GM's bankruptcy was 40 years in the making

General Motors, as expected, filed for bankruptcy protection Monday. The 101-year-old company is expected to emerge from bankruptcy leaner and 70 percent owned by American taxpayers. Call it TM, Taxpayer Motors.

GM, once the behemoth of American industry and ingenuity, has been in decline almost since the day my parents bought the first new car they had ever owned — a 1963 Chevrolet Biscayne with a six-cylinder engine, rough fabric seats and no options, not even an AM radio. Back then, General Motors was selling nearly half the cars sold in this country. GM brands were stepping stones with each brand — Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac — marking a higher rung on the economic ladder. GM was so dominant that the Johnson administration was reported to be considering filing an anti-trust suit against GM.

GM dominated the American market, but it was foreign competition that struck the thousand small blows that eventually bled GM into insolvency. GM followed a "we'll show them" strategy against the foreign automakers. GM was a giant; it could overwhelm the competition. When the venerable Volkswagen beetle, a car designed by the Third Reich as a practical, economical "people's car," made inroads, GM answered with a sportier-looking car that copied the VW's air-cooled rear engine, the Chevrolet Corvair. But the Corvair, which my father and brother owned and which I enjoyed driving, had a design flaw — the rear suspension could fold up under the car in hard maneuvering, causing the car to flip. It was the Corvair that launched Ralph Nader and was the prime target of his book, "Unsafe at Any Speed."

When Japanese automakers challenged GM's dominance, the company answered with the Chevrolet Vega, which had even more problems than the Corvair. The Vega, promoted in magazine ads as "Twinkle, twinkle, little car," had a habit of blowing its engine. The Vega was also a pawn in the battle between GM and the United Autoworkers. A worker at the plant that built Vegas bragged to a reporter that he had strung a loose nut between brackets inside the roof of a Vega, resulting in an annoying rattle that could only be found by taking the entire roof apart. Autoworkers got back at GM by sabotaging the product, never realizing they were also sabotaging their own futures. Later, GM sabotaged its own Saturn venture by abandoning the new brand's unique relationships with workers and buyers. The current Saturn lineup is just a copycat of other GM models made like all other GM vehicles.

To save money and boost profits, GM in the 1970s and '80s turned its cars into clones of each other. A Chevrolet Malibu is an Olds Cutlass is a Buick Century is a Pontiac Tempest. At one point, a family of clones spelled its own name: The Chevrolet Nova was also the Olds Omega, the Pontiac Ventura and the Buick Apollo — N-O-V-A. GM also made a habit of introducing a small car, then making it bigger and bigger because bigger cars produced bigger profits. The original four-cylinder Chevy II (a used 1963 version was my first car) grew into the Chevy Nova with an oversized V8. When gasoline prices fell, GM and other U.S. automakers leaped at consumers' interest in truck-like SUVs, preferring short-term profits to long-term sustainability. GM never seemed to realize that functionality and reliability, which Japanese automakers concentrated on, were a better means of retaining customer loyalty than planned obsolescence.

I remain skeptical about taxpayer-owned GM's ability to respond to consumer interests and produce reliable, desirable vehicles at reasonable prices. At the same time, I think it is essential that America regain its manufacturing base, which made it possible for the United States to win World War II as automakers turned out trucks, tanks and planes for the war effort, eventually overwhelming Germany and Japan. America's shrunken industrial base would be hard-pressed to convert to war footing today.

GM's future will depend on its ability to produce reliable, economical, functional vehicles that consumers will value. The company's Cadillac line, its new Chevrolet Malibu and its upcoming Volt electric vehicle hint at what's possible. Taxpayers will be looking for a return on the $50 billion and counting that taxpayers have poured into GM. Let's hope we get our money back.

Chrysler's circuitous path to bankruptcy

Chrysler is in bankruptcy but is supposed to survive as a brand, with billions of dollars in help from federal taxpayers and a deal with Fiat, the Italian carmaker. It's a sad day for the company that used to tout its engineering prowess and that once seemed to have a leg up on other U.S. automakers in the struggle against foreign competition.

Over the past 25 years, I've owned four Chrysler products, putting nearly 400,000 miles on their odometers. At the time, I bragged about the comfort and reliability of the Dodge and Plymouth K-cars and talked my parents into making a Dodge Spirit from Cox Dodge in Wilson the last car they ever bought. But one by one, as the cars approached or topped 100,000 miles, key components of the cars — water pumps and air conditioners, primarily — failed. Since the late 1990s, my wife and I have driven Nissans and Hondas and now own two aging Hondas, which are still running reliably.

