What's Good for General Bullmoose
As I watch the seemingly endless debate about the fate of The Big Three in the halls of government and in the media, a phrase from the past haunts me… What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the Country. This line is from Al Capp’s “L’il Abner” cartoon strip, which was famous in the fifties…about the same time General Motors was the most powerful corporation on earth. General Bullmoose is General Motors, and in many ways General Bullmoose appears to be an archetype of the USA today. The General is on the ropes and gasping for breath…hoping to ward off the next possibly fatal blow. How did it come to this? Where do we go from here?
If congress is correct, a radical re-tooling of this wheezing giant is necessary to save it. Many say that it is the legacy costs that are sinking the ship…i.e. health care costs and pensions. Many say it is the fact that they are not producing the cars that the world wants right now, but are still building gas-guzzlers that belong to a by-gone era.
Well if those things are true…shouldn’t we as a nation be taking a hard look in the mirror too? We are rushing headlong toward the same kind of government that appears to be sinking GM. We are staring a legacy cost of Social Security and Medicare in the face that most economists say will destroy us when the baby boomers retire. We have outsourced many segments of our manufacturing industry to others leaving us weak. We have grown fat as a people…both literally and figuratively. We cry out for some form of Socialized Medical Care that will further overburden the system. We have used our houses as a vehicle to financial well-being for decades…flipping and speculating on homes as if they were stocks or bonds. Now a burst housing bubble has become the catalyst for a financial meltdown.
The leaders of the big three are scorned for lack of vision and poor management of these huge beaucracies. Isn’t this equally true of our elected officials…once they are in office, it is nearly impossible to get them out (even if they are guilty of crimes in many cases). One wonders if any of the current crop have the interests of our nation at heart, or are merely looking toward the next election. Can General Bullmoose change if we bail him out? Can America rise to meet this financial challenge…to pay this overdue bill, which has come in the mail? Let’s see how the Big Three make out in the days ahead.