Friday, June 12, 2009 - Posts
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Micheline Maynard on GM: 1) Rattner: "We're not going to fail ." I would say that lets us say he failed if he fails! Specifically, it rules out the "We're giving them a shot but if they collapse in a couple of years at least we delayed it" defense.. .. 2) Rattner's problem has always been his high profiling in the press. Yesterday he was quoted boasting about not failing in the same newspaper in which his (possibly more powerful) auto task force colleague, Ron Bloom, was attempting to strike a lower key note in testimony to Congress.... 3) The government isn't going to run GM--it's a "passive shareholder"--but according to Rattner it is going to change GM's culture. OK!. ...4) So here's how the culture will change, if I read Maynard right: By empowering GM's holdover old guard managers who are steeped in the old culture to make decisions without consulting the holdover old guard CEO, Fritz Henderson. Sounds like a dramatic "wholesale restructuring" to me. . .. 5) This delegation of power to the existing bureaucrats will also be accompanied by "a deeper level of scrutiny" from the board of directors. But no second-guessing, of course. ..
Meanwhile at FIAT/Chrysler: Sergio Marchionne is speed dating ...
And I have buried the lede: Robert Farago has an amazing, Washington-Monthlyesque explanation for GM's "crap interiors." I don't quite believe it. But if true, it should be a segment on "60 Minutes" ... 2:39 A.M.
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Jennifer Rubin gives her trademark optimistic analysis (from an anti-Wagner Act union perspective) of the prospects for "card check" compromise. ... The CW is less optimistic, I think. ... 2:07 A.M.
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My friend Robert Wright, who applies a Marxist/materialist view of religion in his new book, thinks Palestinians, and the Muslim world generally, will behave better when they no longer feel "humiliated and dispossessed" and "not in control of their own destiny." Presumably he'd say the same thing about Israeli Jews who believe "God wants the people of Israel to populate all of the promised land." ... I share his basic viewpoint--but it has a big Marxist/Condescension problem, not unlike Obama's famous "cling" problem with guns and God in Pennsylvania. 'That's a nice little religious faith you have there. But I know that your beliefs will change if your circumstances change.' At some point the people you are dealing with sense that you think you know better than they do (which you probably do and definitely think you do). ... When I last wrote about this problem, I didn't have a very satisfying solution, though it looks better to me now than it did then. .... One response I didn't discuss is to hang a lantern on the problem and drily condescend to God too: "The Abrahamic God has shown the capacity for great moral growth," writes Wright. See you next week at the usual time, God. ... Not sure that helps! ... 1:53 A.M.
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