Ford wants that industry bailout money BAD, y’all. Their essay to Congress on Why We Deserve Free Money, or as the kids are calling it these days, a “business plan” details just how the company isn’t going to fail in the next six months – and is even so optimistic as to think that it will stop losing money by 2011, which when you step back and think about that is a pretty horrible goal to set for yourself. Anyway, Ford wants $9b from the government, Or Else, and they mean srs bizniss.
Highlights of this “business plan” include:
- Selling those pesky corporate jets, because the company MAKES transportation so it is dumb to pay for jets
- Accelerating its electric car plan, so that the nation’s woefully inadequate power grid can melt down sooner rather than later
- No more bonuses for anybody in the US, or for management anywhere
- CEO Alan Mulally takes a salary of $1, supplemented only by the stack of $100 bills someone keeps dropping outside his office door every morning and since he can’t find who lost them he might as well keep them, right?
- Pay lip service to reducing labor costs but actually continuing to take it in the keister from the UAW
- Other such nonsense
It all sounds very fancy, and will likely sway members of Congress who were never really going to not give them the money anyway.
Lolo, ESQ // Dec 2, 2008 at 10:43 am
i notice actually moving to detroit is not on the list
Jason // Dec 2, 2008 at 10:44 am
For $1 a year he could buy the largest house in the city, but as part of Ford’s cost-cutting measures they are eliminating armor plating as an option on its vehicles. He could never live in Detroit.
Claude // Dec 2, 2008 at 11:26 am
I don’t like how the full article no longer shows up in RSS feeds.
Jason // Dec 2, 2008 at 11:31 am
I blame Alyx for the RSS insufficiency.
Alyx, you’re fired.
alyx // Dec 2, 2008 at 2:43 pm
lol, I got teh boot!
The RSS thing is a design change I may or may not be sticking with depending on how much haterade gets dumped upon it.
Farid // Dec 2, 2008 at 3:11 pm
More hatred. (i.e. plz bring back teh full RSS thing! – I read this blog on Google Reader).
Which makes me wonder: if you have a service like Google Analytics installed on your blog/website, does it actually track people who read your RSS feeds as “visitors”? My guess is no.
alyx // Dec 2, 2008 at 3:58 pm
^Farid, you’re right – there are no embedded analytics in the RSS.
Google offers various analytics for RSS that aren’t nearly as granular, mostly limited to number of readers and uses of feeds (iGoogle, Google Reader, published to webpage, etc)
LOLFed » GM Has Plan, Is Saved // Dec 2, 2008 at 8:34 pm
[...] Like Ford before it, GM also has one of those “business plan” things that, had it created some years ago, might have saved the company from its current sorry state. This “business plan” is filled with fantastic ideas that GM’s management stole from WSJ opinion pieces on what it needs to do, but the company is not without its own doom and gloom and no-pressure statements: it needs $4b by the end of the year or it will fail and we are all going to die, in fire. [...]