Thinking in Summer (v.2K9)

Image: The Bankruptcy Litigation Blog.

2009 tastes the end of an era for the US automotive industry. Those days of glory, when General Motors Company reigned supreme as the world's foremost enterprise are over. How big can be measured by the fact that its revenues were bigger than the Gross Income of some nations. I recall one particular year, when it was larger than that of the Netherlands. GM's logo is known almost by everyone and it is likely that few people have not got a ride in one of its vehicles, or at least in one made under another brand belonging to that company.

When Nikita Kruschev visited the US in 1959, then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower welcomed him to IBM saying ”you will see a true American company”. Movie director Stanley Kubrick took to the future the icons of that American industry in 2001, A Space Odyssey: Pan American would shuttle people to space; IBM would go on governing computing technology and telephones would be run by Bell (Ma Bell). Only GM was absent in that film (BTW some DVD transfers lack all those logos today).

Now GM is 60% in the hands of the US Government (Where are You, Adam Smith?), though it promises a short term intervention. However, Bell is gone as an empire long ago, as long ago some other covert monopolys went over too. Although IBM is still powerful, it is no longer the tycoon it used to be. I don't think that we are to witness the end of GM, I believe it will reinvent itself to come back like a Phoenix. Would it be possible to think that GM is a herald of a new age, the signal of the end of entrepreneurial megafaunas?

Or perhaps it is exactly the opposite? That we are seen the raise, not of magafaunas, but of petafaunas, capable of eating whole markets at once? Could it be possible tha Nikita´s Prophecy is on its way? Would Eisenhower greet Nikita with so much pride today, like in 1959?

I have never been a big fan of US cars. But I do love some of its finest ones. Like Mustangs, Cobras or Corvettes, which would have been impossible to develop in other markets. Also, I am fed up with the sad and loud GM farewell: Amidst convoluted negotiations,occult agendas and only God knows which other sordid manuevers. History, perhaps, will tell the whole story some day.

Perhaps some day someone will seat in front of the descendant of the Wikipedia just to read it all: "Then President Barack Obama, advised by the Nation leading banking staffs, decided to save the Company by investing billions of dollars taken from taxpayers in order to...".