Spero Consulting

Why only $25 Bil­lion for the auto-​makers? Why not $30 Bil­lion more? That would be about bil­lion per year for each year since the first energy cri­sis on top of the pre­vi­ous loan “guarantees.”

Does the reader real­ize that at least some of those GM and Ford’s retirees hadn’t begun to work for the “Big Three” when the for­eign man­u­fac­tur­ers started their rise: not their dom­i­nance, but their RISE engi­neer­ing and mar­ket­ing supremacy.

Umm, couldn’t we tax­pay­ers start a new, effi­cient car com­pany for a lot less – even a “green” one? So, exactly who or what are we sub­si­diz­ing? Oh, inef­fi­cient man­age­ment and intran­si­gent unions that did not have the dis­ci­pline to change in over thirty years!

Thirty years! Through X-​cars and J-​cars and Jaguar and Saab and Sat­urn and Lee Iac­coca and bail-​outs and tax-​breaks and robots and every other ill-​conceived ven­ture that per­mit­ted bad cost accoun­tants to rule good engi­neers and man­age­ment to avoid man­ag­ing its biggest cost. Shame on them all.

Did none of those par­ties ever visit Pitts­burgh or Cleve­land or Buf­falo any time after 1980 to see what the same com­bi­na­tion inep­ti­tude and greed did to the domes­tic steel industry? 

Nowa­days, they call the enor­mous, empty lots along the rivers “brown­fields.” Grow­ing up, we never real­ized the Pitts­burgh had flood plains until the mills were all gone and with them about 600,000 people.

For you pro­fes­sional foot­ball fans, those mem­bers of the local dias­pora are the ones you see flood­ing the sta­di­ums at all of the Steel­ers’ away games. (Some of the duller announc­ers may be amazed that it is not a trav­el­ing car­a­van of yinz­ers – like dead-​heads – who travel from city-​to-​city from game-​to-​game. The air­lines only wish.)