“Who among us wants US$50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM?” That’s the question asked by Michael Moore, writing for the Daily Beast, in a remarkably cogent article outlining what to do with General Motors.
In short, Moore recommends killing GM with utmost swiftness while making it a top priority to save the US industrial infrastructure. “And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear,” Moore writes. The solution isn’t a smaller GM; it’s a totally different GM.
Moore’s solution is to rapidly retool the former automaker and its remaining factories into modern manufacturing facilities used to build mass-transit vehicles and alternative-energy infrastructure. It’s already been done once and can certainly be done again: In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ordered GM to stop car production and start making planes, tanks, and other implements of war. GM completely retooled its factories in a matter of months.
Instead of pouring money into GM to build cars, instead use the money to keep the skilled workers primed and ready, “so that they can build the new modes of 21st-century transportation,” Moore writes. Let them start by retooling the existing GM factories.
There’s not only deep justice, but something deeply right about retrofitting GM to manufacture some of the modes of transport it worked so hard to obviate.
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