Who killed General Motors?
By: Patrick J. Buchanan

Willys built the jeeps that carried Ike's armies across Europe. Ford built the Sherman tanks. Packard made the engines for JFK's PT boat and for the P-40s of Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers. Studebaker built the Weasel armored personnel carrier.

Chevrolet built the engines for the Flying Boxcar, Buick for the B-24 Liberator, Oldsmobile for the B-25 Mitchell Col. "Jimmy" Doolittle flew in his "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" raid in 1942.

Nash-Kelvinator built the Navy Corsair and Hudson the Helldiver that succeeded the Dauntless dive-bomber that sank four Japanese carriers at Midway. But no company matched the contributions to victory of General Motors, the greatest company of them all.

Now, most of those companies with the legendary names – Packard, Hudson, Studebaker, Nash, Oldsmobile – are gone. Of the "Big Three" that survive, Chrysler is German-owned, and Ford and GM are bleeding, and their debt has fallen to junk-bond status. Delphi, the auto-parts supplier for GM, just declared bankruptcy.

Thanksgiving week – its share of the U.S. market down from 46 percent, 30 years ago, to 26 percent today – GM announced the closing of nine more American plants and the dismissal of 30,000 more workers.

Many reasons are given for the decline of the U.S. auto industry. The Volkswagen "Beetle" that invaded America in the late 1950s, the Toyotas and Hondas that followed, the Korean Kias coming in today are, we are told, cheaper and more reliable, and deliver better mileage. But there is a more basic reason for America's industrial decline.

A sea change has taken place in the mindset of our elites. The economic patriotism of Hamilton and Henry Clay, of Lincoln and T.R. and, yes, of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, who forged America into the mightiest industrial machine the world had ever seen, is dead.

To the economic patriots of the Old Republic, trade policy was to be designed to benefit, first, the American worker. They wanted American families to have the highest standard of living on earth and U.S. industry to be superior to that of any and all nations. If this meant favoring American manufacturers with privileged access to U.S. markets and keeping foreign goods out with high tariffs, so be it.

But that Hamiltonian America-First vision that guided us for 150 years no longer informs our politics. Economic patriotism is dead.

For the Davos generation of leaders puts the Global Economy first. They are all good internationalists. If it's good for the Global Economy, it must be good for America. Theirs is a quasi-religious faith in that same free-trade ideology for which Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and T.R. had only spitting contempt.

And like Marxists who refuse to question their dogmas, despite manifest signs of failure, our free-traders believe that everything that is happening to America has to be happening for the best.

That U.S. manufacturing that once employed a third of our labor force now employs perhaps 10 percent does not matter. That the most self-sufficient nation in history, which produced 96 percent of all that it consumed, now depends on foreigners for a fourth of its steel, half its autos and machine tools, two-thirds of its textiles and apparel, and most of its cameras, bicycles, motorcycles, shoes, televisions, videotape machines, radios, etc. does not matter.

That tens of thousands of foreign workers are brought in each year by U.S. employers to take high-tech jobs, that U.S. factories are shut down daily here while opening in China, that professional work is being outsourced to India, that we borrow $2 billion a day to finance consumption of foreign goods – none of this matters. The nation does not matter. The country does not matter. For we are all now in a Global Economy.

And so, as the jobs and skills of U.S. manufacturing workers disappear, and the taxes they pay into Social Security, Medicare, and federal and state governments fall, and the cost of their pensions is passed on to taxpayers, and the government goes deeper into debt to cover rising social costs corporations used to carry, other countries quietly observe.

Fifty years ago, a trade deficit of 6 percent of GDP, a hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs and a growing dependence on foreign nations for the vital necessities of our national life would have been taken as signs of the decline and fall of a great nation.

Our elites tell us that we have simply not read Thomas Friedman, we do not understand that the old Hobbesian world is history, that we have entered a new era of interdependence, where democracy and free markets will flourish and usher us all into a golden age – and we Americans will lead the way.

If they are right, we are Cassandras. If they are wrong, they are fools who sold out the greatest country in all history for a mess of potage.

Link

The Management of GM killed GM.  "On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors" by John DeLorean.  Corporate Interests have been selling the USA to the highest bidder going back to the 50's and they aren't done yet.

Pat gets a whole bunch of things right in his commentary, but let's not pretend the Gilded Age Robber Barons were economic patriots.  They went to any lengths necessary to exploit the American worker and fought with all weapons--legal and extralegal--to keep the workers from organizing for fair wages, reasonable hours, and safe conditions.  The motto of big business then is the same as now: "The most work for the least pay."
Buchanan cannot give organized labor any credit as a rightwing idealogue, and this is a shame because it leads him to mendacious claims about "patriotism" and beneficent intentions among the capitalists of previous generations.
You could not extract Pennsylvania minerals in China, and it was not feasible to forge Pennsylvania steel in Mexico.  Rockafeller needed to build American railroads in America, that much is obvious.
If industrialists of yore were faithful to American workers, it was out of georgraphical necessity and pressure from organized labor.
Friedman's analysis may be factually correct, but it isn't morally correct.  Globalization without the strong counterforce of organized labor and without regard to the ecological limits of the globe will result in catastrophe on a scale without precedent.
General Motors was not killed by a "who" so much as a "what," and that is the greed of corporate executives who are forced by a self-destructive corporatism to funnel every dime possible into the burgeoning bank accounts of the wealthy few.  Yes, greed killed GM, and what will kill General Motors will kill America.

