Fritz Henderson Fantasist

From the unsafe at any speed Chevrolet Corvair on which Ralph Nader made much of his reputation as a consumer advocate, to the notorious Brian Bosworth article where he claimed that while he was working at a GM plant in Oklahoma, UAW assemblers would mischievously scatter a few loose bolts in the door so the subsequently produced vehicles would always have an unexplained rattle, General Motors has a well-earned reputation. From unscrupulous dealers such as my hometown's thankfully vanquished Bill Heard, to my own experience with my 1995 Chevrolet Blazer, which surged into traffic at a busy intersection when I released the brake but before I stepped on the gas-nearly causing me a t-bone collision, to my grandfather's 1968 Cadillac that sits immobile in my garage after running well for about a month in 1969 and having so many problems that it was simply left idle since the early 70s, GM has produced piece of crap after piece of crap and some very dangerous ones along the way. The reborn GM has all the baggage of shoddy workmanship to go with screwing their own dealers, some of which screwed their customers, terminated their own salaried workers (executives, designers, engineers, and management who do not enjoy union protection), stripped the rights of customers who were in litigation after being injured by GM products who had their recourse taken away by the bankruptcy, dunned suppliers, and even left states in the lurch, such as my own Tennessee, which hosted the state of the art Chevy Traverse plant which had formerly been Saturn and had given General Motors enormous subsidies-some in the form of education grants, road building around and for the benefit of the plant, tax abatement just to bring and keep the plant, only to be stabbed in the back by GM, who is relocating manufacture to Wisconsin, a closed shop, rather than right to work state Tennessee, to placate the UAW. As long as Barack Obama is President, living in the back pocket of organized labor, I will never consider purchasing a GM or for that matter, Chrysler product (the worst vehicle my family ever had to endure was a 1985 Chrysler Fifth Avenue). Companies that sell inferior products to unwary and vulnerable consumers, sometimes using essentially fraudulent financing schemes, such as telling car buyers to deliberately overstate their incomes to qualify for loans-both a lie and criminal offense, who always seem to be able to boost a price between the time it is negotiated and sealed with a handshake but before it is put down on paper, whose trained technicians seem to find mechanical difficulties you never knew you had that make your vehicle dangerous to operate if not immediately addressed, but can never seem to hear the hiss and rattle that brought you into the Goodwrench repair shop in the first place, which have kowtowed to their unions while telling their consumer to take a leap-deserve to be consigned to the ash heap or in this case the "green" enviro-friendly junkyard of history. Ask me what these behemoth government-union partnerships can do to earn back my business with their new fuel-efficient CAFE standard mandated models and I will tell you-"nothing, not now, never. I will never buy anything from a socialist enterprise."