You can fool yourself by saying this 'was' a big american automobile company,,,or that you bought what 'were' not junk-rated bonds,,,or that you put $70,ooo of your own retirement money in the stock and you 'expect' every stock to be successful expecially when the federal government has been bailing out the big 3 since the 60s or 70s with tax breaks, loans of taxpayer money, and lately $billions in advances on the big 3 designing cutting edge diesel-electric cars but not having to sell a single one. A farce, a tragedy before our very eyes, a collective misplacement of trust.
So you can hide your head in the sand,,,or be 'in denial' ,but we all saw it, the press reported it constantly, and we just got use to GM and Ford and Chrysler being management mediocre and making mediocre cars. The Hummer is a loser on the battlefield because the floor is too close to the ground and can not fit a v-shaped road explosive shield. The GM Citation(a girlfriend had one,,,) was a total piece of crap , like the Chrysler Mercury Capri(my sister had one and the interior ,for one, disintegrated and peeled off like the piece of crap it was).
We americans have been looking the other way at many of our state and national problems , thinking i/we will be ok, but god help the sucker that comes after us !! And that the Feds will always be there to save us, when we now know that this worldwide financial crisis started by the Republican Party basic idea of "deregulation" was what was best for Wall Street and all of us was a big fat known lie and may still ruin the entire international banking system, worse than the so-called 'great depression' that both my parents lived through somehow(one was given away to relatives who could afford to feed him and his sister, imagine,,,).
Will the restructured 'big 3' be able to compete and redesign badly designed and poorly made cars to compete with the japanese and the germans and the other better cars ,since the 60s ? It is extremely doubtful, because creativity is not in a can unlike finance which comes with a off the shelf software program disc. And do you realize how cheap cars are to make?! Ask one of these closed car dealers the big fat industry secret that i learned decades ago that we have been paying luxury retail for years to car companies who lost vision and lost the fire to compete and just stumbled and fumbled along, like the new Camero redesign.
Remember all the VW bugs and VW campers you saw in the 60s all of a sudden, even tho the terrible air cooled pancake engine was notoriously labor intensive like a Porsche and if you did not have/do the dirty valve adjustment job before 3000 miles the engine would blow up, like mine did twice , before i swore never to own an aircooled pancake engine again !
Remember in the 70s, and if you were alive i am sure you do, the huge influx of much better quality and durability and attractive design of the japanese car invasion to the shores of the usa ? i bought a toyota corolla and was amazed that for 10 years it never broke down once,not once!, and only needed its exhaust manifold talken off and filed once, and was much more reliable and more fun to drive and much more fuel efficient ,even tho it was a horrible shade of orange mustard (yikes) and i got it as the last model on the lot at the end of the year at a huge discount because no one else liked the color either. But you could not ignore, unless you were really sick with perceptive denial, that we were being invaded by other,japanese or german, car makers of much better milage cars(the bug and college students) and more attractive cars some or most with better quality and durability,like the old not the new bmw and mb, than most of the crap 'produced in america'.
