Arlo Guthrie had the best-known recording of Tom Paxton's great song, "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler" back in a previous era of corporate bailouts:
Paxton's words are prophetic:
Since the first amphibians crawled out of the slime
We've been struggling in an unrelenting climb
We were hardly up and walking before money started talking
And it's sad that failure is an awful crime
Well it's been that way for a millenium or two
But now it seems that there's a different point of view
If you're a corporate titanic and your failure is gigantic
Down in Congress there's a safety net for you.
I am changing my name to Chrysler
I am going down to Washington D.C.
I will tell some power broker
What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me
Is GM's proposed merger with Chrysler perhaps the equivalent of Sears merging with KMart? In a previous life (during the Chrysler bailout) I worked for Ford Motor Company, who struggled through without the bailout. I miss the immortal words of "Henry the Deuce" (Henry Ford II) who, when caught in an affair, said:
Never complain, never explain.