Thanks for bringing this to our attention, bmaz.

Somehow I don’t think this is playing out the way Obama had in mind.
He better watch out or he’ll be known as the President who Killed Detroit.

Bob in HI

You know, I thought this change just about 6 weeks ago was interesting considering present news.

Frank Asbeck had said last fall that SolarWorld was ready to take over troubled GM’s German subsidiary and transform it into an eco-friendly automaker. But Asbeck tells the German newspaper Die Welt that conditions have changed significantly since he first expressed interest in Adam Opel GmbH.

Bonn-based SolarWorld had planned in November to offer GM about $350 million, plus $945 million in credit lines, for four German plants and Opel’s development center and headquarters.

GM never expressed interest. A spokeswoman said in November that Opel was not for sale.

And then this back in March as well:

FRANKFURT (AP) — Employees at German carmaker Adam Opel GmbH, a unit of struggling General Motors Corp., said Friday they wanted to join Opel dealers in buying a stake in the company.

Klaus Franz, the Opel workers’ representative, said employees are in favor of joining dealers in an attempt to buy a 25 percent stake, a blocking minority which would give them a say in company decisions.

After a meeting with employees in Ruesselsheim on Friday, Franz did not provide more details about the proposal, but said any investment is contingent on employees’ pay remaining at current levels.

Franz said workers would be open to negotiations during the next round of talks on wages, vacation pay and Christmas bonuses.

On Thursday, German Opel dealers said they were in favor of splitting off the Adam Opel GmbH unit from parent General Motors Corp. and grounding an independent Opel of Germany with headquarters in Ruesselsheim.

After all of that change, the German government has given this list to Fiat:

The FT has also obtained the checklist of criteria that any potential deal will have to fulfil in order to have any chance of receiving loan guarantees by the German government, which would provide the lion’s share of the loan guarantees supplied by the various European governments that play host to GM Europe plants. The checklist was drawn up by Germany’s vice-chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier to ensure it represents the interests of the German taxpayer and Opel’s German workforce. While on examination the list is a sensible checklist of what should be examined from Opel and the German government’s point of view before any deal is approved, it also confirms the sheer multitude of obstacles that need to be overcome for any deal between the two companies to be agreed. The questions over who would own Opel’s patents and intellectual property appears to be particularly thorny.

The full list of criteria is as follows (as reported by the FT):

* A solid and sustainable business concept.
* Synergies and additional market opportunities.
* Complexity (would the concept require European Commission approval?)
* Who would own Opel’s patents and intellectual property?
* The number of jobs under threat.
* The credibility of the buyer’s international strategy.
* Location of future headquarters and where taxes would be paid.
* The impact of the transaction and eventual restructuring on German suppliers to Opel.
* The credibility of Opel’s future management.
* The degree of support from Opel’s workforce and stakeholders.
* The experience of the buyer in closing similar transactions and managing large corporate entities.
* Financial solidity of the transaction.
* Contractual conditions.
* The compatibility of corporate cultures between Opel and buyer.

It would be nice to know why GM walked away from the combination of SolorWorld and employee ownership?

Nice work if you can get it. Why did I talk myself into being a mere academic economist rather than a fast-deal card shark? This is what happens when there is too much executive unemployment. Idle hands and devil’s work.

Hey bmaz, you know, there are a great deal of crossover concepts from your The Value Of The Hometeam post and this post!

If GM can pull this off and hold on to the Opel Ampra, then GM should form an alliance with SolarWorld or OPEL International to come up with the next generation of PV cells that are integrated on the roof of cars for solar charging while the car sits parked outside.

That was SolarWorld’s hope at least.

About 20 years ago, I regularly visited a part of the State that had a heavy concentration of Textile Mill Towns. These Mills had no Unions, but the workers ‘didn’t care’ because the factories were steady running all the time.

A burgeoning white Middle Class had begun to emerge in the communities that served the Mills. The need for services – such as lawncare and landscaping steadily increased, too.

But a pervasive air of ‘cheapness’ ran through these communities. As far as I know, only the Mill Management was working towards a retirement. The Mill Hands were only working towards pay-day – once they were ‘used up,’ they were kicked to the side and forgotten.

But, without a whit of self-awareness, these Mill Workers were ‘cheap,’ too. They were more than willing to ‘look the other way’ at hispanic illegal immigrants in the lawncare business – because they were the lowest ‘cost.’

