- Bogdan Kipling
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Why is Martha Stewart crowding my mind when I read and think about President Barack Obama dispensing orders to General Motors and Chrysler?
What does Martha Stewart have in common with Detroit? She’s in home craft and design. This successful woman started baking cakes in her kitchen and built her cottage industry into a billion-dollar corporation.
General Motors resembles Martha Stewart in three interesting aspects: As a sacrificial goat to pacify mobs of pack-instinct media, any distraction will do if it sidetracks the public’s attention away from the indecencies the Obama administration is committing in servicing Wall Street bandits while forcing auto makers to beg for gruel.
Martha was vilified and railroaded to prison, but she came back. I don’t want to overwork the simile, but she stands in as a frightening example of politics and hidden motives at their worst. Martha Stewart was handy as a trophy catch for prosecutors hot to hunt down corporate crooks.
Today, General Motors is everybody’s whipping boy in any category you wish to name. But GM committed no crime other than to anger hordes of environmentalists by selling Hummers and lesser-sized SUVs to a public that craved them.
Compared to the exploits of Ken Lay, that’s hardly an indictable offense. Lay, onetime chairman of Enron, was convicted though he admitted only to playing the piano when upstairs his executives rolled investors and plundered Enron’s pension fund.
His comeuppance came before he hatched his greatest swindle: making Enron the international broker for carbon emission trading — the scheme to combat global warming while adding greatly to the riches of the unscrupulous. Lay’s oft-repeated claim that Enron would soon reap tens of billions of dollars as a “green” broker undoubtedly helped it bilk additional billions from unwary investors.
Ironically, the Houston schemer’s idea for trading carbon-credits is virtually identical to the plan now being advanced by the President and his green allies in Congress.
Lay, who was seeking 10 percent of cap-and trade trading action, was considered a full-fledged corporate hero in Green circles — so much so that the Pew Center on Global Climate Change made him a founding member of its Business Environmental Leadership Council. Needless to say, Pew quickly expunged his name after his shameful shenanigans finally came to light.
GM’s troubles are of the clean kind. Its cars are increasingly fuel efficient and generally very good. In fact, a growing number of its models are world-class — though main stream media wisdom here still insists they are not.
As it turns out, not one of the financial wizards Obama recently appointed to his auto industry oversight panel drove a car manufactured by America’s Big Three. Washington’s elites prefer Lexus, Mercedes and BMW over Cadillac and Lincoln — as power parking lots throughout the capital readily attest.
The same politicians like nothing better than somebody or something diverting public attention away from real economic crimes; and blaming Detroit fits like a glove.
But President Obama is granting General Motors 60 days to refit the equivalent of the U.S. Navy’s entire aircraft carrier fleet to a flotilla of electric-powered dinghys. If the world’s still predominant car and truck builder doesn’t deliver on deadline, he will deny additional assistance and throw most of the UAW’s remaining 431,000 workers out on the street.
Meanwhile Wall Street gamblers, AKA as investment bankers, though, have it easy. Their overarching greed and recklessness plunged the world into an unprecedented financial crisis. They show no inclination to mend their ways. They put aside $40-billion – yes, billion – for 2008 bonuses the top bosses and star traders would share. And Mr. Obama continues to give them dollars by the billions gives — without imposing any deadlines.
What can President Obama and his economic advisers be thinking when they coddle buffoonish bankers, but shut down U.S. carmakers.
Maybe they reckon China and India should build all of the 15-odd million cars and trucks Americans buy in every good year. Maybe the people driving General Motors and Chrysler into oblivion from their White House desks see nothing problematic in propelling the already stratospheric trade deficit right into orbit.
Who knows? In this Martha Stewart-like set up, all things are imaginable.
Bogdan Kipling is a veteran Canadian journalist in Washington, D.C., who has covered the auto industry as a labor reporter on both sides of the border for more than five decades. 
