler?

Buy American. Be Patriotic.

Hell, we all want to do that. But a car is a huge purchase. It’s not a toaster. It’s the second biggest purchase Middle Americans can make after buying a home. I don’t know about you, but I got screwed for the last time by American auto makers years ago. I kept giving them another chance and they kept giving me cars that let me down in every way imaginable. I don’t throw my money away like that any longer. I don’t believe them. Instead of attempting to make me feel guilty, they need to learn that it’s their job to convince me, and then it’s their job to prove themselves right. It is not my job to feel guilty for refusing to be screwed again. I wish I had all the money I flushed down the toilet for American cars I couldn’t wait to get rid of. There are far too many Americans who feel the way I do and unless and until American auto makers get the point, they will continue to play second fiddle to Toyota, which passed them two years ago as Number One.

A Car Czar can’t fix attitude. Post WWII, a mathematician named W. Edwards Deming warned America that if they didn’t mend their quality and efficiency ways, they might not be the manufacturing leader of the future. American car manufacturers snorted at him. To get the pest out of our hair, we sent him over to Japan to help clean up their mess. Everybody knew that “Made in Japan” was a joke. Deming stayed with them for 40 years. That’s how long it took for Japanese car manufacturers to eat our lunch while we slept. In the early 90s, when he was close to death and it was already too late, American auto manufacturers wanted him to come to their plants and fix them up in a few weeks. He laughed a lot. Patience has never been our virtue. No, a Car Czar can never fix attitude.

Consider this: Honda produced the first Civic in 1972.

Many of them are still on the road. You could have bought your Honda ten years ago and people still won’t be able to tell what year it is. How come the K-car didn’t survive like the Honda did, except as a collector’s group novelty? Above is a ‘72 Honda Civic as shown today. Compare it to the K-Car shown above and let me know what you think.

Down the road, Toyotas and Hondas are made right here in America, crafted by the hands of American workers. Except they have been building the cars the Big Three have only talked about building for 30 years. They work on the concept that the person performing the next task is their internal customer. Thus, quality really IS Job One, not just a slogan. And they are paid well too. But there isn’t an ass for every chair and a chair for every ass. Job Descriptions don’t call for somebody to sit around because the job being done right now isn’t in their job description.

Consumer Reports also found that non-hybrid gas-sippers such as the Honda Fit, Scion xD, Smart ForTwo, and Toyota Yaris had few problems. Ford scored well for domestic car companies, but the top 10 most-reliable brands sold in America are all owned by Asian automakers.

I think 30 years is long enough to wait and I think that much of America no longer believes the Big Three. I don’t think America believes their management and I don’t think America believes the UAW either. Like the saying goes, this is deja vu all over again. We are bailing out these companies to keep the unemployment rate down. If they could compete well enough, we wouldn’t be bailing them out. So we are keeping them around so people can work and get paid. Where is the incentive in that?

American taxpayers do not want to be an employment agency. They already resent the bloated government payroll in a country where government is the number one sector for added jobs. Appointing another useless Czar isn’t going to convince them. They’ve Been There and they’ve Done That before.