Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times
So, let's get this straight.
General Motors (with Standard Oil, now Exxon-Mobil; Firestone; and others) bought and dismantled city public transit systems in the 1930s and 40s.
They have consistently worked to stifle innovation and squash new competitors. When innovation rears its head outside their walls, the big automakers steal it -- or buy it and kill it.
They have fought in Congress for decades against raising federal fuel economy standards -- arguing that it would cost jobs -- much as they fought against seatbelts and airbags and catalytic converters, and just about every consumer, health, safety, or environmental safeguard that would affect their product.
After California passed the extremely rigorous Zero Emissions law in 1990, GM released the EV1 -- an electric car. I drove one. It was extremely cool, and fast, and silent. Like piloting a spaceship, a shuttlecraft from Star Trek.
But GM refused to sell the EV1 -- they leased the car to a test audience. Meanwhile, the automakers partnered with the oil companies, once again. The twin industries sued the State of California to kill the State's groundbreaking law, which mandated zero emissions vehicles in the fleet. And they succeeded in forcing the state to weaken the law. And once they succeeded, they cancelled the leases on all the EV1s, and, literally, crushed them. They sold the patent for the lead acid battery technology to Exxon. And it was never seen or heard from again.
The battery, of course -- the ability to store energy -- is what gives an electric car its range. Today GM is working to release the Volt, an electric hybrid that runs electricity but, for some strange reason, has a backup internal combustion engine that runs on gasoline. The Volt has a range of 40 miles. The EV1 had a range of 60-90 miles.
Instead of working to build fuel-efficient cars, they spent their money on lawyers and politicians. The intent was to kill new regulations intended to stave off catastrophic climate change. And it worked.
The automakers and the oil companies have banded together, for decades, to prevent forward motion on developing clean fuel automotive technology. They seem to have decided, together, that their mutual fate depends on vast supplies of cheap oil. For the automakers, big, powerful, gas-burning cars mean wide profit margins -- they make more money on an SUV than on a sedan. The internal combustion engine is also prone to wear and tear -- those are little explosions that move the car forward, after all. It has many moving parts, which break. Those parts must be replaced. So, too, must the vehicles, themselves, which at this point have roughly a 10-15 year lifetime.
Likely, a thorough investigation would illuminate a historical web of cross-ownership among the executives and directors of Exxon-Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler -- an industrial marriage that entwines the two industries' fortunes together.
In 2000, the oil industry gave $26,739,976 to Republican candidates, and $7,038,306 to Democrats -- a 78%-21% margin. For 2008, their numbers were nearly identical. In 2000, the automakers gave $1,812,641 to Republicans and $808,378 to Democrats. (In 2000, the automakers gave nearly equally to Republicans and Democrats -- likely hoping Republicans would win, but also sensing the direction of the political wind. The numbers might explain the parties' current positions on the Big Three's proposed bailout).
Here, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, are the auto industry's top three recipients of political donations (from PACs and individuals giving over $200), in 2000:
1 Abraham, Spencer (R-MI) Senate $191,300
2 Bush, George W (R) $127,301
3 Dingell, John D (D-MI) House $73,100
Here are the oil and gas industry's top three for the same cycle:
1 Bush, George W (R) $1,958,851
2 Lazio, Rick A (R-NY) House $285,725
3 Abraham, Spencer (R-MI) Senate $258,221
You might recall what happened. George W. Bush, became the President. Spencer Abraham -- the "Congressman from Detroit" -- became Bush's energy secretary. Dingell, until last week, remained the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee in Congress.
Scarcely two years later, Bush led the nation to invade the nation with (at the time) the world's second largest reserves of the one substance that is essential to both the auto and oil industries.
Bush sent representatives from the oil industry to every global climate meeting, to successfully kill global action to stave off catastrophic climate change.
Again, the oil and auto industries banded together to kill public transit in cities; prevent technological innovation; distort energy and climate policy; and drive the nation to an unjust war.
We went to war against Iraq in 1991 to keep Saddam Hussein away from Saudi oil. We left our troops stationed in Saudi Arabia for another decade -- until the Saudi militant Osama Bin Laden sent airplanes into New York and Washington, and the Saudi Royal Family requested that U.S. Troops leave the kingdom.
So it's not that far a stretch to argue that the automakers and oil companies caused the September 11 attacks. Certainly the policies that they pushed through politicians whose favors they curried led to our military interventions on behalf of their products. And the September 11 attacks occurred partly in response to that military intervention.
The automakers spent their money on legislation, rather than innovation.
Allied with the oil companies, they never built low-emissions vehicles. So when gas prices skyrocketed -- partly as a result of the current Iraq war -- Americans stopped buying big, dumb American cars, and started buying hybrids that were being built only by Japanese companies, whose nation has few natural energy resources, and no military, and so must innovate to solve problems of energy supply and demand. They can't go to war for oil, so they build better cars.
