Open Letter to GM

Dear Sir or Madam,

When the prime minister of Japan said that US workers were lazy, I vowed to never again buy a japanese product if an american product was available. I have fulfilled that vow all these years. Now I find I must review my convictions, and these are the reasons:

1. I supported American cars in order to support the American economy. Keep the dollars here, keep the good jobs. For, even as the minimum wage tends to prop up the standard of living from the bottom, the good union job bouys it up from the top.

American car companies are shutting down their factories, and shedding union jobs. Detroit is becoming a wasteland. Toyota, by contrast, is opening a brand spankin' new plant in TN this year.

2. The American economy for the last 50 years has been driven by technology. Your decision to embrace the military industrial complex of death instead of the hybrid market was pivotal in my decision to never again buy any of your products. That you embraced the gas guzzling SUV instead of the hybrid was a pragmatic decision. The Hummer however is the symbol of your overweening arrogance. The hummer is an obscene behemouth on the city streets. Every time I see one, I give it the finger, and meditate on how american car companies are killing our grandchildren by polluting the environment. Used as a symbol to militarize our civil society, it is nevertheless in a class that includes heavy machinery and is therefore available to be purchased by companies that don't have need of them and using our fed tax money (money that is being offered for heavy equipment that generates profit rather than just burning up three times the gas to go somewhere).

I lived in LA CA for almost 20 years, and breathed the brown soot that passed for air out there. Recently the people of CA passed a proposition tightening pollution laws in the state to be at the same level as China. American car manufacturers could have replied by selling proven technology, low polluting cars there. Instead they instigated a lawsuit to allow them to continue selling pollution belching cars there. Now the state of CA is defending the people's right to clean air with money that could be better spent solving the serious problems that are threatening our health and standard of living.

I've always wanted a Subaru Outback AWD. . . .

Sincerely
SBGypsy