The hispanics worked hard for less, and the Mill Workers didn’t have to worry about their Mill jobs, either, because the illegals weren’t Citizens.

By the time I first visited the area, the County Health Departments were over-flowing with hispanic mothers, and children, who couldn’t speak English. The Health Departments didn’t have enough translators, and the lines were long, all day long.

And, all those mothers were holding natural-born Citizens in their arms, too.

Taxes were going up to pay for new schools, busses, teachers, roads, water and sewer, and more County Services. The Middle Class was ‘paying’ for its ‘cheapness’ without even realizing it – they never stopped patronizing the (illegal) discount services providers.

And then the unthinkable happened – the Mill Management started hiring the natural-Citizen children of the illegals – at substantially lower pay rates!

The white Middle Class started rapidly shrinking as the hispanic Lower Class became the New Middle Class. All the while, the Mill Owners kept getting the benefit – raking in the profits – of the Class struggle for their jobs.

And, by the time wages began to move up for the new Mill Hands (at this point, the street signs had spanish sub-titles) – NAFTA let the Mill Owners move their Mills directly to Mexico, where the Mill Owners could work their Class-warfare-for-jobs Mojo all over again – leaving the previous Mill Towns in my State destroyed.

Capitalism needs Unions and a Commitment from Our Politicians not to ship Our Jobs Out-of-Country to the lowest bidder, if there is to be a True Partnership and Fairness of Opportunity for both Owners and Workers in America.

The ‘Cheapness’ mind-set keeps the Clever-and-Scheming Owners rich, while keeping the Dull-and-Under-Valued Workers down – and paying for the ‘Cheapness’ every step of the way, without ever realizing it, until it’s too late.

If We are going to Pay to Save the Mill Owners in Detroit, then, this time, let’s Stand Up, Educate Each Other and Demand Fairness – not Cheapness – for the Workers, too!

Or, the next Mill Town might be yours…

This is all so utterly hilarious.

GM and Chrysler run themselves into the ground for decades, to the point where we have to save them with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to avert our complete economic doom.

Then GM and Chrysler use financial wizardry and a foreign company to effectively form one giant Mediocre Car Consortium, thus becoming even more Too Big to Fail for the next round of corporate welfare/bailouts, and walk away in bankruptcy court having burned through all the taxpayer money.

Oh, after firing a ton of union workers and slashing the pay and benefits for everyone who gets to stay.

I’m not sure who, exactly, wins here. Investors lose, the unions lose, the bondholders lose, the taxpayers lose, their competitors who didn’t destroy themselves, both foreign and domestic, lose…. I guess the board members we haven’t sacked get to keep their 7 figure salaries and keep destroying the world?

Hooray!

It’s at times like this that I wish Tom Lehrer was still actively writing satire.

Unsupported how?

Is it not a fact that, under the proposed Chrysler bankruptcy, bondholders could lose 70% or more? Yes, it is. (Though of course some have CDS that will happily bail them out at additional taxpayer expense through our cutout, AIG.) That the unions have to trade their debt for equity in a company circling the drain? They most certainly do! What about mass layoffs and benefit cuts, did I imagine reading about those too? Nope. Right here, as it turns out.

Will Chrysler in fact be walking away with over 7 billion dollars in US bailout money? Computer says, ‘Yes!’Will it take many years to get our GM loans back, if we ever do, and that return is predicated on the idea that GM is consistently profitable for the medium term future? Computer says, ‘Yes!’

What about GM firing tens of thousands of union workers? Again, the answer is yes.

I always supported keeping GM and Chrysler afloat, myself; the problem here is precisely the same one we see, on a larger scale of course, with the bank bailouts. The taxpayer takes all of the risk, gets none of the upside, the Masters of the Universe stay in power, and the average worker or taxpayer gets the shaft. In other words, we return to status quo ante bailout, ready for the next catastrophe engineered by our financial wizard overlords.

For the record, I was trying to be humorous with my comment, not alarmist. Quite frankly I do find this whole situation blackly funny. These deals remind me of nothing so much as Lex Luthor-style comic book supervillainy. (At this point all we need is a crashed UFO from a far off world and we’re set.)

But I do thank you for assuming I was uninformed, as well as the smug, condescending tone.