GM DOWN THE DRAIN? - AT 7:51 A.M. ET:  From the Washington Post:

DETROIT, April 2 -- The leaders of General Motors have been uncomfortable for months even mentioning the word "bankruptcy." The very idea would scare off customers, they said, and ravage car sales.

But on March 27 it became clear that the American corporate icon would have little choice.

Steven Rattner, chief of the President Obama's auto task force, instructed GM officials to give serious consideration to the tactic.

"They basically indicated it may well be that bankruptcy is the right strategy," Fritz Henderson, the company's new chief executive, said Thursday in an interview.

COMMENT:  This reminds me somewhat of the old practice, in some dictatorships, of people being "suicided."  They're simply forced into it, or murdered in such a way as to make it look like suicide. 

Go to sleep with the government, you wake up with bankruptcy.

April 3, 2009