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Wagoner steps down, Obama steps up
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This could be ugly.
As has widely been reported, Rick Wagoner has stepped down as chairman and chief executive officer of General Motors. A terse press release issued yesterday (March 29) said in part that Wagoner would be cleaning out his desk and is being replaced:
“Rick Wagoner is stepping down as chairman and CEO, effective immediately. Wagoner, 56, was named president and CEO in 2000, and assumed the role of chairman in 2003.”
Another release carried a statement from Wagoner himself:
“On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with Administration officials. In the course of that meeting, they requested that I ‘step aside’ as CEO of GM, and so I have.”
Reports from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press state that the resignation came as the requests from “the Obama administration” and “the White House” as a condition of receiving additional aid from the, adroitly avoiding the fact that the president himself has the ultimate responsibility, not a faceless “administration,” or worse, a building,
No doubt course of events will be cheered by the generation who envisioned themselves as manning the barricades, heirs of the French Revolutionary spirit and Les Miserables. Not the least will be radical leftist and Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers, who helped launch Mr. Obama’a presidential campaign. Having forced America’s political defeat in Vietnam, it’s the same generation—or at least part of it—that is now the leverage behind Mr. Obama’s ability to bring down Wagoner, a Delta Tau Delta fraternity member—ironically on the 34th anniversary of the last main contingent of U.S. military forces to leave South Vietnam.
Heads will roll, as the saying goes, with Mr. Wagoner’s undoubtedly being only one of the first.
By having the personal responsibility for humbling the president and CEO of America’s largest automaker and one of the world’s biggest companies, Mr. Obama has no doubt cheered the likes of Carol Browner, his global warming chief and member of Mr. Obama’s auto industry task for…and recent member of Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Economy.What this means over the long run will be played out as Mr. Obama’s term continues and his government’s crushing financial influence is brought to bear on GM’s product development. No doubt Mr. Obama will stare off long into the teleprompter, speaking in conciliatory but challenging tones about the auto industry and government “partnership” or some such.
But this now places Mr. Obama as the effective head of General Motors, a company that for all its faults has now finally begun to turn around with quality products and world-class technology—belatedly for Mr. Wagoner, under whose tutelage had also seen market share and capitalization collapse, although a process fairly begun long before he took office.
I wish Mr. Obama good luck, for as GM goes, so goes the nation. Unfortunately, the government neither has a remarkable history of being unable to manage any commercial enterprise—nor was it intended to have—and Mr. Obama’s “green” tendencies will likely place “social responsibility” ahead of profitability.
The future of General Motors, along with the union members who got him elected, is. now in Mr. Obama’s hands. Will Mr. Obama, who is delivering the change he promised, be a savior that many think him to be? Or drawing from the fantasies of generation who made him what he has become, become another Robespierre?
This could be ugly indeed.
Illustrations" Top, now-former General Motors President and CEO Rick Wagoner at the introduction of the Sequel concept vehicle at Shanghai in 2006. Copyright General Motors Corp. Bottom: Then president-elect Barack Obama in January warning of economic "catastrophe" is his economic plans aren't followed. AP photo.
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