We Don't Need the General Motors Corp.

Times are anxious indeed, but simultaneously we are face-to-face with
an extremely rare chance to replace our transportation system with
something we can literally live with.

To take advantage of this uncommon opportunity we will have to do
something far more profound, yet less costly, than a government
bailout or an act of Congress. We will have to, as Paul Newman said
in Cool Hand Luke, "get our minds right" on one simple fact: what we
need is reliable, sustainable transportation. That does not mean we
need General Motors Corporation or even cars. Contemplate the freedom
implied in that statement for just a moment: we do not need General
Motors Corporation.

Truth be known, the kingpin of the highway lobby has been by far the
biggest roadblock to reliable, sustainable transportation for one
basic reason: while we've needed, and still need, good transportation,
we forgot that GMC was never in the business of providing
transportation. It was in the business of making money.

That means that 90 years ago when GMC officials realized their market
share had stalled out with less than 20 percent of the population
owning automobiles, they had to do something. They had to get the
other 80 percent of the population out of streetcars and trains - and
get them into cars.

Had the company really been in the business of providing
transportation, it could have started manufacturing and maintaining
streetcars and rail-related equipment, but that was never going to be
as profitable as selling a General Motors car to every family in the
nation (or at least come as close to it as Henry Ford would allow).
So GMC, as would any for-profit company, put shareholders ahead of
citizens and decided the trains and streetcars had to go.

That whole, sad story is told in painstaking detail in the
documentary, "Taken for a Ride." A lively, engaging film released in
1996, it has never been more timely than right now. I'm not going to
tell you how GMC did it. You can read about it here, and you really
need to see the film. If your library doesn't have a copy ask them to
order it.

The point is, we have an abundance of everything it takes to provide
reliable, sustainable transportation - raw materials, skilled labor
and now, if we decide to exercise our 60% ownership of GMC courtesy of
a $50 billion taxpayer bailout, we have the capital.

The entity known as General Motors Corporation is a legal fiction, a
device most adept at concentrating economic and political power,
buying off elected officials, opposing seat belts, pollution controls
and higher mileage - while handing out executive lifestyles to make a
pharaoh blush. But the corporation called General Motors is by NO
means needed to provide transportation.

Cooperatives are just one of the humane models available for
organizing finance and production. The U.S. has a rich cooperative
history but since most people view them as arcane and since in modern
times we have not provided optimal conditions for their growth, let's
consider an example from a country where they are taken seriously.

The Mondragon Corporacion Cooperativa (MCC), a finance, manufacturing
and distribution cooperative based in the Basque region of Spain, has
85,000 employees and operations on five continents. Can you say
"Goodbye, GMC?"

Michael Moore, native of Flint, Michigan, one of the communities most
devastated by the deindustrialization campaign our government allowed
GMC to wage, puts it a little more bluntly.

"Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it
will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs...Let's be
clear about this. The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our
precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must
be a top priority. If we allow the...tearing down of our auto plants, we
will sorely wish we still had them when we realize...that the best way
to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner
buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity
and its skilled workforce to disappear?"

Equally important, Moore displays better insight into this problem
than 90% of the "expert" talking heads when he describes hybrid cars
as merely a temporary phenomenon, a bridge technology, not really
required for transportation. Never forget that we are heirs to a
generation of automobile advertising designed to sell cars and three
more generations of advertising designed to make us feel beautiful,
sexy, in command and uncommonly smart if we bought the right kind of
car - along with a not-so-delicate head bashing in recent years that
our very lives depend on letting the auto industry have a free hand
governing our work and our economy.

It is indeed true that times of crisis are times of enormous
opportunity. All we have to do is get our minds right and the sky's
the limit.