Posted on 05/30/2009 10:46:15 AM PDT by Painesright
The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.
Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Is this a veiled barb directed at Obama? He's presiding over the bankruptcy of GM, essentially forced by his administration, and there are quite a few nude photos of his mother floating around the web.
Melodrama indeed.
Whether you label it ObamaMotors, Government Motors, Mr. Lib Wrench, or whatever, I will NEVER buy their brand.
As if they care. The whole idea here is to keep funding the UAW so the UAW can keep funding dems. And your taxes will do just fine for that. No need to for you to actually purchase their crappy products thank you very much.
Political payback as usual. No wonder our schools, roads, anything in America under the government never gets done. It’s about political payback and how much money they can steal and put in their pockets.
bump
I bet you do, whether you want to or not.
Government Motors will supply ALL the cars for the US gov't fleet. They will build all (or most) vehicles for the military. I suspect that at this moment state, county, and city officials are being advised that their fire, police, and other official vehicles had better come from GM, or they may have funding problems.
Looking into the future, I see the whiz kids at GM coming up with a new gadget, probably of dubious value to car owners but "Great for the Environment". Suddenly you can't buy or sell a car in the US without it, and it's only available from GM.
Far-fetched? Not to me. Obama will bull it (or something like it) through.
Just finished reading the entire article in today’s Wall Street Journal. I hope everyone can link to it. P.J. O’Rourke can be very amusing. Sadly, he’s got a pretty good read on the tea leaves when it comes to really great cars.
If you ever have an opportunity to attend a reading or book tour by him, do so. He can be a lot of fun off-the-cuff. Several years ago, a bunch of us attended one of his speaking engagements at a private club. We were astonished when he joined us outside for a smoke. We had fun talking about the cigars we were smoking and the idiotic nanny state antismoking laws.
Great article! Only fools made cars and we loved them.
There are 3 smallish bridges around my neighborhood that are now in year 5 of reconstruction.
I was telling mt GF yesterday that if they were bridges to a new casino they all woulda been rebuilt in less than a month.
It6 took over twenty years to get a four lane road from Tulsa, Oklahoma to the Arkansas state line.
After twenty years it was still half built so the state authorized the rest to be a toll road. It was completed in about three years.
That figures. Wonder where all our hwy money has really gone?
***That figures. Wonder where all our hwy money has really gone?***Back in 1964, I worked on my first construction job, four miles of dirt road to be paved.
I did not understand why they would get the gravel bed perfect for paving then use a road grader to pile it up and do it again. the road was finished after a year and began to break up in two years.
A few years ago the company I worked for hired a construction firm to build some water canals and a pump station. For three months all they did was push a pile of gravel from one spot to another before they began digging the canals.
They will bring it back after I am dead.
The shareholders deserve most of the blame. It seems they weren’t “watching the store”. You can’t just accept your ROI and then cry when things go south.
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