Okay, here’s an opportunity to put your new creative thinking skills to work. Go to www.change.gov and send your ideas for improving the economy to President-elect Obama and Vice-president elect Biden. See what I wrote below. Send me a comment and let me know how you would change or improve mine, or tell me like it like it is. Don’t worry. I have thick skin and practice the Four Agreements: Never take it personally.
***** The Auto Industry and Innovation*****
I have a suggestion and an opinion for the transition team. I have been a small business owner here in Texas for the past 10 years. We all work very hard to make a living. We have a small business fund here that has dried up, but the Big Business fund in TX has about $437 million in it.
We already bailed the Auto Industry out in the past. Bailouts do not fit the Capitalist model. We encourage weakness by bailing them out, and they don’t do anything to help themselves. Corporate greed and corruption are rampant in Big Auto.
Over 97 percent of all businesses in America are small businesses. We are the innovators. We ARE change.
I recommend setting up a new cabinet position for Innovation. LIke Einstein said, “You can’t use the same level of thinking to solve the problems that created them in the first place.”
One of the first priorities of the new Cabinet member should be to set up grants to small auto manufacturers to build fuel efficient and hybrid cars. It will take a small company without bureaucracy much less than the 20 years the Big Guys anticipate to get cars out there. Let the people being laid off at the Big 3 come to work for the little guys for NON Union wages. Unions had a place decades ago. They don’t any more. (Talk about graft and corruption.)
If the employees don’t want to take the Non-Union jobs, it’s not the Administration’s fault. You offered them an alternative.
I’ve talked to many, many small business owners here. We don’t want to see the employees laid off, but we DON’T want Bailouts. Why should our hard earned money go to pay some rich guy who is living beyond his means? Why should someone get a bonus because his company is failing? They don’t want Government interference, so stay out of their business, and let them die a natural death like they should have.
I took a course called Competitive Strategy in Graduate School. This is part of the natural cycle of business. Cars that run on fossil fuel are obsolete. If we artificially keep a dying Industry alive, we will suffer even more serious repercussions.
Mr. Obama impresses me (and trust me I haven’t been impressed by a politician in a long time) as a deep thinker. Please make sure he sees this idea.
*****Send your thoughts to www.change.gov