Five Takeaways from the GM Safety Debacle

Townhall.com ^ | April 10, 2014 | Peter Morici

[4Liberty]

6. GM-Bailout money is union money is democRat money.

[Kaslin]

It sure is

[DBeers]

I HATE GM, but this demand for perfection is laughable.

That's 13 deaths that are now known about & one problem now known about. It's not perfection being sought -it's ethics & accountability. On those counts GM fails miserably.

Normally, market forces penalize failure & reward success. In the case of GM a corrupt administration bailed out a corrupt automaker's unions & operations. NOW maybe the marketplace will put GM & its unions where they belong -the garbage. However, I doubt that will happen because of the Obama bankruptcy of GM that rewarded the failure.

[cuban leaf]

Thing is, it is not a problem. It worked. Extremely well. Better than five nines well.

[DBeers]

Thing is, it is not a problem. It worked. Extremely well. Better than five nines well.

That's a matter of perspective. It worked well for the idiots that ran GM into the ground, it worked well for the unions, & it worked well for Obama's political propaganda machine.

It did not work well for the stockholders zeroed out, nor the bond holders & creditors cut out of the court proceedings financially & operationally. It did not work well for conservative suppliers & conservative dealerships that were left for dead.

The market should have had input into and in some cases decided what an acceptable recovery plan was and what cuts had to be made where. Instead the Leftist Obama the free market idiot sat on his throne bolstered with taxpayer cash & dictated how properties were to be dispersed and what recovery plan was acceptable.

What happened here is that GM failed and surrendered to the market THEN Obama came in and negotiated the terms of the surrender his way rather than how the market & rule of law would have.

[cuban leaf]

It worked well for 1.6 million owners as well.

But I’m focusing on the single point. The ignition switch. I’ve never been a fan of GM since I bought my brand new 1980 Buick Skylark. I learned then that their approach to cars was what we in IT call the TIP methodology: Test In Prod.

The design defects in that care were so numerous that a few years after I dumped it, I started working at a place where I guy had one sitting in his garage pending a lawsuit with GM. He had an 8x10 piece of paper full of two collumns of design problems the car had. Mine had suffered from the exact same list - everything from the wipers intermittently refusing to work to the brakes failing to keep the car from rolling.

I swore I’d never buy another GM product when I got rid of that car.

[SoCal Pubbie]

The legislation providing loan guarantees to Chrysler was signed by President Jimmy Carter on January 7, 1980. No Federal money was given to the automaker. Loan guarantees meant the Feds cosigned for private loans totaling 1.5 billion dollars.

In 1983 Reagan supported raising tariffs on foreign motorcycles to give HD time to breath. Again, no federal money was given.

[Kaslin]

Thanks for the clarification.

[Texas resident]

Now GM has been fined $35 million over safety lapses.
Federal regulators have hit them with this fine.
Who has been running GM? The same govt.
Guess where the money will come from to pay the fine?
Us, again.
All for show.
Nothing will change.

In a sane business environment, GM would have been left to fall, reorganize and come back stronger. But they have to protect their union money laundering operation above all else.