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| Yes | 32% | 18 votes | Total: 56 votes | |
| No | 68% | 38 votes |
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Add to FavoritesYes, I think Chrysler can survive.
The federal government's role in the company's reorganization will likely be short lived. I really don't think Washington wants to be in the automobile business.
The roles the union and Fiat will play are still being defined, but I am confident Chrysler will reemerge, perhaps not as a big player as it once was in the US auto industry but still a viable one.
But I would like to approach this whole debate from another angle.
I've watched as both the Congress and the Obama administration have belittled the auto industry executives for not building the kinds of cars American consumers want and need.
As I've watched this exercise in moral outrage and indignation being directed at the car manufacturers unfold, I want to press the pause button on the TV and ask members of Congress and the president himself, "Ah, excuse me. Where have you been?"
From the mid 1980's, until last year when gas spiked to almost four bucks a gallon, the US auto industry was building the vehicles Americans craved. Known by the acronym SUV, these vehicles were cleverly called "Sport Utility Vehicles".
My late octogenerian mother, ever the provocateur, used to say that they really ought to be called "Status Utility Vehicles" and that they, like Corvettes in the 1950's, were deigned specifically for men who were insecure about the size of a certain body part.
All that aside, they flew off the lots. GM, Ford, and Chrysler's Jeep division were raking in money hand over fist.
Americans, especially the faux green, nouveau riche, bourgeois bohemians who populate towns like Newburyport, Andover, and North Andover, couldn't. get enough of vehicles with names like Denali, Yukon, Expedition, and Grand Cherokee.
It mattered little that such vehicles were terribly wasteful and largely unnecessary when one figures we drive on some of the best maintained roads in the entire world.
It didn't matter because such vehicles were an integral part of the way so many nouveau riche, faux green, bourgeois bohemians in towns like Newburyport, Andover, and No. Andover perceived themselves.
It was all about image.
I remember one summer two or three years ago when I was living and working in Wellfleet on the Cape.
Gas prices had spiked to almost three dollars a gallon. A car dealer on the Cape interviewed in the Cape Cod Times reported sales of Status Utility Vehicles going through the floor. That interview occurred in July, at the height of peak summer gas prices.
In October, when that same dealer was interviewed again and gas prices had fallen back into the $1.90 to $2.00 a gallon range, he was able to report the sales of Status Utility Vehicles had rebounded nicely.
People had not learned any lessons. As soon as gas prices dropped, they went back to their profligate habits.
Now, to be sure, US auto manufacturers were short sighted, and perhaps even negligent, in their continued production of gas guzzling Status Utility Vehicles, especially when one figures they, more than the average American, had to be fully aware of the precarious position America's love for such tanks put the nation in - but they were also only responding to a demand, as stupid and selfish as it may have been, that came directly from the American consumer.
I am no apologist for the CEO's of America's auto industry. But they are being done a grave disservice by self serving politicians willing to scape goat them while letting the American people off the hook for the role they played in the economic and environmental mess in which the auto industry and country now find themselves in.
Learn more about this author, Michael Cook.
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No
The devil's own these days, ahead of those horrible UNIONS, is the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Link them together and up from the netherworld appear the ultimate villain, the archetypical, legendary prince of darkness, the embodiment of the supreme, ultra-liberal-left-w ing elite and his acolytes, the drive-by-media. So, NO! Chrysler will not survive under control of its unions and the federal government.
Workers, the 'by the sweat of their brow' kind, along with the thinkers among them whose tinkering and inventing made this country great, have always been troublemakers, too threatening with their demands, way beyond reasonable control. Few among those laborers who moved up from the underclass working in factories during World War II knew anything about patents or workers' rights or privileges or fair wages and pensions. They were left to tinker and then given small severance pays if lucky or a memento fob for a pocket watch and a handshake from a journeymen's supervisor, if anything at all, before being shown the door. It did not matter that management and private investors had profited from their workers' substantial contributions to the technical advancement of the company or to the social and financial advancement of owners or wealthy shareholders.
Union men and women and their unions have been the grit in the gears of industry and the ephemeral nightmarish bugaboos of owners, managers and bosses over generations. Union men and women have paid and continue to pay dearly for their desire to up-grade themselves and their families, to see their children through school and college, to see them enter professional jobs in medicine, law, education, business. That once-upon-a-time era lasted just a couple of generations. Those workers grew the middle and professional classes. They grew the companies. They grew the United States of America.
They created the genius of the military industrial complex. They helped place men on the moon, not because they worked on those projects themselves necessarily, but because they grew the children who went to school and then to college and then to those professions that helped make this country great. Ask yourself, what does wealth management grow? More wealth, much of it created without mercy.
Clearly, it is the giants of commerce who have always bedeviled workers and their unions in the name of financial gain. Just follow the course of textiles in this country. There are few plants left. WestPoint Home in Biddeford ME closed last month. The manager there now travels to China. 159 worker, on the other hand, are added to the list of "the jobless. A Biddeford worker invented the blanket they manufactured.
Manufacturing went overseas to increase a company's margin of profit. Overseas had and still has cheap labor with no meddlesome unions. Overseas also has raw materials with which to manufacture all that which used to be Made in America under the Union Label. Today, it is a luxury to find a well-made garment not made in China but in Bangladesh! [No unions there either - none expected in the near future.]
Today's news, under the magnifying glass, focuses on the Obama administration's unflattering view of corporate investors. According to one report, the Obama administration is accusing those entities that hold first class big bonds of being selfish. First class bond holders scream, 'Holy Moly!' The feds want to break our bond contract with Chrysler. The rest of the story is that the feds are cozying up to unions.
The outcome of the bankruptcy proceedings involving Chrysler is anybody's guess at this time. Chrysler could be sold to another company. Chrysler could redevelop. Chrysler could close. From the time imports decided to open plants in this country to manufacture their brands, the death knell for unions began sounding just a little louder. Union workers traded their badges for steady, full-time non-union jobs. Union organizers, while still practicing their witchcraft, were on the outs. Shop stewards and reps were put out to pasture. It's the end of the millennium for the brotherhood and for Chrysler. Too bad.
Learn more about this author, Gerard Coulombe.
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