Is there any symbolic signficance to GM filing for bankruptcy?

GM is already out of bankruptcy.

Only because the government bought shares in it.

Well I know it doesn’t make sense to blame the union. The union only gets what management is willing to give them.

What does the bankruptcy mean? It means that management sucked. They didn’t plan ahead very effectively. They didn’t build the cars that people wanted. They didn’t cut back production quickly enough when demand dropped.

It does represent a decline in American power, but only because the whole recession has hurt our ability to wield power around the world. I don’t think we are the role model we once were.

I don’t think it symbolizes the transition to information economy. That was happening anyway. They will still be making cars. I hope they will do it smarter—more efficiently and more effectively.

I think it symbolizes the decline of American manufacturing. It shows us that even the most powerful companies can screw it up and become shadows of their former selves. It is an object lesson in the dangers of complacency. It shows what happens when you don’t pay attention to the world around you. A company can not thrive in ignorance. Not for the long term. They have to follow trends that can affect them, and look down the road a decade or two, and make plans for a variety of circumstances that could happen. Either GM failed to do this or they made really bad projections.

The symbolism isn’t important here. The important thing is that GM has an outdated business model that produces products that are no longer in demand and their infrastructure which is geared towards building these behemoths, is so large that it would bankrupt the company to change their factories to make anything else.

Toyota and Honda do well because they innovate. American auto makers aren’t innovating much of anything lately. They’re just trying to do the same things they always have.

I think there’s a great deal of symbolism here.

GM failed because it thought it was big enough and powerful enough that it could dictate the sort of cars that Americans would buy. When the price of gas skyrocked, GM was producing and trying to sell a couple dozen models of SUV and few subcompacts. But it’s worse than that: GM really didn’t react to the fuel crisis of the late 1970s—it just weathered it and waited for gas to get cheap again. Meanwhile, the market changed. People who wanted reliable, fuel-efficient cars bought Toyotas and Hondas and Subarus, not Chevrolets and Oldsmobiles and Buicks.

Meanwhile, the United States is trying to carry on as if the Cold War is still on and as if imperialism and military adventurism are the proper tools of world diplomacy. At the same time, it’s racking up debt like there’s no tomorrow. This has worked in the past, because we had enough resources to weather the crisis—but it’s not clear that we’ll have enough resources this time. Who’s going to bail out the US when we realize we can’t meet our debt obligations?