Board Chairman Whitacre: GM Must Be America's Number One! Again! (But Not Still)

Wall Street Journal had a little post-BOD meeting chinwag with New GM’s federally-appointed Chairman of the Board. Clearly, Edward E. Whitacre Jr.’s busy not kicking ass and not taking names. Whitacre told the WSJ that “GM’s business plan needs to be ‘tweaked.’ Among areas he cited as needing rapid improvement are advertising, revenue and net income.” Do you have any idea how hard it was not to substitute the word “nipples” for “business plan”? Anyway, “Gaining market share is ‘right there at the top’ of his agenda for Chief Executive Frederick ‘Fritz’ Henderson, Mr. Whitacre said. ‘You clearly don’t want to be in a position of losing market share.'” Thanks for the [unintentional] hat tip to the U.S. taxpayer, but didn’t Eddy get the memo about GM bankrupting itself in the single-minded pursuit of market share? No, he didn’t. Make the jump for the most worrying corporate jingoism since, well, all the other GM BS.

Mr. Whitacre, a former AT&T Corp. chairman, said being No.1 is “the position we should strive for… an American company that employs hundreds of thousands of people…We just want to be No. 1.”

And girls just wanna have fun. But, you know, hungry mouths to feed and all that. The list for which now includes every man, woman and child paying taxes in these here United States—who were over 70 percent opposed to GM’s nationalization. Could Whitacre’s attitude get any worse? Yes, it could.

Referring to improving market share, Mr. Whitacre said, “I want to see it done quickly…the whole board wants to see it done quickly. We know we’ve got great products. We’ve got to create awareness out there.”