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Where the dinosaurs roam

About a year ago, on one of those weekly television panel shows where we all try to pretend we know everything, I was railing about the shortsightedness of the U.S. auto industry in cranking out enormous sport utility vehicles that could be seen from space at time of rising gas prices.

It reminded me of the last time absolute disaster devastated Detroit when the car companies got caught with stockpiles of enormous boats with ridiculous tail fins no one wanted, allowing foreign imports to hijack the American market for small, well-built, fuel-efficient cars.

The reason I remember the show is that Republican state Rep. Jeff Stone lectured me like a child. Apparently, I didn’t realize, Stone said, that those big SUVs being produced in Janesville were General Motors’ most profitable vehicles. Apparently, Stone and General Motors didn’t realize that dinosaurs have extremely short life spans.

Last week General Motors announced it was closing the Janesville plant, eliminating about 2,600 jobs there, along with three other plants in Ohio, Ontario and Mexico.

That’s right, plants in Canada and Mexico, too. GM’s overproduction of gas-guzzling behemoths and $3.3 billion in losses the first quarter of this year means not even cheap Mexican labor can get the company into heaven anymore.

“Did GM just wake up yesterday and realize gas prices were high?” Gov. Jim Doyle demanded to know. “Why didn’t they get some lines in here that could withstand these prices?”

Doyle has every right to question GM management. In 2004, Wisconsin agreed to contribute $10 million to a $175 million plant upgrade in Janesville. As part of that agreement, GM promised to keep 3,330 workers at the plant through 2010.

Now, 2010 is the date when all production at the plant is scheduled to cease. The first cuts in July will eliminate 750 jobs—or more. With employment in Janesville around 2,600 at the time of GM’s announcement of the closure, it appears the company already has been violating its agreement with the state.

Politicians should know better than to trust the word of a company such as General Motors. That’s because politics and Big Business have exactly the same problem with “the vision thing.”

Politicians typically look no further ahead than the next election. That is what prevents government from tackling long-term solutions to the most pressing problems we face. Global warming? National health care for everyone? Creating a solid, financial structure to protect Social Security for future generations? Those are all major problems that require long-term solutions.

We can count on a couple of fingers the presidents within memory who had the vision to think long-term. They were President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who created Social Security, and President Lyndon Johnson, who passed Medicare, Medicaid and the Civil Rights Act.

The only people more small-minded than most politicians are the corporate leaders of American business. America’s business leaders don’t even look two to four years ahead to the next election as most politicians do. Business looks exactly three months ahead to the next quarter.

The grossly inflated salaries, bonuses and stock options for top executives all depend on the short-term bottom line. They fatten themselves by cutting costs and increasing profits each quarter.

Corporate executives couldn’t care less about the future. By the time the future gets here, corporate officers figure they will have bailed long ago with their platinum parachutes.

Unless, of course, they’re the present GM management caught red-handed still scattering mammoth dinosaurs across a landscape that can no longer sustain them. The U.S. automakers couldn’t see around those gas-sucking mountains of metal to notice foreign car companies gaining an enormous head start in developing the gas-conserving hybrid technology of the future.

It’s funny how avoiding future disaster is closely tied to having a knowledge of the past.

President Bush wouldn’t have been so eager to get us into an open-ended war if he had attended a few of those Vietnam teach-ins when he was in college.

And U.S. carmakers should have recognized the similarities between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Hummer.

Joel McNally is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is jmcnally@wi.rr.com.