The Global Marketer

We’re with the cynics, not the skeptics, on this one.

Our advice is to strip it and flip Chrysler as fast as that can be done.

Sorry about that.

Read Newsweek at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18665395/site/newsweek/ on the newly privatized Chrysler Corporation and talk about slimming it down and putting it on the block…

…then ask yourself, why wait?

Why not stop as soon as possible the enormous waste of time, money and manpower that’s been going on since long before Daimler-Benz stepped in and took over where others were too wise to tread?

Root out the paychecks, the perks, the facilities and the operations that are no longer needed. Buy out the former, sell off the latter, THEN get back to the busness of building and marketing cars and trucks instead of creating sinecures and legacies.

Bitter medicine, to be sure. But there’s no other way.

As presently constituted, the enterprise that Walter P. Chrysler cobbled together 75 years ago is about to disappear -altogether - and with it ALL of the perks, the bonuses, the work rules, the pensions and the benefits that marketing and manufacturing have to carry.

There’s not much about any model in the Chrysler — or Ford or GM — lineup, in fact — from design to performance or quality control, from durability to passenger safety to fuel economy or marketing — that anyone need make an excuse for, or that can’t stand up to its non-U.S. counterparts.

To this alumnus and longtime observer of the U.S. automotive scene came of age in Detroit and cut his eyeteeth on marketing jobs at the Dodge and Chrysler-Plymouth divisions and Chrysler’s corporate headquarters, Daimler’s hubris merely extended a day of reckoning that was long overdue.

The Germans either glossed over, failed to see or flat-out ignored what was the unholy alliance of a bloated union and an equally bloated white-collar management dually entrenched in a decades-long scramble to entrench and to perpetuate their collectively won perks, pensions and benefits.

So UAW President Ron Gettelfinger had it exactly right when he opined that Cerberus’s true intention probably was to ’strip and flip’ when it showed up with the offer that Daimler found too good to turn down.

So let’s get it on.