Wall Street Journal:
General Motors Corp. will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy early Monday, marking the humbling of an American icon that once dominated the global car industry and setting up a high-stakes gamble for U.S. taxpayers.
The question now facing 56,000 auto workers, 3,600 GM dealers and the Obama administration: Will it work?
The government, which will own a majority of the company, is wagering upwards of $30 billion that it can return GM to profitability, reversing a decades-long decline by shearing away liabilities and creating a freshly competitive car maker by summer's end.
Wall Street Journal (another piece) titled "The Obama Motor Co."
Back in December, in an economy far, far away, then-CEO Rick Wagoner tossed out the scary cost to taxpayers of $100 billion if General Motors wasn't saved by the government. Well, GM was saved in December and again in March, and as early as today the feds will rescue it a third time in a prepackaged bankruptcy that is already costing at least $50 billion, and that's for starters. Welcome to Obama Motors, and what is likely to be a long, expensive and unhappy exercise in political car making.
NYT: "The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M. "
It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.
The scariest part of this whole thing?
But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.
Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing — “he’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force — Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry’s maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended.
Warm and fuzzy feeling hitting you yet?
The Washington Post:
General Motors filed for bankruptcy protection this morning, marking the end of financial independence for the 100-year-old industrial leviathan that once conflated its interests with the country's and -- counting jobs at the company and its suppliers -- employed well over 1 million people.
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