Vancouver Secrets

Can We Put A Stop Payment On Our GM Cheque?

Obama’s selection of top talent should leave everyone shaking their heads. The GM fiasco of first firing the leader, now he’s putting people in place to run GM that have no good reason for being there, other than George Soros… is it payback or systematized looting?

Brian Deese – In Charge Of GM

Glenn Beck: the wunderkind in charge of saving our auto industry is a 31-year-old with about as much experience as a summer intern.

Despite having no formal business education, no business experience and no auto industry experience, 31-year-old Brian Deese is now in charge of dismantling General Motors.

So what does this guy’s resume look like? It should be impressive, considering he’s managing America’s $458,000 per day involuntary investment.

Deese grew up in a Boston suburb, the son of a political science professor at Boston College. He moved to Vermont and attended Middlebury College, where he studied political science and also took time to host a campus radio show called “Bedknobs and Beatniks,” described in one write-up as “a format of music, news, discussion and banter.”

He graduated college in 2000 and then it was onto a pair of non-profit think tanks: the Center for Global Development and the Center for American Progress.

Eventually Deese went to Yale for a law degree, but a few credits short of graduating, he went “on leave” to work on Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, quickly becoming her to economic policy staffer.

Last summer, Deese moved to the Obama campaign as a deputy economic policy director and, just before this current gig, he served on Obama’s transition team as an economic adviser.

He was apparently the only full-time member of the auto task force from election night until about Valentine’s Day, which Deese says was, “a little scary.”

What should be more than a little scary for GM, much less the American people, is that however smart Deese may be, he has literally no private sector experience; he is not formally trained in economics or business; and, according to The Times, he “never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the nature of the American and Japanese auto industries.”

In fact, until a few months ago, the closest Deese came to an automobile plant, was sleeping in a GM parking lot, where Pontiac G5s have been made since the plant’s 1960s heyday.

Feeling good about your investment, America?

With only one out of five Americans supporting the auto bailout in the first place; I wonder what kind of support there is for the inexperienced Brian Deese to tinker with the auto industry and change capitalism? I’m not an economist, but, like Deese, I am “on leave” from Yale. So I guess that makes me “uniquely qualified” to take a guess at the number: zero.

Which, ironically, is just a hair less than what GM’s stock is now worth.

Great investment we’ve made, and an even worse choice of who we partnered with.

Why we didn’t just let the whole thing go tits up, then sell it off to the a real auto czar, Frank Stronach, the Canadian owner of auto parts maker Magna International Inc.

Frank felt strongly enough of buying a General Motors lemon – Opel unit. Which has me thinking he may be smart like a fox.

Do we still have time to cancel our cheque? (Check for my American friends.)

Bonus: NY Times readers turn on Obama and the Auto industry takeover… priceless.

Next up: Obama is taking over tobacco next.

Last, Obama’s Useful Idiots – another reason to be afraid.. really afraid. GM as a tool of socialism.

“We need to protect our industrial infrastructure, as I’ve said many times before, so that we are using these factories to built the things that we need — bullet trains, light rail, alternative energy, cleaner buses — things that society needs in the 21st century. … We have to kill GM in order to save it. … They’ve planned their own obsolescence by helping to destroy the middle class …” — Michael Moore on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Monday, June 1st, 2009