Corporate America is falling apart. That seems to be the news headline in every newspaper and on Television. Bailouts! General Motors. AIG. Who else? I realize that the whole world is going through some crazy and very serious times right now but who is in charge of this roller coaster ride we are on in the financial markets? In my opinion this is all sheer lunacy! Why should we (the citizens of all the major countries of the world) be pouring money into these greedy and opportunistic companies?  What do we expect to get back from our investment? I think we really need to re-evaluate what we are doing before we make things even worse than they are. We live in a free market society, or at least I thought we did. The income streams of a company are supposed to be created based on production and sales, not by how much money they can cajole from the government through threats. Take the automobile industry for example. There are thousands of brand new cars sitting in lots waiting to be sold. So what do the car manufacturers want? More money so they can keep the factories rolling. Is their goal to fill every nook and cranny of North America with unwanted cars just to keep the people employed? There are two problems with this situation that I can see. First, maybe we don’t need so many cars to be manufactured. In any other industry, the production is market driven. It should be the same with the car industry. I think the government should tell these big automobile manufacturers that they need to re-assess their business model. After all, do we need a Chev, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick? In fact, do we need General Motors at all? And this is the second problem. I think that if GM can’t tone down their fat and get to a state of profitability, they should go bankrupt. I think they need to do what Chrysler did back in the early 1980’s, i.e. dispose of unprofitable sectors of the business. We don’t seem to be hearing any crying from Toyota or Honda or any of the other “foreign” manufacturers. I think the North American car manufacturers need to grow up and do a reality check. Hey, here’s a great idea. Why don’t the North American Car manufacturers build something the consumer wants? How about some innovative environmentally friendly cars? And how about this one? Let’s let the oil companies bail out the car companies! They don’t seem to have a problem with cleaning out our pockets every time we pull up to refuel these pollution balls we drive around in. We are a resilient people. If an industry dies, we find something new to do. I really think that all the money pumped into these car companies will end up only delaying the inevitable. Maybe all this money being pumped into saving the car manufacturers would be better spent funding creative initiatives that can blossom into new industries. The bottom line of the corporate meltdown is a large scale demonstration of how lack of self responsibility and its buddy greed have come to fester and burst in our society. This problem is not going to go away until we, as individuals, start to be more self responsible ourselves. We need to reduce our consumerism. We need to reduce our debts and learn to live in a more common sense manner. We have to quit expecting the government or anybody else to bail us out every time we screw up. And in the same vein we need to expect to pay for our choices. Whether we are a business or an individual, self responsibility is the only vehicle which will save us and help us to mold the new economy which is unveiling. We need to learn to look at the bigger picture as well as the smaller picture before we make decisions. After all, if we can make good decisions at each step of our lives, we will not need to be asking for hand outs. It is an interesting time we live in. If we can only open ourselves up and see the realities of the situation as they actually are, rather than how the big corporations would like us to see, we will move through these challenging times more quickly and with more success. Namaste Monty Ritchings www.powerofsafety.com