Taxpayers bailed out Chrysler once before, in 1979, when Detroit's chronic misjudgment of consumers' desires and a huge spike in gasoline prices left all three U.S. automakers foundering. That bailout paid off. It gave Chrysler, under the leadership of Lee Iacocca, time to bring out its new generation of front-wheel drive cars and to invent the minivan, which revolutionized the vehicle market. Chrysler paid back the government loan ahead of time, but after Iacocca retired Chrysler went up the wrong path again, resurrecting its 1960s-era Hemi engines and muscle cars and building ever-larger SUVs to complement its minivans.

But even in recent years, Chrysler did not seem to be as oblivious as GM or Ford. Chrysler never made a gargantuan Expedition, and its 1990s styling on cars such as the Dodge Intrepid was ahead of the competition. Unfortunately, its merger with Daimler Benz never paid off for either entity and probably helped bring Chrysler down in the end. Chrysler dumped Plymouth, the brand Richard Petty had driven to so many NASCAR victories. Its forays into specialty cars, such as the Dodge Viper or Plymouth Prowler, didn't do much for sales of more mundane vehicles.

Still, I think Chrysler's long-term prospects, especially if the Fiat deal works out, could be better than GM's. The automaker that once claimed 50 percent of the U.S. market and was being threatened with an anti-trust lawsuit by the Johnson administration, is weighted down by too many models that are nearly identical, too much corporate bureaucracy and too little attention to customers' interests. Recent news reports indicate GM might also end up in bankruptcy. Meanwhile, foreign automakers are producing more and more cars in the United States (my family has driven two made-in-the USA Nissans and one made-in-the-USA Honda, but our Chrysler vehicles were made in Canada or Mexico) and are more closely attuned to customers' demands.

Detroit, once the heart of American industry, seems to have thrown a piston rod.

Tribune's bankruptcy could be a harbinger

The Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs, has filed for bankruptcy. Although this is sign of the distress in the newspaper business, the Tribune situation relates more to its heavily leveraged purchase a few years ago. The company has a mountain of debt and had little choice but to file for bankruptcy.

The Tribune's debt is dragging down some great American newspapers. The LA Times, the Sun and the Tribune are legendary and once fabulously profitable properties. These papers are not suffering alone. The McClatchy company, which bought foundering Knight-Ridder (another once-great newspaper company), owns the Miami Herald, Raleigh News & Observer, Charlotte Observer and other great papers. It, too, has a huge debt incurred in the Knight-Ridder purchase and has had to restructure that debt and lay off hundreds of employees. Cox Newspapers, out of Atlanta, has all of its North Carolina papers up for sale, leaving the Greenville Daily Reflector, Rocky Mount Telegram and others in limbo. There apparently are no eager buyers for newspapers, and the credit crisis has made it much harder to put together multi-million-dollar deals.

Could the Tribune bankruptcy be a harbinger for the entire industry? While Detroit automakers go hat-in-hand to Washington for a bailout, the newspaper industry suffers from some of the same problems that plague Detroit. Americans are not buying the traditional newspaper tossed in the driveway. More and more Americans are getting their news off the Internet or television (which is also suffering from revenue declines). Advertising revenues are down. Classified ads have been decimated by Internet options such as eBay and Craigslist. Sunday classified sections that once went on for dozens and dozens of pages are pitiful now. And daily classified sections are so thin they are no longer their own section or are so filled with "house ads" (newspaper promotions) that they are laughable. And newspaper management has not responded well to the challenges it faces.

But Americans still want to read the news. They want information, and they want it from a reliable source. Independent newspapers still provide that news, although layoffs in the newsroom and the redefining of news in futile efforts to win back readers have taken a toll on serious journalism. Investigative reporting, in-depth analysis and solid governmental reporting are getting more and more rare.

Newspapers are rushing headlong into the Internet with more and more sophisticated Web pages with photo galleries and video the print paper can't provide. But they haven't figured out a way to make the Internet pay as well as print ads did for more than a century. Until Internet ad rates rise sharply (which seems unlikely) or advertisers recognize that print ads are still valuable and worth the expense, newspapers will struggle, reporters and editors will be laid off, and readers (voters, citizens, decision makers) will be less well-informed.

An uninformed electorate is a danger to democracy. In terms of societal worth, newspapers are more important than automakers.