Up & away

Oh, mymymy…

Just when you thought things couldn’t get more drenched in irony in the auto industry, come to find out that the CEOs of GM, Ford & Chrysler actually had the unmitigated gall to fly out to DC on their begging trip…in corporate jets.

& when I say jets-plural, I mean each fat cat in his own jet. They couldn’t even jet-pool, for God’s sake.

Yes, children, they actually were whining to Congress about how their companies won’t survive unless we-the-people fork over another $25B in the next couple of weeks, while their pilots were keeping the G4s ready for them to get out of town.

The generally-accepted cost of running one of these jets on a trip such as Detroit-DC-Detroit is $20K. As opposed to $576 for coach & $1674 first class round trip.

What gets me is the degree of arrogance these jerks-in-bespoke-suits display in doing this. Did they think no one would notice their mode of transportation? Or that no one would think it out of bounds?

I said earlier that these guys have no shame. Well, at this point they’ve gone three exits down the pike beyond the no shame exit.

Did they not have any advisors to say, “Um, Rick—you know, for this particular trip, with this particular purpose, what say you fly Northwest first class? Just this once?”

Evidently not.

But all the more reason to contact your representatives & tell them in simplistic terms that Detroit should just get itself out of its self-induced mess. & they can start with the money-for-old-rope comp packages these CEOs have been getting: Mulally of Ford, $21.6M in 2007; Waggoner of GM, $15.7M; Nardelli of Chrysler has an undisclosed package, but piously said he’d be willing to follow Lee Iacocca’s lead in taking $1/year salary—the LAST time Chrysler needed bailing out . (He’s also the one who got $210 in severance from Home Depot after driving that company into the ground.)

BTW, all of these guys have seen their compensation increased in the double-digits in the past year despite the obvious failures their management has engendered in their respective corporations.

None of the three said he’d be willing to step down as condition of their companies receiving the bailout they say they desperately need. They had the nerve to say their leadership is needed, & Mulally compounded this by adding that if any stipulation were made on restricting executive compensation, it might cause the company to “lose executives & be unable to attract top talent.”

Well, losing THESE execs wouldn’t be the downside of this crisis. & there are plenty of senior-level managers swirling around following the mass slaughter in the financial industry; they might not be quite so prissy about compensation for the next couple of years.

& while we’re on the subject of capitalism, how about this for private enterprise managing without government intervention: Let the damned oil companies bail out the Gang of Three. They’ve been in cahoots for decades—let Exxon-Mobil use some of their obscene windfall profits from the past nine months to invest in Detroit.

& a plague o’ both their fleets of private jets.