Brother, Can You Spare GM A Dime?

General Motors began the week with the announcement that it will make yet another round of job cuts, including closing two factories. Its stock is trading at a 60-year low, its market share has dropped to nearly 20 percent from over 50 percent a half century ago, and its market capitalization is only a fraction of the mighty Toyota's.

There are several reasons for this dire state of affairs, including staggering legacy costs such as pension obligations. But at the end of the day it comes down to the reality that the once mighty General has worked hard to make a boringly uncompetitive range of products while failing to invest in new technologies, and only recently has showed signs of shaking off its bad habits.

In other words, GM did it to itself.

While continuing the trend of making competitive products is a no-brainer, at this point GM's survival depends more on getting a big chunk of a $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout (and perhaps merging with Chrysler, as well) to give it some breathing room. This would enable it to retool its factories in order to build the fuel-efficient vehicles that are flying out of the showrooms of Japanese manufacturers.

At one time the mere thought of "rewarding" a company like GM for its boneheaded management decisions would have been anathema, but these are not ordinary times.

And so I reluctantly conclude that if a Salomon Brothers or AIG can feed at the taxpayer trough, then so can a venerable company that still employs over a quarter million people, most of them in blue-collar jobs, and whose demise would cause catastrophic economic fallout in Michigan and elsewhere.