Make Michael Moore a GM Director!

The fat lady finally sang. General Motors (GM) is gone at last. Don’t look at the share price, which now trades in pennies, down from $90. Look at the labor force, which has shrunk from 360,000 to 39,000 on its way to 18,000. I sat at Ralph Nader’s knee (because there were no chairs) 40 years ago, who wore his unfashionable trademark white shirt and pencil thin tie. He was fresh from the runaway success of his book Unsafe at Any Speed, which castigated GM for its Corvair, which had the unfortunate tendency to explode when hit from behind. Even then he was predicting the demise of GM. Companies that recklessly kill off their customers and produce inferior products at high prices can’t last, he said. Fuel efficiency and the environment came later. Many people considered him a communist then, for bashing GM was considered unpatriotic by most and treasonable by some. No doubt J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was following his every move. I think that Obama should now make Nader a director of GM, along with that other GM hater, Michael Moore.

-- The Mad Hedge Fund Trader

The bolding emphasis above is my own, of course.

You gave it away, when you said that you learned at the knee of Ralph Nader. If you learned "cars" from Ralph Nader, who has never designed and built so much as one part for a car, much less an entire industry, who doesn't own a car, and who, as far as I know, has never had a driver's license, well then I feel sort of sorry for you.

But not sorry enough to refrain from pointing out to you that the Corvair did not have a rear-impact problem. The Corvair had terrific rear-impact crashworthiness. Because, like the Volksgagens and Porsches of the era, the Corvair had an air-cooled rear engine. No gas tank in the rear. No rear-end explosion risk. You must feel pretty stupid right about now, making up that part, and having gotten caught.

But because you seem like such a nice idiot, apart from your sick proposal to put that corpulent asshole Michael Moore on the GM board, I'll help you out. The Corvair issues that Nader took on had to do with the Corvair's rollover propensity, due to the design of its four-wheel independent supension.

So, GM, let that be a lesson to you. You take a brilliant car designer like the late Ed Cole; you turn him loose to build a small, economical American car in the image of a Volkswagen, and what happens? Ralph Nader sues you. That'll teach you. And it did.