Saying "I told you so" is pretty immature - which never stopped Michael Moore in the past...

I was quite curious to find out the level of glee and gusto with which Michael Moore would rub salt into GM's wounds as he discusses his prescription for the auto giant's future in today's The Daily Kos. On the contrary, I was surprised by how gracious he was: while pointing out many of the General's failures over the years, he did not dance on GM's grave.

While a good hunk of what Moore suggests for the future of GM is pie-in-the-sky stuff, I agree with his basic premise: saving GM for the purpose of building more crappy cars does not serve America's long term interests. Those interests, however, could indeed be served by using this opportunity to re-purpose GM and its laid-off workers, putting them in service of a greener economy by building trains, solar and wind power equipment, etc. I particularly enjoyed this part of Moore's article:

[Let's announce] that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

You can read Moore's full article here.