While I know we’re talking about a lot of lives laid waste here, I can’t offer too much comment about Ford’s announcement that they’re turning another 10,000 employees into job-force Soylent Green, beyond a smug yet grim chuckle.
With gas prices dropping — yet guaranteed to rise once more, and Americans at last beginning to realize that SUVs are shit — it’s hardly surprising that Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Chevrolet are feeling the effects of monumentally piss-poor business decisions.
Ford’s slashing of 10,000 white collar jobs and offers of buyout for all of its 75,000 employees are just the latest moves of retreat that are the direct result of what happens when runaway captialism joins forces with marketing.
Just because “the people” want something does not mean they should get it. (I know that sounds elitist, but only because I’m indisputably correct.)
Lincoln Masturbators, Ford Exploders, Chevy Avalanches* and Canyoneros are as doomed as the dinosaurs on which they run. These unforgivably selfish, short-sighted disasters on wheels are pretty much directly responsible for the failures of their manufacturers — or more accurately, the failures of their manufacturers to show due diligence or even a scrap of wisdom are responsible for their impending collapse.
The selfishness and greed of the typical American SUV owner, of course, is a factor here as well. “I’m safer!” bleat some — sure, you’re safer; fuck everyone else … “I get a better view of the road!” squeak others — and in the SUV arms race the people stuck behind you just don’t matter, I guess … “Hey, you never know, I might go offroad sometime” — yeah. Right.
If you really want to make the roads safer, the obvious solution is to mount an eight-inch steel spike in the middle of every vehicle’s steering wheel. That, or perhaps consider scaling down the size of vehicles. It doesn’t take a physics major to understand that a 7,000 pound vehicle is always going to do more damage in a collision than a 3,000 pound one.
So in one respect I think the big automakers are reaping what they’ve sown — the problem, of course, is that in the process, they’ve fucked the American economy. Again.
How about showing a little self-restraint in the future? Or better still, investing in something that’s guaranteed to increase safety on the roads while improving quality of life and substantially reducing your fuel costs?
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* I didn’t have to make up a joke name for that one.
