To read the mainstream coverage of the GM bankruptcy, you would
think President Obama's main enemy--and indeed the enemy of progress
for the whole country--is a unionized labor force in the auto industry.
Good thing Obama and his one-person task force on dismantling the auto industry--31-year-old Yale Law School student Brian Deese are ready to stand up to the automakers and the union, we are told.
"Any idiot can nationalize a company," the great American socialist
Michael Harrington used to say, disparagingly. For socialists of
Harrington's generation and thereafter -- the socialists and social
democrats who have governed most of Western Europe off and on for the
past 30 years -- nationalizing companies hasn't really been part of
their playbook. To be sure, they long since nationalized a range of
services -- most prominently, health insurance -- that remain in
private hands in the United States.
What in the world is the Obama
administration thinking? The GM bankruptcy -- entirely avoidable --
seems designed to hurt every constituency it is supposed to assist.
The trouble with the whole "Nixon goes to China" theory -- which is
grounded in the calculus that big progress is made when a politician
goes against type to address a seemingly intractable challenge -- is
that sometimes the "bold" gesture is really just more of the same.
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General
Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made
it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by
friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen
to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in
the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you
lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be
your state of mind?
The media coverage of the auto bailouts has focused on the need for union autoworkers to take big pay cuts, causing them to once again miss the real story. The Fiat-Chrysler deal shows that the pay problem is at the top, not the bottom. At the end of the day, the new Chrysler is still likely to be producing most of its cars in the United States. What the new company will be getting from abroad is technology and top management.
