I'm Speechless

by BILL WADDELL

Headline #1

GM to keep its in-house lobbying staff

General Motors is keeping it's lobbying staff in order to lobby the government even though they are owned by the government?  They are paying lobbyists to lobby the government - which is us - with our money?  What the ......????

Read it here

Headline #2

GM to become more discreet

"As a privately held company, it’s likely we’re not going to disclose information except to the shareholders," Ray Young, GM chief financial officer, said Tuesday.

Read it here

How does the CFO of the most publicly owned company in the history of publicly owned companies in the United States decide that, because their shares are not available on Wall Street, they are privately owned and that they will not share their financials with the public?  Whose $50 billion does he think he has?  Barack Obama's?  How come this guy still has a job? Who hired this guy to begin with?

Even though GM has backed off a bit after sobering up, I can't wrap my mind around any of this  

 

I asked David Foster over at Chicago Boyz to put this into some sort of perspective.  He is a lot smarter than I am and maybe he can make some sense of it all.  

Comments

[Joseph]

If GM ended up in financial troubles, the first person to sack is the CFO. How did we ever reach this position, that the bean counters ended up as the ruling class? It is a sad state of affairs, when highly intelligent engineers and scientists who create the value in a company are treated as subservient to those whose only claim to fame is that they can count...!!!

[Bryan Lund]

What is so hard to understand Bill? This is a clear example of a couple of campaign promises made during a certain campaign actually coming through:

1) No more special interests in Washington,

and

2) Government transparency.

Bryan - we get a lot of clever and insightful comments on Evolving Excellence, but this might top them all. Thanks, Bill

[mike]

Senators give alot of our money to GM, GM gives money to lobbiest who give gifts to the senators.

[Joseph]

Thanks, Mike! I didn't understand the purpose of professional lobbying till you so clearly articulated it... Now it all makes sense! Corrupt parasites helping other parasites to help themselves... Someday, they will have no one left to feed off... Then what will they do?