Is What's Good for GM Still Good For The Country?

1973 Chevy truck
Photo by Gilbert Mercier/color infrared
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More than 50 years ago, then General Motors president Charles Wilson said: "What is good for GM is good for the country." In the light of GM's chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of today, this quote from Wilson is troubling. It seems that one can say today that: What is bad for GM is bad for the country. Is America on the brink of chapter 11 bankruptcy filing?

Of course there is another way( indicated in president Obama's speech today) to look at it, as any death can be viewed as a rebirth.

Until the mid 70's the Big Three had a comfortable lock on the US market. OPEC's move to jack up oil prices in 1973 changed the parameters all of a sudden. The Japanese car industry was quick to adapt and started building fuel efficient cars. On the other hand, neither GM, Ford or Chrysler had the intelligence to do the same. They just kept building gas guzzlers for 3 decades, and were never able to grab any significant share of the fuel efficient cars market.

In the late 80's GM had a potential winner in the form of the very first electric car available on the market, they failed in seizing this opportunity and stopped the production.

Quite simply the big 3 made cars that consumers did not want to buy any longer.

General Motors was once upon a time a symbol of America's economic success, it has now become a symbol of America's failure. President Obama today said that the US government has "become a reluctant share holder of GM". It is indeed as US tax payers have now 60% shares of the bankrupted company. We should just call it for what it is: General Motors was just nationalized today, and this not necessarily a bad outcome. President Obama claims it is temporary but, in any way you look at it, the collapse of what was once the biggest company in the world, is a blow to the American psyche.

Michael Moore lives in Flint Michigan; both the birth place of General Motors & the epicenter of the economic disaster triggered by GM's collapse. He wrote this touching farewell to GM today. To read it click on the title.