What to do with my new car company

I guess it’s time to update the ol’ resume again. You may recall a couple years ago when I had to add Time‘s Person of the Year to my awards and honors. I hope all of you did, too. Well, now it’s time to add to the experience section with our new role as majority shareholder in General Motors. What? You didn’t know you own one of the Big 3? Yup. Sure do. GM’s bankruptcy filing today means you, I and the rest of the American taxpayers will own a 60% share in the automaker. And all it cost us was more than $30 billion and thousands of jobs.

So what should we do with a company with billions of dollars in debt that burned through God-only-knows-how-much cash in the last several years? What should we do with a company whose top executives thought it was a good idea to fly on private jets to beg for a federal bailout in Washington? What should we do with a company that has employed such a moronic, stubborn business plan it drove the price of the company’s stock from an all-time high of $94.62 in 2000 to 75 cents a share when trading opens this morning.

What has happened to GM should serve as an important wake-up call to all of us: No one is invincible. The hubris of a generation of corporate and union leaders has created an unthinkable dilemma that impacts us all. The auto industry, its subsidiaries and the countless businesses that count on the industry for at least part of their income, including the advertising dollars we need so much in my business, are all taking a hit thanks to these feckless leaders who cared only about their personal gain and not the long-term viability of the company that provided it for them and beyond.

So don’t feel sorry for Rick Waggoner, who lost his job as GM’s CEO because of all this. It’s tough for someone to fall too hard when they have a nice, big golden parachute to catch them. I wonder if he feels the necessary shame he should. I wonder if he feels bad for the autoworkers, whose union bosses convinced them never to stop pushing for more and more benefits, even when it was clear the industry probably could not handle it. Those union leaders will be fine as the workers search for new work, though even some of them are getting sweet severance deals when compared to most of the rest of us. Feel sorry for the auto dealers, thousands of whom have lost their businesses and jobs through little fault of their own. Feel bad for any of us who work for a business dependent on the car companies.

So what should we do with this mess called General Motors? I’ll be waiting for my invitation to the shareholders meeting so we can take a vote. I hope they can find a room big enough to hold all 300-million of us.