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WORD COUNT
662
JUNE 10, 2009
IS GM
GOING THE WAY OF THE STREETCAR? – by Donald Kaul
General
Motors filed for bankruptcy last week and the stock market went up 200
points. If that doesn’t make you want to laugh you must have a heart of
stone.
I’m old
enough to remember Charles Wilson, the head of General Motors, being
confirmed as Secretary of Defense in 1953---“Engine Charlie,” they
called him, and later “the man who invented the military-industrial
complex.”
At his
Senate confirmation he said, famously, “I’ve always thought what was
good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”
It was the
vice versa part that became famous and Wilson went down in history as
the man who said what was good for General Motors was good for the
country. He took a lot of flak for that but in truth he was merely
stating the obvious: The fate of the United States and General Motors,
arguably its signature corporation, were inextricably intertwined.
Now,
apparently, those bonds have been severed. General Motors stumbles to
the brink of oblivion and Wall Street doesn’t so much as blink.
The
bankruptcy is aimed, they tell us, at saving GM but it is a harsh
prescription, akin to saving a patient through amputation. One can only
hope it works. GM was a true industrial giant of the 20th Century,
global in its reach. In its heyday, it employed 400,000 people directly
and provided work for hundreds of thousands of others in related
industries.
I grew up
not far from the Cadillac plant on Clark Street in Detroit. Working
there was considered the best factory job in town, if not the
industry---good wages, never a layoff and a product you could be proud
of. And the people who worked there were proud of it.
Now the
Clark Street plant is shuttered and GM stands on a corner with a tin
cup.
There are
those who think it entirely possible that the current scenario is a
result of the Ghost of the Streetcar taking its revenge.
In
conspiracy theory circles, GM is widely credited with having killed off
the streetcar in the United States.
Oh, you
think we still have streetcars? Get real. Portland, Oregon, has
streetcars, everybody else has toy trains to amuse the tourists.
At the
time of the First World War, electric streetcars were the way people got
from here to there in all cities of any size in this country. They were
an efficient, non-polluting form of transportation. Then, in 1922, GM
decided to do something about that. It formed a consortium with Standard
Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Firestone and Mack to buy up the
streetcar companies in major American cities. Transportation systems in
Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Baltimore, Minneapolis and
Los Angeles soon became hostage to the cartel. And one by one they
switched from electric streetcars to buses---GM buses, for the most
part.
Does that
make streetcars the victim of a conspiracy? Well, conspiracy is in the
eye of the beholder. One could say that GM and the oil and tire
companies were merely practicing capitalism at its finest. They were
competing…and winning.
One could
argue that buses had advantages in flexibility and cost that streetcars
couldn’t match and that trolleys were a doomed technology whose demise
GM and its friends merely hastened. By that standard, however, GM’s
troubles now are also an example of capitalism at its finest. It is
competing with the world’s carmakers…and losing. GM may well deserve its
fate but the collateral damage is stunning. No matter how this shakes
out, tens of thousands of jobs will be lost in this country---forever.
Towns and
cities that boasted of unparalleled prosperity 50 years ago will dry up
and blow away, like mining towns when the mines played out. And my
Detroit, the “Arsenal of Democracy,” once a proud city of two million,
could very easily be one of them.
If that
doesn’t make you want to cry, you don’t have a sense of humor.
--
Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent
who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong.
A photo of Don Kaul is available CLICK
HERE
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