Today, on World’s Most Extreme Detroit Apologists… Forbes’ Senior Correspondent Jerry Flint goes all the way on a federal bailout for Detroit– he even says GM’s management doesn’t have its noses in the trough. That’s right. Our man Flint thinks that the tens of millions of dollars shovelled into GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner’s pocket each year, not to mention the pockets of his non-performing pals at the top, are nothing more than fair compensation. Despite the fact that GM’s stock price has tumbled from $40 a share to less than $5, despite the huge loss of American market share, despite a cash conflagration that threatens to burn GM to a crisp, Flint says the big bucks belong to the bailout queens. “The leaders of GM have made their mistakes–plenty of them–but they didn’t enrich themselves beyond decency as those other executives did. Today’s economic problems, brought on by subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, a credit freeze and a stock market collapse, were caused by those other folks.” What’s more Flint says America owes GM a bailout because the General saved the country during World War II– completely ignoring GM’s contribution to the Nazi war machine. Flint concludes his dietribe [sic] by repeating the old saw, “What’s good for America is good for General Motors–and vice versa.” We say what’s good for Jerry Flint is a mega-caffeinated dose of liquid reality. Before it’s too late.
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So, does it sink or not?
A few years ago, my first revelation that GM was in big trouble came from the Buickman, closely followed by TTAC. Thanks to both.
It now seems that we are in the revisionist period of GM history, where apologists for their shoddy performance are creeping out of the woodwork, eager to leave messages that have little to do with reality. This is how the history we teach our children quite often develops. Not from the truth, but from subsequent spin by those, who for whatever reason, put forth their ideas of what happened.
So kudos to TTAC for keeping the truth coming, and for alerting us to the attempts to mangle it for ulterior motives.
From my point-of-view, the executives at GM, Wagoner foremost, seem to feel that they are mere custodians of the company, and let the chips fall where they may. Nothing is their fault, they are just managers, and managers get paid outlandish sums these days whether they perform well or not.
Since government bureaucrats behave in similar fashion, making GM a ward of the state will accomplish exactly nothing, because management outlook will not have to change at all.
The whole affair is so sad, and has gone on for so long, I’m starting to feel numb about it. At this juncture, who really knows what the correct thing to do is? And even if someone had a brainwave, we know that GM is the supreme bastion of “not invented here” syndrome. That head-in-the-sand attitude is the one thing Wagoner performs supremely well.
No hope.
idea:
I wonder how much of the “Too Big To Fail” mentality by big business is used as a Blank Check for misconduct & bad practices.
Like, “I can do whatever I want, like looting the company and snorting coke off Peyton List’s ass during the annual board meeting, because ‘GM/AIG/Bear is Too Big to Fail’. There is no economic, business or moral recourse. We will be bailed out again and again until the US treasury is dry and the government is dead. -So whore it up, Caligula’s in town!”
completely ignoring GM’s contribution to the Nazi war machine
Armchair Bob, your retort will fall on mostly deaf ears, with the exception of mine. As much as you want to diminish GM’s contributions to the Arsenal of Democracy (Detroit) you simply can’t. Why? Because it was mostly Alfred P. Sloan’s doings and not the shareholders or other executives. Who knows, Sloan could have been as much a rabid anti-Semite as Henry Ford but we will never really know since he left virtually no records.
Now, what other companies did work for the Nazi war machine or Tojo? Let’s see….we have BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz for Adolph. Toyota and Mitsubishi weaponry helped power the Japanese war machine.
But god forbid we say anything bad about Toyota and any other non-Detroit company.
derm81 :
German car companies worked for the Nazi war machine? Japanese car companies helped the Japanese war effort. Duh. I think that’s pretty obvious.
GM’s contribution to our enemies is less well known. As in not. Have a little read.
Sounds like it’s time for Michael Moore to do a follow up film on GM, sort of a Roger & Me sequel. Perhaps call it Rick & Bob or something accompanied by the Laurel & Hardy theme music, the cookoo song.
