The International Writers Magazine: Reality Check USA

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Beggars and Choosers • James Campion Hard Promises On The Road To Automotive Welfare History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today. - Henry Ford  Interview in Chicago Tribune May 25th 1916

Henry Ford's bastard children are currently suspended in the slow ascent of Oliver Twist's empty gruel plate. Attached as if by a pulsing umbilical cord is the world economy, jobs for thousands of tax paying consumers, several and varied satellite industries from media, transportation, culinary, service, litigious, and big labor, not to mention the entirety of the technological engineering fleet of American Century sad sacks looking for a peculiar method to prop up our past and sell it as progress. The American Auto Industry is weeks from going belly up in an already eroding economic slog, and with the federal government in transition, over half the states already bankrupt, and what is left of Wall Street becoming a drooling Dali rendering, there is not much choice but to turn to us, the American Tax Payer.

    The People's Republic Of America to the rescue!

    These are curious days and we are crazy with empathy now that the Lefty is on his way to the White House to put right all the crimes of Captain Shoo-In, who is now officially the only sitting president of these United States to be completely ostracized from the reconstruction of his own shit's nest.

    Yes, Virginia, we're going to keep America strong in the global economy, secure its national defense, and restore order to our fiscal sovereignty, but not without conditions. Those who sit idly by and rail against the demise of the free market system with the manufacturing hub of this economy on its last legs whistle past several graveyards. These are the same sub-mentals who would pitch the fit of all fits if the president allowed our national defense to go under. However, only suckers hand over blank checks to doomed business templates. If it means raping and pillaging this broken monstrosity called the American Auto Industry, then so be it.

    Our first act as The Controlling Interest begins with the sacking of the entire management teams at Ford, GM, and Chrysler for fucking the workers and screwing consumers with their half-assed, greedy, mendacious falderal masquerading for countless decades as good, old-fashioned American ingenuity. These dunderheads must suffer banishment from all modes of future free-enterprise leadership until which time the debt has been paid in full with fair interest. Their time has quite obviously passed.

    The new blood will be made to endure a rigorous baseline IQ exam, and not just business acumen, but also the basic function of reason in which they must at least hit the sixty percentile or be forced to walk from coast to coast beneath a dunce cap. These tests must be passed on C-SPAN with Ivy League business professors looking over their shoulders mocking them verily.

    Secondly, and most pressingly, the United Auto Workers must either accept new rules on these insane demands for the workforce or there will be fatal cuts in personnel starting with reps, lawyers, and lobbyists. In fact, in trade for our boundless generosity the UAW must lend thirty percent of its employee base to do our bidding; rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, aiding in the withdrawing of troops in Iraq, and general everyday chores like garbage removal, babysitting and something in the line of sweeping.

    When you consider that the whole of the American Auto Makers must adhere to a minimum of franchises per state, almost twice what they can afford, and that over 20% of the contracted workers are absentees per fiscal year while being immune to discipline or expulsion is beyond ridiculous. The gravy train stops under The People's Republic Of America.

    Look to the Auto Industry's Grand Daddy, Henry Ford for wisdom in these dark hours of pending bankruptcy. His deranged fascist rants, while sounding like the plaintiff wail of a doomed dinosaur sinking beneath the tar pit of history, have a ring of veracity rarely heard in this bleating whine of present day entrepreneurship. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.

    It is a new dawn; embrace the future with aplomb and a frontier spirit. The Twentieth Century is dead. If you would like to join it, well, that's entirely up to you. We, with the money, choose to look ahead.
    Believe me when I tell you this take-over stuff is gangbusters.

    I'm digging this ownership of the banking set thus far. I recently stormed into my Bank Of America branch and demanded all manner of perk and a drastic halt to all the passé, pre-bail nickel & diming. Using the tried and true James V. Campion method of sticking it to the "lenders", I began throwing my primary stockholder weight around. No more paying for personal or company checks, no more fees at ATMs, no more jacking around with their five-layered incongruent Internet banking crap. I told the goddamned bank manager to stand down; the people are in charge now -- and hell if he didn't acquiesce.
    It's good to be The Man.

    Look, these deadbeats are going to get the money. No way this economy can handle the dissolution of over a million jobs, both direct and tertiary to the auto industry, and survive. This country cannot function without some kind of domestic manufacturing. This is the time to put the hammer down, the hammer of The People.
    It is not a question of IF these self-mutilating fossils of industry will get our money, but WHEN. And if it is WHEN then it's under our conditions.
    Take it or leave it.

© James Campion November 26th 2008
realitycheck@jamescampion.com

An Open Apology to America
James Campion
I was wrong.
Despite my hard-line skepticism, serious doubts, and relentless cynicism born from over two centuries of recidivistic dementia, you did not elect a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon,

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