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5/29/09

Daily Finance/EU-Digest - "Resistance is becoming morally justified" - With GM nearly bankrupt, can America manage?

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"Resistance is becoming morally justified" - With GM nearly bankrupt, can America manage?

General Motors (GM) most likely has just a few days before it files for bankruptcy, marking the final death gasps of a company that once controlled 50 percent of the North American vehicle market and sported a peak market value (in April 2000) of $54 billion.While the bankruptcy is great news for America's bankruptcy lawyers and investment bankers -- the pilot fish of American business, snapping up the scraps of food left behind by the economic sharks who create new wealth -- GM's demise also raises a more troubling question: Can America manage? Or more specifically, can American managers still create world-leading industries or have we lost it? First, let's examine GM's pending bankruptcy and the huge amount of money to be made off it by those economic pilot fish. Weil, Gotshal & Manges, the New York firm handling the Lehman case, recently sought approval for billings of $55 million for just three months' work, and is expected to get more from GM.

GM, which has already gotten $19.4 billion in U.S. debt, will require almost four times more -- $40 billion to $70 billion in debtor-in-possession financing -- to create a new version of GM. Bankers will cash in on the GM bankruptcy gold rush as well.

America has recently proven itself to be a failure when it comes to sustaining an automobile industry and our finance industry has only succeeded in gaining control of the global economic system -- right before nearly wiping it out. So can the U.S. economic system still do anything right? Note EU-Digest: If the politicians like it or not, the buck stops with them. They have let this happen and they are still letting this disaster go on. Where is the regulation they promised to put in place around the world to reign in the "free wheeling" of the financial industry?. Maybe it's good to remind government leaders and politicians around the world on what Thomas Jefferson wrote to M. deStael in 1807, "When patience has begotten false estimates of its motives, when wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality". If changes today mean just re-establishing the status quo, millions of desperate people affected by the incompetence of their leaders could very well revert to revolution as the only valuable option for cleaning-up the mess the world finds itself in. Once the masses start moving it will be too late.

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