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The Big Three Automaker CEOs Need A P.R. Firm
It turns out they flew private jets to travel to Washington to plead to Congress for (bailout) funds.
Not smart. No matter what their arguments, this is the kind of symbolism that will hurt their case.
Cartoon by John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri
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5 Responses to “The Big Three Automaker CEOs Need A P.R. Firm”
Couldn't they have shared a plane?
Criticizing CEO's of such large companies for using private jets is just political grandstanding of the worst kind. Their time IS way too valuable to be spent flying commercial aircraft. It was just to make cheap points. Hell, why not ask them to take Greyhound?
1. They could have traveled by commercial air, Chris-WWW. Coach, even. (Is that what Gettelfinger does, anyway, incidentally?)
2. No telling if Gettelfinger was taken aboard any of the jets by any of the CEOs.
3. Well, so much for Romney's campaign promises to Detroit while still seeking the GOP nomination:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19rom…
4. The following is no surprise to anybody but the — ahem, “insular.” (Note reader remarks.)
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2008/11/19/mean-stre…
This sounds an awful lot like Trent Lott whining about having to eat at McDonald's. Someone should properly welcome these folks to the “real world”. If you are going to be asking for a handout, perhaps it would be prudent to leave the luxury behind, at least for a couple of days.
Well, the end result is that the Dems have decided to make the CEOs (and Gettelfinger, we assume, perhaps not wisely) devise a plan that will make the Big Three viable. I've read some comments that say this is like the bailout, floating the issue first, then learning who and what the opposition is, and revising the scheme to buy their favor. I believe this is different, though; the Dems in Congress are trying to pay back the UAW for their votes this year, but not going about it in the same way Paulson tried to rush through a turbo-charged-government-authority bailout that was a sop to his buddies on Wall Street. This was more broad, just a bailout to help auto makers that most resemble Big Government in their nature. (Sorry, but while we are still taxpaying subjects of the federal government, we're not a captive market to Detroit and haven't been for decades.) I'm surprised the Dems don't try other things — if not trying to buy and provide people directly with new vehicles bought from Detroit, why not completely replace the federal government's fleets of vehicles with “newer, more fuel-efficient” vehicle models from the Detroit Three. The Postal Service, the armed forces, Washington bureaucrats and their staffs, departments everywhere giving new cars and trucks to bureaucrats as new perks or performance bonuses — why not something like that?
Oh, well.
Note that change is coming to Congress and it's change that the auto industry in and outside Detroit may not welcome, while as I already said today, environmentalists can gloat, gloat, gloat.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/sto…
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Remarks about the CEOs and Gettelfinger — Chris WWW, the CEOs and Ron G. didn't jet-pool because if they crashed, they all could be lost. Austin Roth — the remarks include defense of the use of corporate jets and scolding of those who decried it, but you have to understand that it is very poor PR and those of us who know the jets make good use of time and money also involve money that the CEOs are “earning” in excess and which brought them to DC for a bailout displaying yet again the arrogance and insularity that has generated a lot of contempt for Detroit by Americans.
[see reader remarks after start of each thread -- interesting, as on this site, The Moderate Voice]
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