General Motors (GM) continues apace its government-backed conversion from a company existing to manufacture automobiles for money – into a fully-formed, Leftist ideological entity working as another wing of the Barack Obama Administration’s fundamental transformation of America.
A de facto non-profit organization posing as a for-profit car joint. That seems less and less concerned with designing cars people want, and is instead looking to redesign the nation – with products and policies Americans have time and again demonstrated they don’t want anything to do with.
How else to explain the continued expanded production of the expensive, unprofitable (yet heavily subsidized) and unpopular Chevy Volt?
How else to explain Administration-appointee Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dan Akerson calling for a $1-per-gallon gasoline tax hike? Which would demonstrably hurt his supposed industry – but is proffered in the perverse hope of forcing people into the Volts they thus far have avoided like the Bubonic Plague?
How else to explain the GM all solar-powered Volt plant? Solar paneling which cost $3 million to purchase and install – buy only saves them $15,000 a year in electricity.
Let’s do the math, shall we?
This means that for the plant to break even via savings on the green investment, it will have to operate – without solar fail, while making unprofitable cars no one wants – for two hundred years.
But wait – the average solar panel lifespan is 20-25 years, after which you have to purchase them all over again. So you’ll have to refit the factory 8-10 times during that 200 years, at another approximately $3 million (plus inflation) a pop, so….
Oh, and the panels are pretty much radioactive when spent, so getting rid of them ain’t cheap.
But besides that….
And on, and on and on the GM inanities go.
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And they are doing all of this with tens of billions of our dollars on the line.
Money Obama once upon a time told us would return us a profit.
A fairy tale Obama has now amended to:
“The government will lose less than 20 percent of the $80 billion used to bail out the U.S. automobile industry.”
Obama’s National Economic Council had the audacity to add:
“The losses are less than the administration originally expected.”
Again – as we just cited – the Administration was seven months earlier claiming we would make money.
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All of these distractions may explain the rash of recalls to which GM car buyers have been subject.
The company is simply too busy saving the world to pay attention to the unimportant sidelight of making vehicles that don’t fall apart.
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As to GM’s ridiculous array of new “business” practices.
When someone owes you money, it is more than a little annoying to see them dining out every evening, then heading out to close down bars and clubs all over town and buying the house rounds all along the way.
So it is with Government Motors.
If a private company wants to throw their money at all these Progressive wistful notions, more power to them. I ain’t buying stock in it – because I don’t think it’ll work. If it does, I missed out and that’s the way it goes.
But in GM, we Americans are unwilling, unwitting shareholders. And Obama upped our stake from $20 billion to $50 billion – again, without our consent.
So when GM pursues all of these radical Leftist larks, We the People have a right to be as upset as, well, We the People are.
Here’s a thought: Do what works first, pay us back – and then you can tilt at all the Progressive ideological windmills you wish.
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President Obama didn’t ramp up his taxpayer-coin choke hold on General Motors to save it – he did it to make it easier for him to exert his ideological will upon it.
He did it to be able to eviscerate bankruptcy law – throwing bond holders over the side to the benefit and illegal betterment of his union allies.
He did it to be able to close down Republican-backing car dealership owners.
He did it to be able to handpick the CEO – again, the eternally malleable, like-Left-minded Akerson – to help him execute his Government Motors Picasso-esque warped worldview.
Thus is Government Motors both a cause and an effect of President Obama’s push to mutate America into a Socialist dystopia.
Serving not only to move forward the Leftist agenda, but also as a visual aide for how Obama thinks a private company should operate.
The private sector not being one of Obama’s favorite places – quite possibly because he has repeatedly demonstrated complete bewilderment at the concept.
Having described his brief time spent there as being like “working behind enemy lines.”
Having repeatedly excoriated the profits necessary to make it possible to expand, hire more people – and send all those tax dollars to Washington to which he then has wasteful and punitive access.
So GM is to serve as Obama’s business model for his fundamentally transformed America.
Broke and broken, unprofitable and unpopular.
But engaging in all of the radical Leftist pet projects Obama wants – so none of that other stuff really matters.
Behold Government Motors – quickly becoming the quintessential embodiment of the Obama Vision for America.