Dear American People: Please Excuse General Motors for Driving its Company into the Ground

Simply put: General Motors and Congress are in a bit of a political pickle. And by pickle I don’t mean the classic Vlasic Pickle, which was faced with the prospect of bankruptcy in 2001 until it was bought out by Heinz, Inc., rather the pickles you find glued with ketchup to the bathroom walls in McDonalds.

On the verge of bankruptcy, General Motors, along with the other two heads of the three-headed monster Ford and Chrysler, has thrown itself on the congressional floors, begging for mercy, forgiveness and a multi-billion dollar bailout --- or corporate subsidy? Your call, dear taxpayer:

Heads: Bridge loan

Tails: Corporate welfare*

*Current odds-on favorite in Vegas

As GM executives continue to beg Congress, dispensing empty but-this-time-will-be-different promises, it is hard for me to sympathize for GM’s man-made plight. Or in GM’s case, what they did make but did not put into mass production: electric cars.

After watching the documentary film “Who Killed the Electric Car?” last year, I couldn’t help but think that GM’s alleged role in sabotaging efforts to launch and market the line of EV1 electric cars would come back to bite them in their Hummers.

However, the film concludes that GM did not act alone in the assassination of the EV1. The documentary found all of the following guilty in helping bring down the electric car: consumers, oil companies, car companies, the California Air Resources Board, hydrogen fuel cell and the government – namely our beloved Congress, which is now taking the holier-than-thou pedestal because it holds the taxpayers’ purse-strings.

Who Killed the Electric Car?: Round up the Usual Suspects



In the meantime, GM is doing everything in its limited power to improve its public image including leaving their corporate jets double-parked at home and promising to forgo executive salaries. But they have yet to take full responsibility for their role in driving the company six feet under…

Stop the Press: GM took out a full-page advertisement out in Automotive News Monday, not only confessing to its blunders but apologizing to the American people as well?

Say it isn’t so, Taxpayer.

A letter entitled “GM's Commitment to the American People,” appeared in the ad and explains why GM needs $18 million and how it plans to turn the company around.

"While we're still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you," GM said in the magazine ad. "At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster. We have proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pick-up trucks and SUVs. And, we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today's globally competitive industry."

Well, that should take care of everything. I’m sold. I wonder how much that full-paged apology cost them?

However, some lawmakers, including Sen. Chuck Grassley, R – Iowa, want the Wall Street executives to serve up some Japanese-style apologies to the American people.

“I am talking about scenes I've seen on television where in belly-up corporations the CEOs go before the board of directors, before the public, before the stockholders and bow deeply and apologize for their mismanagement,” he said in a statement in October. “Something like that happening among Wall Street executives would go a long way toward satisfying my constituents and many Americans that help might be needed and would more gracefully be given by the taxpayers of this county.”

I say take it one step further and turn their public apologies into a marketable game show, say a season of “The Running Executive” (an offshoot of Stephen King’s novel “The Running Man”). All of the executives from the Big-3 will be unleashed in D.C., which is filled with anyone who has lost their job from these companies and the object is to make it to Capitol Hill – alive. The first one to make it alive will receive the lions’ share of the profit generated from the television show.

However, we at Political Fallout –- a no-profit organization – are a little more civilized than this. That said, we would like to resurrect “Please Excuse the Excuses: The War on Excuses”:

Dear American People,

Please excuse the executives at General Motors for, among many other unfortunate mishaps, driving our automobile company into the ground. We really did have your best intention in mind when we killed the electric car, the EV1, and put all of the shareholders eggs in the Hummer basket. At the time, we had hoped the visibility of the military Humvees in Iraq would increase the demand for our civilian version back home.

We thought the Hummer would be synonymous with the American Dream, wherein every child would grow up wanting to be behind the wheel of a vehicle the size of a mobile home. Besides, our constituents, the United States Congress, assured us the war in Iraq would end quickly, thus freeing up the vast oil reserves bubbling beneath the Iraqi soil and yearning to feed a customized Hummer.

Blessed with hindsight and a new awareness that the intelligence procured by our marketing division was faulty, we now realize the EV1 could have been the wave of the future. Our minds must have been muddled, which is only natural given the quickening of global warming back in the day. Boy, that came out of left field, huh?

We admit that we are not perfect, nor are our line of automobiles, which is why most Americans prefer to buy foreign cars, but we do want to somehow make it up to you.

If you just give us another chance, say to the tune of $18 billion for starters, we promise to turn our company around and close the gap on our foreign competitors.

This letter was not easy for us to write, that is why we paid an entry-level employee in our public relations department to do it -- who by the way will be unemployed if we don’t get the bailout.

