Equal Opportunity Employers

I watched a snippet (snippet! isn't that a great word? it sounds dangerous, doesn't it?) of the public hearings in Washington, DC with the Big Three automakers today. Senators and CEOs: damn, that's a lot of old white guys in one room.

During the last public hearing, there was a lot of uproar about the use of corporate jets by the CEOs: Do you mean to say that you couldn't downgrade to a first-class commercial seat to get here from Detroit? As this uproar indicates, we are pretty clearly dealing with symbols here, as corporate jets, more than their cost, simply just don't jive well with the operative symbology of Main Street. Progress these days certainly seems to be measured in symbolic terms--the election of the first African-American to the Oval Office being Exhibit A. Sure, Obama's victory was a huge breakthrough in the fight for racial equality, but it is more than anything a symbolic victory. Hopefully, the symbolic resonance of Obama's victory does not mask the underlying reality of racism that persists despite the anomalous accomplishment that receives all the fanfare. Real work still needs to be done. A digression.

In any case, because symbols appear to be the currency of the day, I say that the face of corporate America needs to be changed. Enough with old white guys running the show.

Earlier today, I was listening to an NPR interview with a journalist about organized crime and its relationship with terrorism. According to the journalist, a key distinction between organized crime and terrorist groups is that crime organizations are typically driven by the profit motive whereas terrorist cells are more bent on ideology. As such, crime organizations practice equal opportunity employment almost to a fault, much more than even their law-abiding, legitimate business counterparts. Apparently, the Yakuza in Japan are one of the biggest employers of ethnic Koreans and Chinese in Japan. I don't really know how this is related to the Big Three automakers, but I think it's a nice contrast.

Maybe with all of the federal protection and union protection that the auto industry has received over the past several decades, the simple profit motive has been obscured, and auto workers have been able to hide a little bit too comfortably behind their awesome lobbying power in Washington, DC. Maybe stodgy old white guys need to be pushed aside; maybe the dog-eat-dog logic of capitalistic competition needs to be pumped into the sclerotic arteries of Detroit such that we can put a new face onto that symbol of American Industrialism, the auto industry. After all, we are dealing in symbols here. And Detroit could usher in a new face to represent Equal Opportunity Employment. Let's hire some Japanese people.