American Motor Companies – Nay, Obama Motors
I am astonished that the President of the United States is now dictating to American companies.
The Obama administration asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, to step down and he agreed, a White House official said.
Un-American?
The surprise announcement about the classically iconic American corporation is perhaps the most vivid sign yet of the tectonic change in the relationship between business and government in this era of subsidies and bailouts.
Tectonic, nay, totalitarian and statist
Obama and his aides may have honed in on Wagoner for two reasons. First, his company is asking for the most in total federal aid: $26 billion, a figure administration officials fear could grow even larger. Second, the GM chief was tied more directly to the ill-fated decisions that that brought much of the American auto industry to the brink of collapse. Wagoner joined GM in 1977, has had a senior role in GM management since 1992, and became CEO of the company in 2000. He is considered responsible for increasing GM’s focus on trucks and SUVs—at the expense of the hybrids and fuel efficient cars that have become more popular in the last couple of years.
Mr. President, you will have to pry my truck out of my dead hands. If you ban the American truck, I will build my own.
This insanity must stop before we lose American at the hands of a tyrant. Yes, the President dictating to companies is tyrannical.
I don’t know how to say it, but GM has been focusing on trucks and SUV’s at the expense of fuel efficient cars for a long time.
I bought the smallest Chevrolet I could and it is still fairly large. Now, if you see what Chevrolet has for sale down here in Mexico City it would blow your mind. Cars so small I could probably drive for a month with one tank of gas.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why Chevrolet wouldn’t sell those cars here. I’ve always bought Chevy, but right now if Obama doesn’t shake some sense into GM and companies, my next car won’t be American. The smallest car you can buy in America right now is the Toyota Yaris. American companies have cars that can compete with it. Why they don’t, I’ll never know.
You own a dang Aveo don’t you? You said you did in a comment once. Those itty bitty cards in Mexico also don’t have emissions standards and they don’t need to truck a family of 4 for long vacations.
They don’t sell those cars here because they are illegal to sell here.
Do you know why GM and the others have been making those big evil trucks (and Toyota and the imports have all come up with American specific models along those lines) because that is what sells!
The free market realized that people who want a car they need a shoe horn to get into are a slim minority and that bigger was selling.