The automakers are arguing today that the cause of their woes is the global financial meltdown. But, again, whose politicians pushed the deregulatory climate that led to the meltdown?
As Bill Clinton once said, it's the economy, stupid. But in this case, it's the fuel economy.
The "Big Three" built their industry on a business model that corrupted national politics, prevented critical action on the most urgent problem ever to face the species, and endangered national security in several dimensions.
That destructive business model has failed.
And now they are asking us for $34,000,000,000 to save it.
If we don't give GM, Ford, and Chrysler $34,000,000,000 today, they tell us, it will cost jobs. It will ripple across the economy. It will cause the Next Great Depression.
The Big Three CEOs went to Washington again, and this time, they brought the Union guy, to try to deflate the public antipathy (as if the Union hadn't also fought against higher fuel economy standards -- it's called my paycheck is more important than your planet). They pledged, out of the goodness of their hearts, to work for only $1 a year, each. Which is a pretty good sign that they have so much stock, that a multimillion dollar salary is disposable income, and that whatever income they don't take -- in 2009 -- they'll get later, as "deferred compensation." They're in the profit business after all.
These men, and their forebears, are the direct agents of the crises we face.
Perhaps the taxpayer should rescue the auto industry -- but we should not rescue the villains whose "public outreach" has brought the economy, governance, and the global environment to collapse.
We have a choice.
We can allow the U.S. automakers to fall, hoist upon their own petards. That would be justice.
I don't quite buy their line that America as we know it would spontaneously combust if they were to disappear. It's the same argument we've seen from them for forty years, and it has proven diametrically inaccurate.
Likely, the U.S. automakers' assets would be bought by foreign companies, who would run them better. The only issue, then, is of national security. It's a good idea to have a domestic vehicular manufacturing infrastructure, in case you someday need to build a lot of tanks and jeeps.
The other option is that we can make the rescue of these corrupt corporations, whose priorities run counter to the health, welfare, or national security of the American people, a complete overhaul.
Get rid of the CEOs and the boards whose business plan is a root cause of so many of our travails, from melting icecaps to the Iraq War, to George Bush and his hamhanded stewardship of the economy. Legislate the end of cross-ownership between the auto and oil industries. Harness these industrial behemoths and ride them into a new age, in which Americans don't have to kill people on other continents in order to get to and from work. Make them the leading edge of clean, mean, green technological re-industrialization.
Neil Young has a great solution: use existing factories to build "transition rollers", vehicles complete but for the engines, and sell those rollers to innovators who are building alternative-fuel engines (Young is a champion of self-charging electric vehicles. He's building one now. More on that later.) Of course, that's what electric car innovators were doing in the late 70s and early 80s -- before GM crushed them.
It's clear that the Big Three CEOs don't like either option. Mulally, of Ford, in a News Hour interview, came across as a glib schoolboy, full of false chastenment. "We really learned our lesson! Yes, maam!" He stressed that under a new plan, Ford will build new cars of all types -- small, medium, and large, and include fuel economy in their plans -- but clearly not as a top priority.
ALAN MULALLY: ... So our goal, our strategy, which is -- which is very different, again, very unique, is with Ford, you're going to know exactly what the brand promise is. You're going to be able to get vehicles of small, medium and large size, cars, utilities, and trucks, and know that they're going to be absolutely the best in quality, fuel efficiency, safety, and be the very best value.
...
GWEN IFILL: Were you surprised at the skepticism with which your appeal was greeted two weeks ago when you went to Capitol Hill?
ALAN MULALLY: [grinning] I learned a lot from our conversation in the first set of hearings. And I have a lot of compassion for what the leaders in Congress are dealing with right now.
That doesn't sound like a guy who's ready to put the national interest first. This is Ford, whose response to declining sales a few years back was to release a few handfuls of new models -- which were mostly new body shapes. What happened to Bill Ford, the innovator's great-grandson, who was supposedly prepared a decade ago to lead the company to its green future?
Bob Lutz, the exec at GM who's responsible for the Volt, doesn't even seem to believe it's all that great a car -- it's a throwaway. Just like the EV1, something to make it look like the company is doing something about global warming, which he says is a "total crock of shit."
It's as if they've just been waiting for oil prices to come back down and stay down, a goal of those who planned the Iraq War. But oil is still a finite resource -- there's only so much. And we're running out. Perhaps they're waiting for the ice caps to melt, so we can get at all that oil underneath the ice. Sure billions of people will be displaced, and more will die in resource wars over scarce food and fresh water. But the central defining principle of this great nation -- big, heavy cars that burn a lot of gas -- will be preserved.
The founding fathers will rest easy, in their underwater graves.
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