Jack Burns Lives!

The Gloaming of George Bush and The Auto Industry

“Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers-obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.”-Edward Abbey

I think we all realize that George Bush, the forty-third selected President of the United States, was never really in control.

And neither were we. Haven’t been from day one, at least as far as I can tell.

The torch shall soon pass to President Obama, and to date, I believe the jury is out on how much change we’ll actually see under his Residency. And that’s pretty much all it is. A Residency, not a Presidency, since all of these people are really subject to the whims of the powerful few that put them there.

Was this ever made more clear than during the Wall Street bailout?

And now we have Detroit standing in the soup line asking for alms. “Alms for the poor, alms for the poor!” The blue collar boys have a had a tougher time of it; however, and their plight has given life to conspiracy charges, agenda driven delays meant to bust the union. A conservative ploy, directed by Southern neo-cons.

There may be some truth to this, as one of my banker friends recently slipped up and let me in on the insider playbook. He stated that the auto makers should declare bankruptcy, not get a bailout and then it would be possible to deal with the unions.

Despite this hard nosed tactic, one that wasn’t equally applied to their buddies on Wall Street, I’m not in favor of a bailout for Detroit. They make a crappy product and have done more than their share to insure the collapse of the biosphere. We don’t need all of these cars, and if you’re really going to have an inegalitarian free market growth economy, you have to be willing to take the failures with the so-called successes.

What to do with thousands of unemployed workers?

Slash the defense budget and use the money to retrain people and put them to work in useful industry. Let’s rebuild the nation’s rail lines for passenger use. Build a nationwide network of greenways. Expand organic agriculture. Research on making point of use energy technologies available and affordable. Start building good bikes in the United States again. (I still lament the loss of Schwinn, the real Schwinn company that produced the coolest bikes ever back in the 60′s and the 70′s, like the artsy Lemon Peeler, Grape Krate, the venerable Varsity and others. They were built to last.)

You know, there’s a lot to do in this country. Stuff, that in my mind, is a lot more important that building Trans Am’s, Hummers and Buicks.

Even if Detroit gets its handout, ultimately, they won’t make it. They have an ideology that’s too ingrained. They’re out of touch with the real world, with biological and geophysical reality. Basically, they’re clueless, so why does the American tax payer want to invest in an out-of-date organization that produces flawed products? Trust me, you don’t.

In many ways, they’re like George Bush, an entity who’s time has come and, thankfully, gone.