The long, slow descent of GM
Posted Jul 07 2008, 02:00 PM by Todd Harrison
Filed under: GM, economy
Rating:

The one thing you learn early on at the racetrack is that when the desperation sets in you can't run around like a lunatic feeling under seats for change and scraping together discarded mutuel tickets looking for a live one somebody accidentally tossed. Hell, at decent tracks they will immediately escort OFF THE PREMISES anyone caught collecting discarded mutuel tickets.
.....If this seems harsh, put yourself in track management's shoes. From a business standpoint, this makes good sense. They are trying to run a business that turns people into broken, desperate beggars; not host some kind of weird halfway house for people who got that way prematurely.
.....Unfortunately for General Motors, and all the more horrific for us, there's no such entity, no governing body with an enforcement arm possessing an all-powerful eye-in-the-sky surveillance system capable of identifying this kind of ugly, shameless degenerate behavior and then quickly shooing them out of our eyesight. No, we're forced to witness the entire grisly descent, the whole god-awful collapse into desperation.
.....Where will it end? This morning, responding to reports the company is probably going to axe thousands more salaried jobs and is hoping to sell off some of its brands, GM said No... they're only looking to sell the Hummer. This is shockingly bad timing, if for no other reason than the memory of GM giving everyone the finger and rubbing our noses in the oil splattered tracks left by these military transport vehicles remains so fresh, so vivid.
.....If our post-90s version of socio-capitalism were not so primitive, we'd be shielded from embarrassing sights like GM hawking off its Hummer line. That the abandoned carcasses of these vehicles will soon be recycled into low-cost housing for the homeless is cold comfort.