The problem with General Motors is that their product lines have been stagnant for far too long. Up until the late 1960's, GM was the worldwide leader in automotive design, and the quality of their vehicles was among the best in the world. Their cars were elegant and stylish, and they didn't rely wholly on market research and focus groups when it came to designing their vehicles.
   Today, it seems that the quality gap between GM and the Japanese automakers has been pretty much closed (after their quality suffered horrendously in the 70's and 80's), yet their designs (for the most part) are still quite bland and they lack the refinement of their Asian counterparts.
   Not to mention that the suits at GM have made some spectacular missteps. Remember the Pontiac Aztek (which I like to refer to as the "Edsel Of The New Millenium")? How in the bloody hell did that thing ever make it off the drawing board and into the showrooms looking the way it did?  By all accounts, it was a well-executed vehicle, but it was wrapped in some of the ugliest sheetmetal and plastic to emerge from a domestic auto plant since the demise of American Motors. They also killed off their oldest brand name, Oldsmobile, while at the same time spending a good chunk of their capital buying Saab and the rights to the Hummer brand.
    It's not for lack of engineering skill, that's for sure. The latest Corvette, the Z06, is by far the best Vette ever built, and can outperform "supercars" that cost two to three times as much. However, there's the problem. GM is using too much of their technical ability in developing "prestige cars" (witness also the Chevrolet SSR, a sort of modern El Camino that costs over $40,000 and examples of which have sat unsold for months on dealers' lots--a vehicle that is capable of stunning performance but is also completely impractical), and not enough in their regular passenger car lineup.
   GM is not dead yet. I still believe that they can build vehicles that will send customers scrambling to their showrooms, and being an auto enthusiast (and a traditional GM loyalist) I try to keep up on their future plans, and I can tell you that they have some vehicles that will be coming out within the next few years that could certainly generate the buzz that they so sorely need. Saturn, in particular, has a couple of cars coming out in the next 2 years that I think will blow people away (Google "Saturn Sky" and "Saturn Aura" and you'll see what I mean  ;)). Also, it is rumored that Chevrolet will unveil a prototype for a new Camaro at the 2006 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, which is only a week or two away. So don't count them out yet.

  GM is not dead yet. I still believe that they can build vehicles that will send customers scrambling to their showrooms, and being an auto enthusiast (and a traditional GM loyalist) I try to keep up on their future plans, and I can tell you that they have some vehicles that will be coming out within the next few years that could certainly generate the buzz that they so sorely need. Saturn, in particular, has a couple of cars coming out in the next 2 years that I think will blow people away (Google "Saturn Sky" and "Saturn Aura" and you'll see what I mean  ;)). Also, it is rumored that Chevrolet will unveil a prototype for a new Camaro at the 2006 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, which is only a week or two away. So don't count them out yet.


yeah, well I say the new prototype Camaro today on one of the car websites.  It's like they say the Mustang and the Challenger and said "How do we design something that looks like both, while at the same time looking really ugly?"  GM has always been good with drivetrains, but their entire cabin design team should be fired, the interior of the new SSR is awful (I know, I really liked it when I first saw the car until I looked inside it).  Cheap, poorly fitted plastic is their new motto.  Between the crappy transmissions of Chrylser, the overpriced Fords, and the cheap plastic GMs, I finally had to break down and buy a Japanese vehicle to replace my last car. 

So yeah. Poor GM has to pay it's workers, and maintain their healthcare costs.  If they didn't devolve into building crap for the past 15-20 years they wouldn't be in the same boat they are now.  Most of the deals these automakers are stuck in, were designed to keep them from shipping jobs out of the country.  They still shipped the jobs overseas,  so they pay people to sit in a room rather than build cars from prior labor arangements.  They really have no one to blame except themselves.  However, history has shown us that the Republicans love to give huge bailouts to large companies, (like Chrysler in the 80s, or the airlines in 2002) so I'm sure they'll be more than happy to boost the profits of GM at the same time they cry about the costs of social programs and slash away at them.

yeah, well I say the new prototype Camaro today on one of the car websites.  It's like they say the Mustang and the Challenger and said "How do we design something that looks like both, while at the same time looking really ugly?" 
Ugly? I must most humbly disagree with you.  That thing looks TUFF. ;)