Socialism

GM scapegoating a low-level engineer for the ignition switch problems is not credible.

"I speak from the experience of owning a supplier company that was smashed to smithereens primarily by the GM engineering and purchasing bureaucracy during the last decade of its mayhem. If there is one thing that could be said about GMs modus operandi during the era of the safety switch fiasco, therefore, it is never did any engineer walk alone anywhere within a country mile of GM operations."

That was even before the government takeover, and it could only have gotten worse after.

"Business meetings at GM were held in small auditoriums. Even mid-ranking executives were accompanied by a posse of aides every step of the day. And the layers of bureaucratic approval were so dense and deep that it is amazing that the GM monster actually functioned—so sclerotic had its bureaucratic arteries become after the temporary boom of the 1990s."

If you call that functioning.

"But nowhere in the vast expanse of GM did bureaucratic layering and encrustation reach a more absurd level than in its so-called PPAP (“production parts approval process”) procedures—– a regime that governed every waking move of the tens of thousands of executives and functionaries that compromised its purchasing and engineering departments. The inherently true fact is this: the alleged villain—Mr. Raymond DeGiorgio—was a prisoner of the PPAP bureaucracy, not a lone wolf that fooled the thousands of managers, checkers and overseers above him."

Even in nimble, large companies, production changes are thoroughly documented and reviewed.

"But this episode is not about culpability for one failed part—especially since it now appears that GM is close to achieving the recall of every single car it has ever made in the last several decades. The real issue is the corruption of crony capitalism."

It does seem they will have to recall them all.

"An out-of-control, dysfunctional, dangerous, red-ink bleeding industrial dinosaur like GM should have been put out of its misery in Chapter 11 in 2008. After all, folks, GM did manage to loose the stunning sum of $85 billion during the five years leading up to 2008, and it did so after selling 35 million vehicles at total revenues of nearly $1 trillion. No industrial managers have ever—before or since—managed to accomplish such an economic fiasco."

Thanks, Bush.

"The GM recovery was no miracle of statist intervention. It was a travesty on capitalism and the taxpayers of America. And the unraveling is just getting underway. Just wait until its junk-bond financed sales to sub-prime borrowers collapse and it uses up the tens of billion of phony “fresh start” cookies jar reserves provided by its quick rinse bankruptcy."

Liquidate.