Credit crunch

Here’s the scariest thing about the credit crunch. We don’t know whom to credit anymore. In boardrooms and showrooms all over America all you see are incompetence, failure and overpaid losers. Entire industries are about to go away, to China, to Japan, to nowhere, and the best the CEO’s of America can do is beg. Business by the incompetent, of the incompetent and for the incompetent is killing us.

We’ve got the top job covered. I’m pretty sure we hired a competent guy for that. If anybody can pull off the miracle of making Washington work, Obama can.

But the rot in New York and now Detroit is devastating, and we don’t get to fire those idiots, like we did our nation’s First Idiot. It scares me to death.

I don’t know how you take an industry that thrived for a century, whose brands were once beloved, coveted and iconic as a GTO’s split grille, and drive it straight into the ground, just because gas went up for a couple of quarters. I don’t know how you plow through a hundred years worth of profits in two. Call me naïve, but I actually thought it wasn’t possible to screw up that bad.

This isn’t Amalgamated Buggy Whip we’re talking about. Cars haven’t gone away, they’re still as necessary as ever. It’s not even an American crisis, the Toyota plants in the USA will survive just fine. It’s a management crisis of what we still call The Big Three, for no good reason.

General Motors gone? Ford history? Chrysler, Chevy, Caddy disappeared? Who did that? Is it possible to be that stupid by accident? Or were the Big Three killed on purpose? Maybe there was a hostile takeover by the Republican Guard when we weren’t looking.

And, of course I mean the Iranian Republican Guard, not the GOP Republican guard. Not that there’s all that much difference.

Sorry, that was a cheap shot, but I’m feeling real cheap these days. Great Depressions will do that to you. And this one is looking greater every day.

Seriously, where is the competence? Wall Street firms that survived two world wars and the first depression killed dead in six months. Auto companies that put the world on wheels, now reduced to begging for bailouts, threatening to go bust and take the entire American economy with them.

I want to help, but I don’t consider Detroit’s current management credit worthy. It’s not just money they’re fresh out of, it’s ideas, it’s smarts, it’s competence. That’s the real credit crunch.

I’m scared that 25 billion won’t do it. Detroit has blown through several times that much in the past few years. There is no end to their failures. These guys could screw up a wet dream.

Hell, these guys did screw up a wet dream. Most of us had our first taste of sweet, forbidden sex in their products. I mean, they used to call it parking. You didn’t walk to Lover’s Lane, you drove. In daddy’s car. And it wasn’t a Subaru.

So, what’s the solution? I don’t know. If I did I’d be sending off my resume right now. But I have one idea.

From what I hear, Detroit is well-endowed with homeless people. That is a class of folks who have loads of experience in Making Do With Less. Surely there is among them a genius of thrift, an Edison of improvisation, a Rockefeller of the Streets.

Find him. Or her. Job one for the auto companies for the next few years will be begging. Why not hire a professional?

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