I feel sorry for all the folks who worked at the corner stores,
restaurants, and other stores where the GM employees and the employees
of their suppliers used to buy snacks when they had a job as well as
for the GM and supplier employees themselves.

Rick Wagoner, on the other hand, should have enough money so that he
doesn't need to work another day in his life. I don't know enough
about the finances and management of the company itself to say how
much Rick Wagoner is responsible for GM's present troubles.

I also think that the UAW is partly responsible for GM's problems.

Jeff

Rick Wagoner, the anti-Iacocca.

The borrower becomes slave to the lender, unless your AIG then it's the
other way around.

I disagree. The US Government is soon to be GMs biggest lender. If
instead of the Government, a big bank had loaned GM billions, they
certainly would have been within their rights to ask Wagoner to resign
as a condition of the loan. Same applies to the US Government.
Recently when Toyota started down the tubes, the CEO was also asked to
resign.  In both cases it is justified.

Many US Boards of Directors are a joke. They are made up of people
with a similar mind set and in many cases the same people are on
boards for multiple companies. There is way too much of a "I'll
scratch your back if you scratch mine" atttitude among US Boards of
Directors. Stockholder have essentially given complete control of the
companies over to the the top management of the company. If things
worked  like they should, the owners of GM (i.e. the Stockholders)
would have dumped Wagner months/years ago.

This is one area where Ford has an advantage over GM. The Ford family
still controls Ford. They realized the prior CEO was going the wrong
way and pulled the plug on him. They were able to go out and look for
the best available CEO. In theory GM's board could do this as well,
but in fact, they are so inbred they can't see their own shortcomings
and they keep hiring clones of the last CEO. Maybe the Government will
shake up this process. Back in the first half of the last century when
GM almost went bankrupt, the DuPont family bailed out GM. The first
thing they did was force out Durant (creator of GM), and installed
Alfred Sloan - the CEO that really got GM going. Maybe history will
repeat this time.

Ed