The jigsaw puzzle pieces are starting to fit together. There must have been a Bush-Ford conspiracy.
I am not talking about former President Gerald Ford, I’m talking about the secret plan then-President George W. Bush concocted to make Ford Motor the lone surviving U.S. auto manufacturer. (They blame George Bush for the oil spill in the gulf and the break-up of the Gores, so why not this?)
The “evil genius” George Bush (or more likely my old CR friend Karl Rove — a.k.a. “Bush’s Brain”) apparently came up with the idea of bailing out GM and Chrysler to give Ford, which didn’t take a dime of government money, a real competitive advantage. This was especially diabolical because “Dubya” knew Barack Obama and his union buddies would be calling the shots for the bailed-out giants.
The borders of the puzzle framed the “conspiracy.” Look at this headline: “The United Auto Workers control about 65 percent of Chrysler and 17.5 percent of General Motors”. Worse yet, the government now owns 60% of GM. Talk about a competitive disadvantage to those two car giants.
The pieces slowly fell into place. GM eviscerated storied brands, like Pontiac and Oldsmobile, followed-by newer name-plates like Hummer and Saturn. In February, a year after Ford passed Toyota at the number two spot in U.S. market share, for the first time in decades, Ford outsold GM.
But the center-pieces of the puzzle didn’t move into place until recently. Here is the New York Times headline which brought this clearly into focus: “GM Proposes Leaving a Car’s Popular Nickname in the Dust.” GM wasn’t proposing changing its name to the more accurate “Government Motors” — at least yet. (Truth-in-advertising isn’t a hallmark of the current administration.) No, instead General Motors was instructing its employees to stop using the famed nickname “Chevy” for their best selling brand. A quarter century ago a similar corporate blunder was made with the reformulation of Coke into “New Coke” but at least they were smart enough not to insist that their keystone product be called “New Coca-Cola”, instead of “New Coke.”
The “no Chevy” rule as all the markings of its majority shareholder, Uncle Sam — more Obama-speak. “Terrorism” must be called “man-caused disasters” and our “Chevy Camaros” must be called “Chevrolet Camaros.”
And when the public outcry on the “Chevy ban” started, the government controlled entity went to President Obama’s favorite media outlet, YouTube, to shift into reverse, and had a character named “GM Joe” (I kid you not) interview the accented GM official who issued the ban.
The spin of this GM backpedaling – globalism. “This global world we live in today” is “all it’s about.” They are known as “Chevrolet” in the rest of the world, and they wanted the US to conform — but, according to the video, they will make an exception for us Americans. Maybe THAT’S what the administration means by “American Exceptionalism.”
