I suppose your town only rents the firetruck after they get a 911 call, right?

Wagoner, GM has been with his corp the longest.
1977-81 GM, Mid level Treasury (not a decision maker)
1981-84 Treasurer of GM Brazil (profitable but separate from GM North America)
1984-87 Executive Director GM Brazil (profitable)
1987-88 VP Finance GM Canada (separate from GM NA)
1988-89 VP Finance GM Europe (very profitable, not GM NA)
1991-92 President GM Brazil
1992-94 Executive VP & CFO GM NA (now you can start counting his years at the helm)
1994-98 Exec VP & Pres NA Operations
1998-2003 President & CEO
2003- Chairman & CEO

Wagoner’s chance to run GM into the ground didn’t start until 1992, 16 years ago. Except that GM was a behemoth before he got to the board room, selling everything from real estate to solar panels. Under Wagoner, GM has been divesting itself of extraneous non-auto companies since he started.

Now let’s look at Nardelli, Chrysler
1971-88 Engineer, General Electric
1988-91 VP Tenneco Inc
1991-2000 Engineering Director GE, Jack Welch protege
2000-07 CEO Home Depot
2007- CEO Chrysler

So Nardelli’s chance to ruin Chrysler has been 1 year 3 months. And please, totally ignore the fact that Chrysler was completely torn to pieces by the Germans and sold off as scrap to Cerberus.

Cerberus brought Nardelli in as chief despite his ousting from Home Depot. Why? Because Nardelli was a total bastard at Home Depot. He was rude and ran roughshod over anyone who wasted money there. He was the kind of guy they wanted at the helm, even if he isn’t a teddy bear.

Mulally, Ford
1969-92 Engineer Boeing
1992-94 VP & General Manager, VP Engineering, Boeing
1994-97 Senior VP Development, Boeing
1997-98 Senior VP, Pres Space & Defense, Boeing
1998-2006 President & CEO, Boeing
2006- President & CEO Ford Motor Company

So Mulally’s chance to screw up Ford has been 1 year 2 months. Ford is actually not in serious trouble yet. They can wait out this storm and have a very rich family behind them willing to bail them out if the market gets too bad. But Mulally knows that if GM goes under, it’ll drag Ford with it, so that’s why you see Ford at the congressional table.

Do you still believe that these are the guys personally responsible?

I’m not picking on you Snap, it’s just that the whole country has been sitting there making fun of these guys and the companies they represent. As if the problem was a simple matter of ousting three executives and making one electric car. It’s not.

These problems stem back to the beginning of Japanese imports in the 1970’s. Executives way back then made some bad choices. They set some bad goals for their companies and they were slow to change (30 years of slow). You can also thank the U.S. government for stepping in and making things harder at every opportunity. And don’t forget the unions who this past week said they didn’t see “any reason to make any concessions on wages or pensions.”

But heck, we need scapegoats so let’s crucify these guys; ‘cuz their rich and too damn old to marry any of our daughters. Let’s do it now, and make it really bloody, please.

I’m sure Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and their congressional squad of nitwits will do a much better job of building cars Americans really want to drive. Just like they took care of our economy.

I can’t wait.

When you saw that cute footage of Brad Sherman (D-California) ask the executives “raise your hand if you flew commercial” you need to consider what was happening there. Sherman KNEW before he asked “are you going to sell your airplanes” that THEY DIDN’T OWN AN AIRPLANE TO SELL. This guy represents California who has been trying to take down the automotive companies for years now, you wouldn’t see him treating a Silicon Valley executive that way.

Sherman is a politician playing politics. He was an attorney before entering politics and he’s been on the government payroll longer than he worked in law. He has a JD degree, not a business degree. He has absolutely no experience running a corporation, a business, a lemonade stand. He’s a politician who is sitting in judgement of 3 people who actually work for a paycheck.

And as I stated in the “Too Poor To Pay Attention” discussion, we’re not talking about flying one exectutive, we’re talking at least 1 executive, 5 staff and a security detail.

Security Detail? These executives have pink slipped thousands of people. They’re well known faces in this area, they live amongst us and shop in the same grocery stores. I see one VP every parent’s night at school. These guys have pissed a hell of a lot of people off in all this restructuring. Commerical airlines can’t insure their security during flights.

Plus I outlined previously that my husband, a mid level engineer has taken these “luxury” flights before. They’re not just for the hoity toity.

One example: the trip was 9 engineers and a whole cargo bay full of parts and testing supplies. If they hadn’t taken this luxury flight, and entire plant would have shut down. The engineering call came in at something like 9:30pm.

When quality control spots flaws, they shut the lines down until the problem is fixed. Then they run test batches on the new part to make sure it works. Sometimes they ship sample defective parts here, in this case the labs went to the problem source.

They CAN’T take commercial flights in these cases because minutes and hours are precious money. It’s impossible to commercially ship cargo loads of heavy metal in the time frame they have. The situation didn’t allow for my husband to drive 1.5 hours to the airport, stand 2 hours in line for airport security, wait for the next commercial flight, fly 3 hours, rent a car, drive an hour to the plant, wait for the shipping truck to bring his equipment… Minutes are serious money in these cases.

I know it sounds easy, get rid of the private flights and save money. But if it was really that easy, it would have happened long ago. People outside of Michigan don’t seem to understand that the easy fix money saving problems were done 5-10 years ago when they cut every perk imaginable. These companies are running leaner than ever before. Believe me, I’ve been part of a Chrysler family during the money bonfire years and during the starvation years.

This isn’t a company throwing money to the wind anymore; it hasn’t been for quite some time.

Just remember, when you’re watching this stuff on the news: Who is asking the gotcha questions? Who is calling these companies dinosaurs? Who is telling these businesses that they’re making the wrong products, the wrong technology, the wrong decisions?

Is it businessmen and engineers who are elbow deep in the relevant technology?

No.

It’s smarmy politicians with a 19% approval rating and a host of green-energy lobby money in their back pocket.

Whew, I’m a little tired after that rant. Time to take a nap.