Michelle Malkin: [bracketed text mine]
I knew it sounded familiar.
GM thinks we are all Gigantic Morons. The failing company published a two-page letter to American taxpayers today admitting that it made crappy cars and ran its business into the ground. Here’s a flavor of the new GM grovel epistle:
We deeply appreciate the Congress considering General Motors’ request to borrow up to $18 billion from the United States. We want to be sure the American people know why we need it, what we’ll do with it and how it will make GM viable for the long term.
…While we’re still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you. At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster. We have proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pick-up trucks and SUVs. And, we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today’s globally competitive industry. We have paid dearly for these decisions, learned from them and are working hard to correct them by restructuring our U.S. business to be viable for the long term. [We still suck.]
Today, we have substantially overcome our quality gap; our newest designs like the Chevrolet Malibu and Cadillac CTS are widely heralded for their appeal; our new products are nearly all cars and “crossovers” rather than pick-ups and SUVs; our factories have greatly improved productivity and our labor agreements are much more competitive. We are also driven to lead in fuel economy, with more hybrid models for sale and biofuel-capable vehicles on the road than any other manufacturer, and determined to reinvent the automobile with products like the Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicle and breakthrough technology like hydrogen fuel cells. [We promise to do the things we should have done 5 years ago, the last time we took a whole lot of your money.]
Until recent events, we felt the actions we’d been taking positioned us for a bright future. Just a year ago, after we reached transformational agreements with our unions, industry analysts were forecasting a positive GM turnaround. We had adequate cash on hand to continue our restructuring even under relatively conservative industry sales volume assumptions. Unfortunately, along with all Americans, we were hit by a “perfect storm.” Over the past year we have all faced volatile energy prices, the collapse of the U.S. housing market, failing financial institutions, a stock market crash and the complete freezing of credit. We are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Just like you, we have been severely impacted by events outside our control. U.S. auto industry sales have fallen to their lowest per capita rate in half a century. Despite moving quickly to reduce our planned spending by over $20 billion, GM finds itself precariously and frighteningly close to running out of cash. [We've all been in the same financial crisis, but unlike you, we're too big to fail.]
This is why we need to borrow money from U.S. taxpayers. If we run out of cash, we will be unable to pay our bills, sustain our operations and invest in advanced technology. [We need your money. Lots of it. Now.]
(Here’s the PDF on GM’s website.)
Like I said, I knew this apology strategy sounded familiar.
That’s because GM ran a “We’re sorry we suck so much” ad campaign five years ago in that sounded the same themes.
…I dug up the Web ad on GM’s site via the Wayback Machine. You can watch a bit of it here.
GM’s “road to redemption” five years ago turned out to be another dead end.
If you subsidize it, you’ll get more of it.
The “$15 billion” auto bailout installment is essentially a blank check for a carmaker that admits it has run a failing business for the last 25 years.
Gird up those loins.
Dude, where’s our filibuster?
Time for the rubber to meet the road, to borrow a phrase.
