The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M.

NY Times ^ | 06/01/2009 | Free America

[Free America52]

WASHINGTON — It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

Brian Deese, who interrupted his law school career, is the little-seen force behind the revamping of the American auto industry.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

[rlmorel]

I am not confusing the issues at all. GM and Chrysler are not going to survive in the short term without being subsidized by the government. Period. This is unrefutable. And they are not going to survive in the long term, even if we throw hundreds of billions more dollars at them to make them limp through to the 2012 elections, which is after all the goal of the Obama administration. In addition to all the other serious issues I have with how my tax dollars are and have been spent, this is just one more.

You and I have a basic and profound disagreement.

YOU think the greedy, stupid white collar executives have run the industry into the ground.

I think the greedy, self-centered and ultimately destructive unions have finally succeeded in killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

I am not confusing the issue. I don’t want him to succeed because I DON’T WANT MORE OF MY MONEY GOING TO THAT UNION CRAPHOLE CALLED THE AMERICAN AUTO INDUSTRY. He is not going to fix it, money is not going to fix it, and I am not prepared to see our country go even deeper into hock to delay the demise of something that cannot be revived.

I think it is you that is confused about the issue. Do YOU support nationalizing industry? Are you a facist, socialist, or both? Because either you think the government should OWN the means of production, making you a socialist, or you think the ownership of industry should remain private but controlled by the government, making you a fascist.

It is either one or the other. Which is it? I am not saying this to put a label on you. I am saying this to see if you are consistent.

[MAD-AS-HELL]

you are right..the biggest problem GM (and Chrysler) has in selling cars people want to buy. And if they haven’t been able to do that with those “seasoned and experienced car guys” I don’t believe they will be able to do it with government appointed/approved people.

[staytrue]

I guess stealing a VP or two from Honda or Toyota was not in the cards.

Normally in the NFL, when you win a championship, it is open season on all your assistant coaches.

[TurtleUp]

It’s about the kid who is steering their comeback. So let’s focus like a laser beam on him and not the other issues which I agree with you on. You either want him to fail or succeed. It sounds like you want him to fail. I want him to succeed.

obama said today that we have to give GM the next $30B to recover the $19B we gave them two months ago. I had already written off the first $19B as a total loss, and I've now written off the next $30B as a total loss. I want GM dismantled, sold for scrap, insolvent, disassembled, or otherwise modified so it no longer exists. I want GM dead. If this kid is disassembling GM, I want him to succeed. If he's trying to keep it on life support long enough for a few more transfers of our tax dollars to the UAW thugs, then I want him to fail.

Not only that, but I will do everything I can to make GM fail. When someone steals from me, I don't forgive or forget. GM is dead to me. I would not accept one of their cars built after the bailout, not even for free (although I would love a Corvette in good condition from any prior year). I will never buy or own a GM/Chrysler product made after the bailout was approved. Fascism must be resisted in ever way possible, whether large or small, and this is one small thing we can do for freedom.

[Mr Rogers]

“He can’t do any worse than what those seasoned car guys at GM and Chrysler did.”

They didn’t have the option of rewriting the UAW contracts, or defaulting on debt. Now the boy does - and he ‘saves’ the UAW and screws bondholders.

It is looking grim to me. I was always pretty smart, but I learned a lot about the world between 31 & 51.

[Mr Rogers]

You seem to have a problem with our running GM - “THE NEW AMTRACK”...

[Anti-Bubba182]

God help the United States!

[rlmorel]

No offense, redangus, but this guy isn’t a run-of-the-mill guy.

He is a political science hack with no experience. Not that it is going to matter in whether GE lives or dies, in my opinion, because it cannot live. The question is how much of our money is going to be thrown into this until people realize it is not going to work and it won’t work with the unions involved.

This has nothing at all to do with whether the guy has a degree or not, or letters after his name or not. Believe me, I deal all day with people who have MD after their name, and some of them don’t let you forget it.

But just because some of them might or might not be incompetent jerks, that doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t know what they are doing if they DO have letters after their name.

