Bailout Watch 116: Forbes' Jerry Flint Quotes Shelley, Votes Aye

Does anyone edit Jerry Flint’s columns? And yes that’s a trick question. If I were the editor in question, I would sit in awe of any curmudgeon brave enough to argue that GM deserves an extra long root in the federal taxpayers’ trough by admonishing readers that “we should remember Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem.” Ozymandias? That particular poem is about hubris and inevitably of death and decay. And yet our man Flint’s uses the work to suggest that U.S. taxpayers should bail out General Motors because we don’t want a great empire to, uh, decay and die. Here’s the deal: we owe them. “I have a long memory,” Flint opines, synapses firing like mad. “I remember World War II, when the president of GM– his name was William Knudsen– headed the successful effort to build our great war production machine. GM helped save America then.” That would be the same GM that aided and abetted the Nazi war machine. “I remember the great GM pay, pensions, health care and dividends that made life good for millions of Americans.” And the union corruption, intransigence and feather-bedding that made GM a sitting duck for transplant attack. But wait ’til you hear what Flint has to say about GM’s current management. You’re not going to want to miss this. Right after the break.

And we’re back. Thanks for joining us. Before the break, we were examing Jerry Flint’s florid argument for a GM bailout. Not only does the Forbes’ scribe think Americans owe GM another shot, but he’s also come to bury– and praise– the company’s leadership. “If there is a great weakness at GM, it is management. For too many years GM’s financially oriented managers ignored or mishandled the car business. I call it arrogance matched by ignorance. On the other hand, these executives were not thieves. They did not enrich themselves like the leaders of the financial service companies that the government is so eager to rescue. GM’s managers just did not understand why Americans love their cars.” Hello? CEO Rick Wagoner $15.5m annual salary? As Bryon once famously remarked, “for real?”