Way to go, General Motors! You’ve staked your survival on electric cars, hybrid cars, and high-mileage cars - apparently reading tea leaves and thinking that was what Obama and Congressional Democrats wanted. Instead, it turns out Barack Obama thinks you did it all wrong. Even more surprising, it’s GM’s high-tech, environmentally-friendly, crown jewel car of the future that was your biggest mistake.

The Chevrolet Volt may wow the media when it arrives in dealerships next year, but the Obama administration believes the plug-in electric car will cost too much and won’t attract enough buyers.

“While the Volt holds promise, it will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short-term,” the administration said in its evaluation of General Motors Corp.’s restructuring plan. The car “is currently projected to be much more expensive than its gasoline-fueled peers and will likely need substantial reductions in manufacturing cost in order to become commercially viable.”

Read More →

Former RSer Pat Cleary has been checking up on the United Auto Workers and has some thoughts on the need for shared sacrifice. He also observes that the UAW no longer seems so proud of the great deal it got for its members in 2007; in fact, they’ve sent their press release down the memory hole:

So 6 months ago we moseyed on over to The Google and typed in “UAW.” On their site was a link to summaries of their most recent contracts - a link that’s mysteriously gone now. Luckily, we saved it. So here it is, a link to what they said when they inked the most recent agreement with GM back in 2007. Mind you, this was as the company was by everyone’s reckoning speeding headlong into a trough. The UAW release says in part:

Read More →

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration is prepared to recommend billions in new ‘loans’ to America’s automakers, as long as they meet certain requirements. But once you get past that headline, something very disturbing becomes apparent: Obama’s task force never really considered a bailout on the merits, but concerned itself only with how to structure it. The decision to pour tens of billions more into Chrysler and GM was apparently made before the team was ever named.

Interviews with task-force members indicate that the administration doesn’t want to let General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC slip into bankruptcy protection, a course advocated by some critics of the industry. Instead, the task force is expected to say that it sees viable futures for both GM and Chrysler, but only if there are sacrifices from their managements, unions and GM’s bondholders. The team will also lay out a firm timeline for action.

The government is prepared to lend the companies more money. The two companies have requested $22 billion more — including $9 billion for the second quarter. But the task force may not disburse new aid immediately, choosing instead to preserve that as leverage…

Read More →

GM’s auditors are talking about bankruptcy for the automaker:

General Motors Corp.’s auditors have raised “substantial doubt” about the troubled automaker’s ability to continue operations, and the company said it may have to seek bankruptcy protection if it can’t execute a huge restructuring plan.

Read More →

Well what do you know? Despite the rhetoric from President Obama and Congressional Democrats, it looks like the rich are set to reap more than their fair share from the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt spending plan:

Billionaire Paul Allen is a Microsoft cofounder, the owner of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the owner of the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers.

And, thanks to the stimulus bill President Obama signed this week, he’s also about to be as much as a billion dollars richer.

Read More →

This provision was not in the House version of the bill, and was not in the Senate version of the bill. And now Carl Levin wants to sneak it into the conference report — despite the fact that Republican supporters are insisting that the bill be slimmed down?

General Motors Corp. may win protection from a tax liability of as much as $7 billion when Senate stimulus legislation moves to a conference committee, Senator Carl Levin said.

“There’s some strong feeling that it ought to be included in the conference report,” Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said of the protection in comments to reporters today. “There’s strong support for it.”

The $838 billion stimulus measure the Senate approved today doesn’t include the tax provision for GM, nor does the House version. A “technical change” that won’t increase the cost of the legislation could be added in the House-Senate conference committee before the proposal is voted on again in both chambers, Levin said.

Do lawmakers see any tension between a new culture of ‘accountability,’ and a $7 billion payoff that hasn’t even gotten a Congressional hearing yet?

On the other hand, Geithner doesn’t pay taxes, Daschle doesn’t pay taxes, Al Franken doesn’t pay taxes, Rahm Emanuel doesn’t pay taxes… why should GM suddenly have to?