10ish years ago it was a conscious choice they made, the automakers.
Now?
They are trapped, they can only continue to exist if they have the margins from luxury car prices for basically standard cars.
The other thing that goes along with this is… horrendously shoddy construction and design, they’re literally built to break down, intentionally.
They’re not really automakers.
They’re managers of very troubled tranches of debt obligations who happen to be in charge of auto plants.
We should have let them all die back in 09, but instead we bailed them out and their management became a punch of sycophantic ‘dont rock the boat, we’re experts’ accountants, just like what happened Boeing after McDonnel Douglass bought them out, ousted their middle and upper managers, and wore the Boeing brand name like a skin suit.
They are completely incompetent, but even if they weren’t, nobody could solve the mess they are in now after decades of coddling and kickbacks from the government, collusion with regulators… rotted them from the inside out, smothered themselves, not really caring because C suite gets golden parachutes no matter what happens.
Your last sentence underscores one of my main frustrations with this system of corporate enshittification. No matter what happens, there is no such thing as real life consequences for the c suite. They do as they please and retire comfortably without a care in the world.
And the inescapable logic there means that unless people put their own credible threat of violence on the table, nothing will continue to ever change.
You don’t play a rigged poker game, you play the uh, meta-game, around and above it, otherwise, you always lose.
Capitalism does violence via complex bureaucracy, via obscuring and normalizing the system itself, by making it very complicated to try to draw some kind of moral line as to where responsibility for the acts of which actors in a system should lie.
The reality is that the system itself is violence, and that you are guilty to the degree that you partake in and profit from it.
This is why Luigi Mangione is pretty much seen as the modern day Robin Hood.
10ish years ago it was a conscious choice they made, the automakers.
Now?
They are trapped, they can only continue to exist if they have the margins from luxury car prices for basically standard cars.
The other thing that goes along with this is… horrendously shoddy construction and design, they’re literally built to break down, intentionally.
They’re not really automakers.
They’re managers of very troubled tranches of debt obligations who happen to be in charge of auto plants.
We should have let them all die back in 09, but instead we bailed them out and their management became a punch of sycophantic ‘dont rock the boat, we’re experts’ accountants, just like what happened Boeing after McDonnel Douglass bought them out, ousted their middle and upper managers, and wore the Boeing brand name like a skin suit.
They are completely incompetent, but even if they weren’t, nobody could solve the mess they are in now after decades of coddling and kickbacks from the government, collusion with regulators… rotted them from the inside out, smothered themselves, not really caring because C suite gets golden parachutes no matter what happens.
Your last sentence underscores one of my main frustrations with this system of corporate enshittification. No matter what happens, there is no such thing as real life consequences for the c suite. They do as they please and retire comfortably without a care in the world.
And the inescapable logic there means that unless people put their own credible threat of violence on the table, nothing will continue to ever change.
You don’t play a rigged poker game, you play the uh, meta-game, around and above it, otherwise, you always lose.
Capitalism does violence via complex bureaucracy, via obscuring and normalizing the system itself, by making it very complicated to try to draw some kind of moral line as to where responsibility for the acts of which actors in a system should lie.
The reality is that the system itself is violence, and that you are guilty to the degree that you partake in and profit from it.
This is why Luigi Mangione is pretty much seen as the modern day Robin Hood.