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THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - April 9, 2010
Intersection for a Disaster
by George Will
WASHINGTON - The times truly are out of joint when the most
important IPO -- initial public offering -- of 2010 could
come from what was American capitalism's iconic corpora-
tion for most of its 102 years. Andrew Bary, writing in
Barron's, says General Motors "may go public in the second
half of this year, and its stock market value could top
$50 billion, more than Ford's $40 billion."
This is justice under today's state capitalism: Ford took
on $23.6 billion in debt to avoid becoming dependent on
Washington, whereas GM shed much of its debt by becoming
dependent. Washington, Bary explains, turned most of its
$50 billion loan to GM into 60.8 percent ownership, the
United Auto Workers got 17.5 percent for forgoing a $20
billion health care claim against the company, and
Canada's government got an 11.7 percent stake for $9
billion.
Detroit's long drive down the crumbling road to disaster
is chronicled in "Crash Course" by Paul Ingrassia, formerly
of The Wall Street Journal. It is a story of the hubris of
a corporate oligopoly and the myopia of a union monopoly.
When Henry Ford said people could have his cars in any
color they wanted as long as it was black, the actual name
of the color was, portentously, "Japan black enamel." But
in 1927, GM hired Harley Earl, whose father designed
custom cars for Hollywood stars, to head its Art and Color
Section, a harbinger of Detroit's emphasis on cars as
"visual entertainment" -- Earl's phrase -- rather than on
the technological improvements Japanese automakers would
come to emphasize.
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Enchanted by stabilizer fins on World War II P-38 fighter
planes, Earl put tail fins on 1948 Cadillacs. By 1959 the
fins were almost as high as the car's roof. The chrome
protrusions Earl put on Cadillacs' front bumpers were at
first supposed to project power by resembling artillery
shells. Soon, Ingrassia writes, they were nicknamed
"dagmars" after the breasts of a television starlet.
But in 1959, an ad showing a Volkswagen Beetle in front of
a suburban home asked, "What year car do the Jones drive?"
This, Ingrassia says, "took direct aim at annual styling
changes, which lay at the very heart of Detroit's business
model."
When Lee Iacocca ran Chrysler, it spent $2 million on gold-
plated faucets and other trimmings on the company's suite
at the Waldorf. Even in the late 1980s, GM had segregation
by rank in the "salaried men's rest room" and the "hourly
men's rest room." Still, the UAW hourly workers flourished.
In 1970, a 67-day strike against GM won, Ingrassia reports,
"the company's 400,000 hourly workers (triple what the
Big Three's combined total would be 40 years later) a 30
percent wage hike over the next three years." Soon there-
after, workers could retire at any age with a full pension
after 30 years on the job. "If the retiree lived to be 79
or older," Ingrassia writes, "he or she would spend more
years drawing a full pension than actually working."
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Those still working did so under rules so complex that the
table of contents of the contract was almost 20 pages long.
Other autoworkers were unenthralled by such UAW triumphs:
In 1986, the UAW abandoned its attempt to unionize Honda's
Marysville, Ohio, plant by secret ballot plebiscite. It
did not have the votes. Today, organized labor wants "card
check" organizing so it can dispense with secret ballots.
By the turn of this century, GM was being kept afloat by
its financing arm, GMAC, which was deeply into subprime
mortgages. Ingrassia dryly notes: "Some GM dealers in
Southern California were taken aback when customers
bristled at being asked to fill out a GMAC credit report
for a car loan. They hadn't needed a detailed credit
report to get a mortgage from GMAC on their new home."
Studebaker shut down in 1966, and American Motors was
absorbed by Chrysler in 1987. But compassionate government
has stopped the Darwinian culling of the herd.
When Washington bailed out Chrysler in the late 1970s, Alan
Greenspan, then a Wall Street consultant, said the danger
was not that the rescue would fail but that it would work,
thereby whetting Washington's appetite for interventions.
The bailout "worked" in that the government made money from
it and Chrysler survived to be rescued 30 years later by
an administration that, as a wit has said, can imagine
the world without the internal combustion engine but not
without Chrysler.
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