Finally, please don’t let Congress know we sent you this letter. We have already had to do a lot of groveling in front of these folks, not to mention we had to carpool in a hybrid all the way to D.C. as part of our penance for being so greedy and ungrateful.

Sincerely (we really do mean it this time),

General Motors Executives

Edwards’ Campaign Launches Pre-emptive Excuse Strikes

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?

With only five days remaining until the FEC’s QRF-Day (that’s Quarterly Report Filing Day for those of you who don't have the campaign finance lingo "down"), it appears the John Edwards campaign is concerned about its war-chest intake. The Edwards’ campaign set a $9 million goal for this quarter, but as of yesterday, they’re $2 million shy of their mark.

To help soften the blow on QRF-Day, the Edwards campaign has been sending out messages that blame the Washington establishment and their media pawns (including the New York Times) for John’s fund-raising woes.

Strike 1: "Obscene Money Game or Policies that Matter?" (e-mail message received on Jun. 23 from Joe Trippi, the Edwards' Campaign)

But while thousands of people are building up this campaign, the Washington establishment is trying to write us out of the race. And their reason? They say it's MONEY - they don't think we are raising an obscene enough amount. But the truth is, they don't want people to hear what John Edwards is saying, because it will mean the end of big money's stranglehold over our government.

Strike 2: "Haircuts and Hatchet Jobs" (e-mail message received on Jun. 25 from Jonathan Prince, John Edwards' Deputy Campaign Manager)

The whole Washington establishment wants our campaign to go away, because they know that John Edwards means the end to business as usual. The Washington lobbyists and PACs don't want us to win because John is the only candidate who has never taken money from them. The political mercenaries and the chattering class don't want us to win because they can't imagine a president who doesn't play by their rules. And you can bet that the big corporate interests—from the insurance companies to the drug companies to the oil companies—don't want us to win because John has been taking on special interests his entire life. So they attack him—personally.

It's classic—they don't want the American people to hear the message, so they attack the messenger. They call him a hypocrite because he came from nothing, built a fortune while standing up for regular people during some of their toughest times, and—heaven forbid!—he has the nerve to remember where he came from and still care passionately about guaranteeing every family the opportunities he had to get ahead.

Strike 3: "The Right Wing's Worse Nightmare" (e-mail message received on Jun. 26 from Joe Trippi, the Edwards' Campaign)

Yesterday, Jonathan told you that the folks who benefit from the status quo are attacking John personally because they don't want the country to hear his message. And you know what happened when we called them out? The attacks started pouring in. That same day, the Ann Coulter-wannabe Michelle Malkin blasted John on her blog. Fox News has been bashing him around the clock. And Coulter herself said, "if I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."

Meanwhile, these pre-emptive excuse strikes have been unleashed with simultaneous pleas for more money embedded in them.

“We have 7 days to reach $9 million and every dollar counts. Please give what you can.”

“Please do what you can today to help take the next bold step for real change.”

“It's up to all of us to do our part. I (Edwards’ Campaign Manager Jonathan Prince) just gave $100—can you please give whatever you can afford today?”

In response to the Edwards’ Campaign “please give us” letters, it looks like I have no other option but to exacerbate the perpetual “War on Excuses” with another installment of “Please Excuse the Excuses: A Series of Excuse Letters”

Dear Friends/Contributors,

Please excuse John for not quite living up to the money expectations of the other candidates this quarter. He’s been under a lot of pressure at home, and to be quite frank with you, the Washington establishment has not made life easy for John. Our John has always shied away from these folks, and now they’ve taken it upon themselves to pick on him because he won’t play their D.C. games. This is really hard for us to believe. John has always received high marks for playing well with others, and we can’t understand why they would single John out for attacks. This political bullying needs to stop, for it’s taking a serious toll on John’s ability to raise more money.

As you well know, John grew up the son of a mill worker and has always had the ability to surpass financial expectations, but the Washington establishment and the media are dampening John’s spirits. Just last night, when John and Elizabeth were on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, you could see that John wasn’t his usual self. While talking to Leno, his million-dollar smile felt more like a $100,000-smile at best. Not to mention, he’s had to resort to humor as a coping mechanism to help mask the pain inflected upon him by the Washington establishment-controlled media. We’re not sure how many more haircut jokes John can tell before he simply cracks.

It’s in this spirit that we’re writing to you. We hope you can help save John from cracking under pressure from these attacks. $2 million dollars should suffice to help seal the cracks, for now anyway. Please send us anything and everything you can spare to help us fight these big bullies. Don’t worry, if you have to pawn some things now, it will be well worth it when John takes the White House back and sticks up for people like you. So we’re asking you, for John’s sake, to send us whatever you can. Pretty, pretty, please with sugar on top…

Sincerely,
Concerned Parents
Joe Trippi and
Jonathan Prince

Originally posted on "Iowa Independent"