You can easily turn it around and it is just as valid. Just because someone doesn’t have letters after their name does not mean they are or aren’t going to be good or competent. It simply means they don’t have letters after their name.

But just because someone DOESN’T have any experience, does NOT qualify them for anything in any way, shape, or form unless competence or incompetence has no bearing at all.

If someone wants to be hired to lick stamps, I don’t care what their background is. They can probably be a successful stamp-licker and I would hire them on the spot.

But if I have had a bad experience with a contractor building a home, I am not going to simply hire the next guy who comes along cheerfully proclaiming that he has no experience whatsoever. I **might** ask to look at some of his work and talk to his customers, and then I might consider him.

He might be a smart guy, I am sure he is a lot smarter than me in a lot of ways, a lot of people are. Liberals are good at going in somewhere and speaking volumes about how to fix this problem or that problem and spend billions doing it.

When it doesn’t work and the money is gone, you can’t get a single one of them to own up to being part of it, much the same way it became nearly impossible to find anyone in Germany in 1946 who would admit to being a nazi.

So, I am glad Lawrence Summers thinks the world of this guy. That’s great, not that I think he is any great shakes. But my issue is that they put this guy in charge of developing policy that is going to suck up billions and billions more of your tax dollars and my tax dollars.

Sure, GM might be a dead dog. But I’ll be damned if I will sign off on money being thrown at the automakers, because until the unions are dead, they are going to be sinkholes for tax dollars. And given his background, what is MOST important is the viability of the unions. The fact that people can keep their jobs and pay union dues that are given to liberal candidates is a nice side effect for them, but make no mistake-that is what it is all about.

[fanfan]

$10 says he can't drive a stickshift.

Or identify an air filter.

[rlmorel]

I just want to be sure you understand my points in #58 and #61. I apologize for calling your opinion stupid and asinine, partly because it IS your opinion and you are entitled to it without being called stupid, but also partly because it doesn’t help me make my point.

I’ll try to do it without being so strident. Thanks for the civil response.

[ChiMark]

Deese is just a beard. The reorganization has been prescribed by the Obama team. It’s about saving the union
membership. The non compete clause between Gm Euro
and domestic GM is in force. The labor benefits will not be revamped so the cost per hour will remain non competitive.

The limits on restructering GM will not make this company
but a massive social works project.

In this scenario wouls any serious car guy want to
bid for CEO of GM.

[Rome2000]

I'm pretty sure I have woken up in a parallel universe.

The lunatics are running the asylum.

[Lurker]

but I clearly said in some instances having no experience can be a good thing

Name two.

In this case, this kid might be able to resurrect a dead company

I might be able to crap Skittles, too. You want to bet that way?

[rlmorel]

Yep. In a nutshell, that is it. Non-competitive.

[rlmorel]

"...who interrupted his law school career..."

Since when is going to law school a career except for some POS liberals who cannot climb out from under the wing of an ivory tower?

[rlmorel]

This auto bail-out has really struck a sore spot with me. That is saying a lot, for someone who has a lot of sore spots since November 2008. That is going to go down in history as one of the darkest days in history, I suspect, with all we have in front of us.

All the dumb asses who think that was a great day are the same idiots who we hear breathlessly hypothesizing that “the market might have finally bottomed out” when it goes up 100 points.

It is indeed lunacy.

[giotto]

Another know-it-all, to judge from his picture. I wonder how many minutes it took Obama to decide on this twerp. I’ll guess it’s in the single digits. The people he picks indicate what a superficial person he is.

[MAD-AS-HELL]

i’ll give you one to start... sarah palin

[RDTF]

oh boy

[M. Espinola]

Since this political hack Deese is a product of the leftist Obama crowd, his overview is certainly in line with the likes of overstuffed, aging hippie Micheal Moore, who arrogantly stated the following dinky-foreign-car-driven-agenda:

"Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs."

And this tax increasing trash.....

"...impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them."

source

Liberal, neo-Marxists have perpetually rebelled & have raged against comfortable, full size American built automobiles, since it's part of their hate-America metal illness.