Rick Wagoner, under whose “leadership” GM lost tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs, will drive away with a $20 million retirement package, ABC News is reporting.
Get it, “drive away?” You know, because he runs an auto company.
Or at least he did until Big Brother took him out.
From ABC:
Although the Treasury Department has barred GM from paying severance to Wagoner or any other senior executive, Wagoner is eligible to collect millions in retirement benefits from his former employer, according to the documents reviewed by ABC News.
The Obama administration asked for Wagoner to resign Sunday, as part of its restructuring of the auto industry. President Obama said this morning that forcing Wagoner out indicated it was a time for new leadership.
As we’ve said previously, these executive CEO salaries and benefit packages are absolutely crazy … and paying exorbitant bonuses for crappy performance is even crazier.
No wonder GM is so tragically effed.
But just like it’s not Obama’s job to delegate a private sector firing, it’s not the Treasury Department’s job to say who gets what private sector severance deal.
That’s GM’s job – and if they do it poorly, they deal with the repercussions of that.
Sure, sure, we get the PR argument and the whole fiduciary responsibility thing (like anybody in Washington actually takes that responsibility seriously), but this is supposed to be a free market.
Remember that expression, America? Free market?
Prior to October of last year it’s what this country was.
That’s the fundamental problem with bailouts, though. They simultaneously invite – and defy – government conditions.
Which is why government has no business bailing anybody out.
Everybody should play by the same rules, the rules should be transparent and fair and just like nobody is “too small to succeed,” nobody – and we mean nobody – should ever be classified as “too big to fail.”
We used a word earlier – repercussions.
Frankly, we’re surprised Obama hasn’t outlawed that word because everybody in his administration – even on its “tough love” days – keeps floating along in an Ivy League haze as if there’s no such thing as repercussions. Or at least no such thing as repercussions that a sufficient dose of generational debt can’t fix.
Of course if you plan on being the beneficiary of that debt, it’s pretty clear the prerequisite is handing the keys to your company over to “The One.”
