OBAMA AND THE KNOWNOTHINGS SACK WAGONER

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After Rick Wagoner's tone-deaf jet trip to Washington D.C. last November, it became clear that GM's CEO would probably be thrown overboard at some point in the "Beg 2" financial crisis.

In fact, Truth With Speedzzter then opined:

Wagoner is the last of the traditional "Detroit insider" CEOs. The popular canard that it will take brilliant folks who have not grown up in inside the auto industry to save it is a career-flattening steamroller for company men like Wagoner.

He may not have made the mess and he may have been fighting for restructuring long before anyone in Congress ever even heard of the concept, but he's most likely to take the fall for generations of GM managers that are long gone.

It maybe totally unfair and divorced from the actual facts, but Wagoner might just be one of the sacrificial lambs in the titanic struggle to save GM.

That day came just a handful of days before GM's Congressionally-mandated restructuring plan was due. And the call to the bullpen apparently came from the highest levels of the Government.

CNBC's Phil LeBeau said

In one full swoop, the White House has made it clear it will re-make America's largest auto maker from the top down.

This goes way beyond dumping the CEO of a company gasping for air.

This is the start of the Treasury Department actively changing who and how GM operates.

Nothing suggests that Rick Wagoner was unable or unwilling to carry out the whims of Obama's Central Committee of Car Czars. Moreover, no one could reasonably question Wagoner's commitment to a company he'd spent over three decades of his life serving in various capacities.

So why did Rick get the "death penalty?" Was it that he failed to impress Obama's automotive know-nothings? Was he too strong for Obama's committee of fly-weights, environmental activists, and non-vehicle owners to manage? Was Wagoner's apparent inability to work a deal with the U.A.W. his downfall?

No. It was old-fashioned scapegoat symbolism, plain and simple. It was a trophy for the wall of GM's legion of critics. It was badge-engineered to buy Obama and his clueless band of Car Czars more time and a larger blank check.

Obama served up Wagoner's head to attempt to squelch vapid "experts," such as the near-brain-dead Alabama Senator Richard Shelby and a host of chauffeured politicians and appliance motorists who pretend to know how to "fix" GM.


Obama's sacking of Wagoner was rooted in cynical realpolitik, not justice or fairness.

It was meant to soften the criticism of inevitably borrowing more money from the Chinese and our grandchildren to give Obama's loyal supporters in the U.A.W. a softer landing in the GM collapse.

(Of course, dumping Wagoner will do nothing to win over the hard-core "Tokyo Roses" in the "Let 'em die/Let Toyota take over America" camp. But it might give Obama a little more "cover" among free-spending moderates, big labor, and disgruntled environmentalists)

To be fair, Rick Wagoner will not be remembered in the Pantheon of great Detroit automobile executives. He was little more than a journeyman corporate bureaucrat who was faced with a mess even some of the legends couldn't have unwound. He was a product of GM's system of homogenisation, notwithstanding the fact that he actually sometimes listened to Maximum Bob Lutz and John Heinricy. And it cannot be ignored that GM's collapse happened on Wagoner's watch.

But Rick Wagoner probably deserved a lot better than being shown the door by a group of hyperpartisan opportunists who are even less capable at their jobs than Wagoner was at his.