SAVE THE DINOSAURS?

I have to admit that I'm really torn on the whole concept of bailing out the big three auto makers. My heart says to let'm go down, but my head thinks that could be extremely bad news for the country.

Before getting into that, however, a little background ... I am pretty opinionated when I want to be (or even when I don't), but I'm not generally arrogant enough to think I could run a business better than most. For example, I've said many a time that I am not "a finance guy" in advance of expressing to my thoughts on the whole Wall Street situation. Having said that, there are two areas where I -- in all modesty -- feel you could litterly plop me down in the CEO chair and receive far superior results than you're getting from the knuckleheads in charge today. One such area is television: I mean, who cancels Pushing Daisies but gives Knight Rider a full season? But that's a post for a different day.

The main area I'd like to discuss is the automobile industry ... Long before $4 a gallon gas, I was telling anyone who would listen that the first U.S. company to own fuel efficient cars would be the "winner" in this arena. And I distinctly remember some friends calling me naive when I said that -- the day I took over as CEO -- I would demand that all our cars be hybrids. I also remember arguing that these old school thinkers in charge of GM, Ford, and Chrysler need to be replaced with a Steve Jobs type who could innovate and shake things up. "It's just not that easy," my friends would say. Well, who's having the last cry now?

So, my inspiration for writing this post was a recent op-ed piece by Thomas L. Friedman titled How to Fix a Flat. In the column, he starts off by saying the following:

How could these companies be so bad for so long? Clearly the combination of a very un-innovative business culture, visionless management and overly generous labor contracts explains a lot of it. It led to a situation whereby General Motors could make money only by selling big, gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s and trucks. Therefore, instead of focusing on making money by innovating around fuel efficiency, productivity and design, G.M. threw way too much energy into lobbying and maneuvering to protect its gas guzzlers ...

... And it included endless lobbying to block Congress from raising the miles-per-gallon requirements. The result was an industry that became brain dead ... Nothing typified this more than statements like those of Bob Lutz, G.M.’s vice chairman. He has been quoted as saying that hybrids like the Toyota Prius "make no economic sense." And, in February, D Magazine of Dallas quoted him as saying that global warming "is a total crock of [expletive]." ... These are the guys taxpayers are being asked to bail out.

Amen, brother! As one of my friends often points out regarding his newest vehicle: "This is basically the same car I was driving 35 years ago." Can you imagine if the computer industry ran this way? Friedman then goes on to talk about placing conditions on such a bailout and ends this way:

I would add other conditions: Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.

Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.

Hmm, demonstrate a plan for hybrid-electric and then call Steve Jobs? Where have I heard that before? So, yes, I will say without hesitation that I could have single-handedly saved the U.S. auto industry. But my phone never rang :(

Okay, now that I got that "I told you so" moment out of my system, the question still remains of why we should help these horrible people who have spent that last half century doing everything in their power to ruin their own companies. Well, simply put, the loss of jobs that would result from them going down could very well throw us into a depression, and I don't think you can underestimate how many Americans are linked in some way or another to this industry. If unemployment wasn't steadily rising (and the credit markets weren't frozen), then I would say to let them go into bankruptcy. But I'm just not sure we can afford to let that happen in this financial climate.

That being said, I reluctantly agreed with the Wall Street bailout a few months back, and that has pretty much been a dismal failure. It seems that many of the banks -- rather than opening up lines of credit -- just hoarded the cash or used it to pay for bonuses, dividends, and even luxury trips. What's to say that these idiot car executives won't do much of the same?

So, should we bail them out or not? ... I just don't know. Do you?