Is Uncle Sam Turning Into Big Brother?

President Obama went public today with what leaked out Sunday; the boot of the CEO of General Motors came by leg extension all the way from Washington, D.C.

I'm of an age where it worked the other way around; the engineer of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations was Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary via Ford. When President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex taking over the business of the nation it was the big corporate giants such as GM he had in mind; companies with deep ties in the government and big business where the line was easily blurred.

Now, thanks to the devil's bargain of taking bailout money from Uncle Sam, the once-mighty General Motors now finds itself at the mercy of a government that can't seem to rein in it's own spending, enforcing it's view of how to run a business. The top government official helping to make this call is an investment banker, not a manufacturer. How did those investment banks do recently?

Only in America?

There are reasons to worry about this development, going far beyond the expected cheers of Michael Moore-types who are only satisfied to see executive blood run in the hallways of corporate power to make good for the blue-collar lives left on the sidelines of plant closings. It was interesting to see union leaders and rank and file take note they are troubled when the government decides who runs a private company -- even when it comes with boatloads of public dollars.

The Ford strategy of keeping arms length away from those billions seems to be a good decision for the managers and owners of Ford, and maybe the taxpayers too since GM and Chrysler now appear headed to where they should have gone in the first place: the protection of bankruptcy to reorganize and reinvent themselves.

This is all early enough to trigger warnings and bad feelings among those with a more libertarian bent but is fed by the populist notion that any business now becomes the people's business. When it is executives at AIG (even those who worked for a buck understanding they would see a bonus for millions that were generated in profitable divisions) it is popular to bang the drum for heads to sit on a pike at the city gates, a warning to all of those who ignore the bonfires inside the walls. But at some point the "them" becomes the "us" -- and who is left to root for what's right when we've all given up the power to address what's wrong to a handful of bureaucrats in Washington who seem to be better at singing songs of blame that orchestrating solutions?