Marchionne Napoleone
(1:25)

By 2011 there will be a total of five/six motorcar manufacturers worldwide. The market is becoming ever smaller and the only manufacturers that will be able to survive (but for how long?) are those that merge with each other. This is the motor vehicle industry’s equivalent of Highlander, where at the end of it all, only one manufacturer will remain standing (or perhaps none). The collapse of the motor industry is historic, systemic. It has nothing to do with the current crisis because there has been an ongoing global drop in sales for the past decade. In 2009, the auto industry has shrunk by one third in the United States and by one quarter in Europe. The value of their shares on the Stock Exchange has plummeted. The shares of Fiat run by Marchionne, the Napoleon of the runabouts, have dropped in value from 17.702 Euro to 7.470. The State aid granted to the motor manufacturers is much like the subsidies paid to the press, in other words money wasted on trying to keep economic zombies alive. Fiat now wants to merge with Chrysler, Saab and Opel. In Italy, these mergers are held up as a triumph. One of the first effects of mergers is the restructuring exercise. From five factories down to two, from tens of thousands of employees down to just a few thousand. That’s what they call efficiency. Adjusting productive resources depending on market demand. Perhaps Marchionne doesn’t have any choice, but with this move he is safeguarding and perhaps even increasing, above all, his own salary. All in all a very respectable outcome.
Marchionne has hinted at "a gradual reduction in production capacity". In essence, a gentle euthanasia of factories and workers. Does it make any sense at all to invest public money in order to simply dismiss, reduce and close down? Never again will the motor industry go back to being what it used to be in the past. We are the real investors, not the Agnelli family. We citizens, with out taxes converted into national and European subsidies granted to companies with nonexistent development prospects. The motorcar belongs to the past. Renewable energy, the Internet and access to knowledge and environmentally friendly public transport are the future. Do we really want to invest in the manufacture of hundreds of millions more motorcars? Is this what the people who govern us believe to be development? Every Euro spent on the economy by the State must go towards creating new jobs and not towards yet another dismissal.