VW CEO TAKING SOME VICIOUS LUMPS ON HIS FAHRVERGNOGGEN:
Oliver Blume took over the Volkswagen Group in 2022, after spending years in the company’s other divisions. For example, he started as a planner for paint and body shop operations at Audi when he was 28, and then, from 2015 until this promotion, he had been the CEO of VW subsidiary Porsche. Obviously, a capable guy who grew up within the unique VW system.
That is both a good and bad thing, considering the harrowing times the company faces right now.
Three weeks ago I told you all how an internal memo had surfaced detailing the company’s plans to do some drastic cutbacks – up to 100,000 layoffs, shuttering up to four plants, and going through their extensive business portfolio to see what they could offload for some upfront operating cash.
German labor unions went berserk – no surprise there.
Well, last Thursday, the turnaround plans were officially confirmed when Blume presented them to Volkswagen’s supervisory board in Wolfsburg for approval.
The plans were just as quickly shot out of the water – ‘torpedoed,’ as Bloomberg describes it – and in doing so offered a kind of horrifying look into what is strangling Germany’s former industry giant as it struggles to right its sinking ship.
Make sure you pay particular attention to that third paragraph concerning the make-up of the board that just told its CEO ‘nein.’ This would be a state of affairs inconceivable to an American.
In his 2007 book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote, “Democratic, and most Republican, health-care plans don’t call for expropriating the private property of doctors and pharmaceutical companies or even for the cessation of employer-provided health care. Rather, they want to use corporations for government by proxy. There’s a reason liberal economists joke that General Motors is a health-care provider that makes cars as an industrial by-product.” In its dotage, “The People’s Car” manufacturer has descended into a similar state. Similarly, in 2024, Germany’s radical environmentalists began implementing a self-imposed update of America’s WWII-era Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize das Vaterland. It looks like those plans are continuing apace.