The dying American SUV, hopefully a thing of the past.

All it takes is a little out of the box thinking, real leadership and some pro-citizen, anti-corporate, conglomerate ideals. Bail them out on one condition — all conglomerates get divided up into smaller subunits.

GM, the one massive corporation, gets divided into 5 separate corporations: Buick and Cadillac; Chevrolet; GMC, Daewoo and Hummer; Pontiac and Saab; and, last but not least, Saturn. The US government should oversee the large corporate divisions and appoint a government official, that is not elected or influenced by any lobbying, to each division for regulation and supervision of the public’s investment. This appointee should be able to override any final decisions that could take the company away from the original intention — to reinvent itself into a viable 21st century company.

Take Ford, split them into Ford, Lincoln and Mercury, and Volvo. Again, there should be a government appointed to oversee the investment.

Chrysler will face the same fate with a subdivision into 3 companies — Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep.

Why do I suggest this? Well, think about it. Why are we facing such economic woes? Would any of this have happened if there was no such thing as the corporate conglomerate? If America was still made up of many small businesses, there would have been more competition, more ingenuity and more stability. We face the current problems because only 3 companies own our nation’s entire automobile industry. If only one gets into serious financial trouble, it’s severely detrimental because they are responsible for millions of jobs and hold a massive economic footprint.

If our automobile industry was made up of 10+ different car manufactures each completely independent of each other, one going down, hell, even two or three going down would not threaten out nation’s economic health. We have allowed ourselves to be blind to what the massive mergers meant — companies so large that we depend on it for survival.

Plus, this may be the first in a series of government-corporation interventions. The bank industry fiasco is quite similar. How about telecommunications companies, computer companies? They are all extremely top heavy with little competition. This must change if we are to reinvent ourselves and stop this capitalism and profiteering at all costs type economy. We have got to be more restrained and realize that the free market, like anything else, needs to be regulated, and the larger the economic, ecological and employment footprint it has, the more heavily regulated it should be.

Does this idea sound ridiculous? Unrealistic? Well, it’s definitely not “American” (at least according to Reagan), but “American” is what got us where we are today. I actually got this idea from the Japanese. A couple of years ago, the Japanese government went into a fiercely debated idea of privatizing what was known as Japan Post.

Japan Post was a public corporation that grew to the point that it was the nation’s largest employer, and one of the world’s largest financial institutions. They held 2.1 trillion dollars of household assets in savings accounts, 1.2 trillion dollars of household assets in life insurance services. Here is what voanews.com said about the process:

Japan’s postal service went private, after more than 130 years of public operation. Japan Post was split into four different business units for managing mail delivery, savings, insurance and counter services. Under a 10-year privatization plan, the units will initially be held under a government-controlled holding company before becoming fully independent in 2017.

The privatization creates the world’s largest commercial bank, as Japan Post has assets of more than three trillion dollars. The Japanese government hopes the reform will boost competition in the country’s banking sector.

So, it can be done. And like Japan recognizing it had to step in, we have to realize that there is a danger in a market being too free, and corporations being too unregulated. There is a balance, and it should be something that is yearned for, not feared. And unless we do something about this, we will just end up where we started.