Re. helping the “enemy”, if you REALLY want to know the truth, you can either buy
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution on Amazon.com for $27
http://www.amazon.com/Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Antony-Sutton/dp/089968324X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225555758&sr=1-1
…or you can download it and print it out at work for free:
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/
So, financial motives transcend national boundaries. If you read the book, you’ll see that leading members of the Federal Reserve SUPPORTED and DONATED LARGE SUMS OF $ to the Bolsheviks. This is before the days of email, but they have the cable telegram transcripts fully documented. The US provided Trotsky an American passport to enter Russia! All through the machinations of Wall Street…the entity which tries to brainwash each individual into thinking Wall Street and Democracy are synonymous…which they are not.
So, not only was the Cold War staged and funded fully by the Federal Reserve, so in turn was the Korean War, the Vietnam War, ….and yes, it has cost American lives, by the thousands.
The authors thesis is there is NO difference between the Far Right political spectrum (ie, the Rockefellers, the Federal Reserve Chairmen, the J.P. Morgans and Socialists…they may espouse a free market, they conduct business under a free market…yet they are no different from the Far Left (ie, Socialists).
And they don’t care how many US Citizens die for their “cause”. It’s a fascinating read, check it out.
Re. GM and the ascot-wearing geezer, …Jerry Flint needs to wrap that Ascot around a sawed-off broom handle and slowly turn it ….and turn it….and turn it till he expires.
I used to read this guy but he has gone completely bonkers in his old age. He is still thinking in the last century. Time for Jerry to retire and go golfing with the GM execs. Nobody will miss his nonsense.
Robert: Opel (and Ford) even contributed to the fund which was (very belatedly) created to compensate people who were abused as slave laborers. They didn’t do that without reason. Thank you for bringing up this dark chapter. According to revisionist history, both Opel and Ford had been taken over entirely by the Nazi regime and had nothing to do whatsoever with their owners. A super-revisionist story even says that Opel and Ford had not received their fair share of the war-pie, and that most went to German companies, Messerschmidt, you know.
Luscious: Well, the Germans had their fair share of stupidity also. America may have given Trotsky a passport. Germany gave Lenin a special train to ferry him from Switzerland to Russia to start a revolution during WW I. Boy, did they ever regret that.
Our man Flint thinks that the tens of millions of dollars shovelled into GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner’s pocket each year, not to mention the pockets of his non-performing pals at the top, are nothing more than fair compensation
The leaders of GM have made their mistakes–plenty of them–but they didn’t enrich themselves beyond decency as those other executives did.
Rick Wagoner makes more than the top twenty-six executives at Toyota. Combined.
Rick Wagoner makes more than an order of magnitude more than Katsuaki Watanabe.
“Fair compensation”, my ass.
To those Socialist UAW auto workers, please take heed:
http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/education/projects/webquests/holocaust/images/arbeit_macht_frei.jpg
That’s right…”Work Will Set You Free”!!
In other news, the Chinese are ramping up their fork production.
Please stop this! WW2 is very old news, and totally irrelevant for today’s decisions regarding the Big Three…
Robbie :
Flint brought it up.
I read that story when it came out on Forbes, and nearly returned breakfast to sender when this line jumped off my monitor: “The leaders of GM have made their mistakes–plenty of them–but they didn’t enrich themselves beyond decency as those other executives did.”
Flint used to make some sense, but he has turned into just another angry old white guy who says absurd things without a clue about how clueless he is. Didn’t enrich themselves? As the IM-kids like to say, WTF?
Bertel,
If I’m not mistaken, GM even sought compensation from the Allies for wartime damage to their German Opel properties.
That being said, of the American companies who worked with the Third Reich, IBM was probably the only one that could be linked to the Final Solution of persecuting and exterminating Jews. IBM’s wartime German activities were outlined in Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust and continued into 1945. The numbers tattooed on concentration camp prisoners’ arms were Hollerith numbers for IBM punch card readers.
angry old white guy
Somehow I think that “hostile young black woman” used as a stereotype wouldn’t go without comment.
Robert, please keep it up! The WW2 connections to Detroit are fascinating and educational.
What is it with GM and fascist dictators? Even now they hope to make big bugs in Putin’s Russia. It’s amazing how comfortable they are doing business with the Kremlin crimelords.
Flint writes all his columns as if it is 1955, with a globe-straddling Big 3 untroubled by a handful of ankle-biter import brands. He should have retired years ago.
Making lickspittle justifications for Bureaucrat Rick’s premium-priced failure is just following the party line at Forbes, the house organ of the deadweight, overpaid American corporate bureaucrat along with Fortune.