"this Administration can imagine the world without the internal combustion engine but not without Chrysler."

"The times truly are out of joint when the most important IPO -- initial public offering -- of 2010 could come from what was American capitalism's iconic corporation for most of its 102 years. Andrew Bary, writing in Barron's, says General Motors "may go public in the second half of this year, and its stock market value could top $50 billion, more than Ford's $40 billion."
This is justice under today's state capitalism: Ford took on $23.6 billion in debt to avoid becoming dependent on Washington, whereas GM shed much of its debt by becoming dependent."
"Detroit's long drive down the crumbling road to disaster is chronicled in "Crash Course" by Paul Ingrassia, formerly of The Wall Street Journal. It is a story of the hubris of a corporate oligopoly and the myopia of a union monopoly."
"In 1970, a 67-day strike against GM won, Ingrassia reports, "the company's 400,000 hourly workers (triple what the Big Three's combined total would be 40 years later) a 30 percent wage hike over the next three years." Soon thereafter, workers could retire at any age with a full pension after 30 years on the job. "If the retiree lived to be 79 or older," Ingrassia writes, "he or she would spend more years drawing a full pension than actually working.""
"By the turn of this century, GM was being kept afloat by its financing arm, GMAC, which was deeply into subprime mortgages. Ingrassia dryly notes: "Some GM dealers in Southern California were taken aback when customers bristled at being asked to fill out a GMAC credit report for a car loan. They hadn't needed a detailed credit report to get a mortgage from GMAC on their new home.""
"...compassionate government has stopped the Darwinian culling of the herd.  When Washington bailed out Chrysler in the late 1970s, Alan Greenspan, then a Wall Street consultant, said the danger was not that the rescue would fail but that it would work, thereby whetting Washington's appetite for interventions. The bailout "worked" in that the government made money from it and Chrysler survived to be rescued 30 years later by an administration that, as a wit has said, can imagine the world without the internal combustion engine but not without Chrysler.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/08/intersection_for_a_disaster_105096.html