General Motors Should Be Worker Owned

I am just as outraged about Obama’s bailouts as I was about Bush’s wars and his stimulus packages. They are expensive. They are of questionable value. They seem designed to benefit only the richest in our society. I am for a hybrid of the GM bailouts, though, and let me tell you why.

Whether you are anti-worker or pro-worker, we are all aware that unions have set the bar for all American workers for the better part of a century. As unions have weakened and membership has declined, benefits and wages for all have followed suit. The Big Three are one of the last powerful bastions of union manufacturing in our country. If we allow them to be killed off, it will just facilitate a quicker end to the American standard of living as we know it. That standard is the result of well over 100 years of struggle by workers and those concerned with their plight.

I see the previous bailouts (and most of the ones in the planning stages) as nothing more than corporate welfare, handouts for the ruling class. They will greatly increase the national debt. They will falsely elevate stock values. They have allowed bonuses for rich people who don’t, in any way, deserve them. I know trickle-downers who are actually prone to believe that this type of activity will eventually benefit those of us in the working class but they must not ever check. We’ve never seen a dime down here.

Reaganomics has never worked regardless of which corporate party runs the printing press. If you print money to give to big corporations, they just keep it. Their officers may vacation longer or they may buy more land in Costa Rica but we don’t ever get any of the pennies we’re supposed to get down here. Never happens.

GM is not an AIG or a CitiBank, though. It is subtly different than these other obscenely corrupt mechanisms in one major regard. It is a real employer of real workers. I read once that 1/12 of the jobs in our economy are dependent on some facet of the automotive industry. Imagine what would happen to our real economy if 1/12 of our jobs just “left the building”?

If allowed to, you can be sure that GM (and our other “patriotic” auto manufacturers) would run happily to China to reap the benefits of Clinton’s terrible legacy of globalization. They will simply move themselves and their parts operations to any place in the world where labor is cheap (or even free) and where steel and energy are cheaper, as well. GM has already been doing exactly this for several decades now.

So, I am for preventing the terrible blood loss that will ensue should we allow GM to fail but I am not for the Fed running our automotive companies. Nor am I for giving GM a blank check and simply letting them do whatever they wish (although that does seem to be the deal most of the banks are getting). But, if we really wish to know what this administration’s goals are in relation to GM, we need look no further than Obama’s Wall Street whiz kid, Brian Deese, who was just put in charge of dismantling GM. The guy has never even set foot in an auto plant. Having some 31 year old rainmaker ship all of our union jobs to China is not my own personal vision of fixing a serious problem. Its likely not yours, either.

The bailouts, as currently structured, leave the government in control of about 60% of GM’s stock and that is just not acceptable. The federal government is beholden to the wrong people and we cannot allow them access to 1/12 of our job base. Enough with the corporate welfare already!

GM doesn’t need a bailout. It needs a huge low-interest loan that will allow it to become a worker-owned company with a new agenda. Perhaps, it could once again make energy-efficient electric cars like the EV1?! It could get rid of the corporate fat-cats who ran it into the ground in the first place. Then, the collective could decide what their fate will be together without Wall Street dictating any of the terms. Look what Wall Street did to our economy (real and imagined). Do we really want these idiots put in charge of anything we have such a huge stake in? Really?