The bankruptcy of General Motors is arguably the biggest news story of the year.
In a year when the most attention getting news stories are about economics, the forced Chapter 11 filing by the giant global car manufacturer noted for building average cars for average consumers is a shocker.
The last six months, ever since GM executives flew in their corporate jets to Washington to beg for a bailout from the taxpayers, have been leading up to the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan this morning.
The moment everyone expected is now here.
In Louisiana we are wondering if there is a snowball’s chance in Hades that the Chevrolet plant in Shreveport will stay open. The plant once had a 3,000 person payroll. That’s been whittled down to around 800 who build Chevrolet and GMC pickups and Hummers.
It appears the fate of the plant depends on whether GM will continue to build Hummers, or sell that line of gas-guzzlers to another firm. Presumably if GM sells off Hummer, it won’t have as much need to operate the Shreveport plant to just build trucks.
We wish the folks in Shreveport the best, but as taxpayers we hope the Hummer will be among the automobile lines General Motors spins off. The Hummer is a gas-guzzler extraordinaire, takes up too much road space, and outside of a movie set or a real-life war zone looks like an overachieving fish out of water.
We feel we can be opinionated about the Hummer because the government now operates the company, and we, along with every other American taxpayer, now own about 60 percent of General Motors.
In bankruptcy court GM will be apparently halved into two companies, a sort of good GM and bad GM. The bad side will be made up of parts of the company not expected to be able to survive in the future world of automobile manufacturing. The good side will have profitable cars with good mileage, repair records and so on. Parts of the bad side will sold off to investors who think they can make a business of the unwanted elements.
Whether lawyers will tie the government’s plan up in lawsuits, whether the government has already put itself behind the 8-ball by giving too many concessions to the autoworkers union, whether consumers will ever want to buy another General Motors vehicle after seeing local dealerships close, in other words, how the reorganization plan will play out, is a tale yet to be told.
One thing does seem clear. When it comes to seeing the USA, a lot more people will not being doing it in their new Chevrolet.
