Lynda Resnick, who with her husband Stewart owns Fiji water (along with POM and Teleflora), is on the board of the Aspen Institute and the Milken Family Foundation and is a regular at conferences where people talk about things like sustainability and carbon footprints. So is her water—pictured above at the Milken Foundation Institute …
Companies & Industries
Maybe Obama’s tough line on Detroit won’t soften
I spent a reasonably pleasant half hour earlier today taping this week’s edition of On the Line, “The International Public Affairs Talk Show,” which will air starting tomorrow night on your local Voice of America station. (What, you don’t have a local Voice of America station? Try online.) The subject matter was the Chrysler/GM …
Was Wagoner too ‘fundamentally decent’ for the job ahead at GM?
So Rick Wagoner is out at General Motors, at the request of the Obama administration. I’ve never known quite to make of the guy—most of GM’s many troubles aren’t his doing at all, but he had eight years to resolve them and came nowhere close to succeeding. I went to Alex Taylor’s November 25 Fortune cover story on GM to see what more I …
The view from Jack Phelan Dodge: Customers looking at big trucks again, not worried about bankruptcy
This TIME.com video visit to Jack Phelan Dodge Suzuki Isuzu in suburban Chicago was my doing, I think. I suggested at a meeting a few weeks back that a car dealer video might be cool, an editor said he’d check into it, and now it has magically appeared on our website. I had this image in my head of videotaping a desperate junior salesman …
The auto bailout: Treading water until the new guy takes over
The $17.4 billion auto bailout package that President Bush announced this morning is a stopgap measure intended to keep GM and Chrysler alive until the Obama administration and the new Congress can figure out what to do about them. This is exactly what the Democratic congressional leadership wanted to have happen and it’s about the best …
The auto bailout bust
It was pretty clear last Thursday when the Detroit Three CEOs testified before the Senate Banking Committee that a lot of Senators (among them committee Chairman Chris Dodd and ranking Republican Dick Shelby) were interested in punting the auto bailout to the Bush administration or the Federal Reserve. Now they’ve gotten their way, and …
The car czar is a horrible idea. A vehicle viceroy would be much better
Why exactly is that, every time we put a government official in charge of some big, less-than-well-defined task, he or she becomes a czar? (Car czar, drug czar, energy czar, cybersecurity czar, there must be more.) I get why Führer and duce aren’t gonna work. But there are lots of other options: emperor, king, queen, prince, archduke, …
The Detroit Three move to the House
I’m watching the House Financial Services Committee hearing on the auto bailout, but I’m not going to give it the extensive treatment that I gave to yesterday’s Senate hearing. The House hearings are almost never as good as the Senate ones anyway, and I’ve got other stuff to do. I will write something later about the drama in …
The auto hearings, part deux
The CEOs of the Detroit Three have successfully navigated the roads between Michigan and Washington, D.C., in their hybrid vehicles, and arrived at the hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger is there too, but I’m assuming he was sensible enough to fly Northwest. It’s their second try at pleading …
GM wants some G-men to play the heavies
General Motors has submitted its 37-page “Restructuring Plan for Long-Term Viability” (a.k.a. request for an $18 billion bailout) to Congress. There’s still a lot of defensive hey-we’re-already-totally-competitive-so-just-lay-off stuff in it (16-17 pages worth, I’d say), and of course a lot fuel-efficiency-is-job-one stuff to appease the …
The Detroit Three’s slow trip back to Washington
Alan Mullaly will be driving in a Ford Escape hybrid. Rick Wagoner will travel in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Bob Nardelli hasn’t figured out how he’ll get there yet, but taking a private jet is out of the question. It’s not quite carpooling in a minivan, as I suggested they do a couple weeks ago, but it’s close enough.
It’s mostly silly …
Next time they should probably carpool
So the Detroit bailout will have to wait, at least until December. Nancy Pelosi said it was because lawmakers wanted to see a plan for how GM, Chrysler and Ford would spend the money. Then there was that other reason:
[W]hatever support they found sagged when it became known that each of them had flown into Washington aboard
…