The American Pundit

General Motors, in an attempt to get the American people onboard with the $34 billion bailout request, published a multi-page letter to the American taxpayers apologizing for being such a crappy company. Here’s a sample, but you really have to read the whole thing.

While we’re still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you. At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster. We have proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pick-up trucks and SUVs. And, we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today’s globally competitive industry. We have paid dearly for these decisions, learned from them and are working hard to correct them by restructuring our U.S. business to be viable for the long term…

Until recent events, we felt the actions we’d been taking positioned us for a bright future. Just a year ago, after we reached transformational agreements with our unions, industry analysts were forecasting a positive GM turnaround. We had adequate cash on hand to continue our restructuring even under relatively conservative industry sales volume assumptions. Unfortunately, along with all Americans, we were hit by a “perfect storm.” Over the past year we have all faced volatile energy prices, the collapse of the U.S. housing market, failing financial institutions, a stock market crash and the complete freezing of credit. We are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Just like you, we have been severely impacted by events outside our control. U.S. auto industry sales have fallen to their lowest per capita rate in half a century. Despite moving quickly to reduce our planned spending by over $20 billion, GM finds itself precariously and frighteningly close to running out of cash.

This is why we need to borrow money from U.S. taxpayers. If we run out of cash, we will be unable to pay our bills, sustain our operations and invest in advanced technology.

Aw, how nice. Except, as Michelle Malkin points out, they gave a similar mea culpa in 2003 and nothing changed. From Slate:

From time to time, companies find it necessary to apologize. They may not do it in so many words, but in the wake of a crisis or a scandal or a huge, news-making problem, they will mount an advertising campaign to assure you, the consumer, that efforts are underway to “win back your trust.” During the Ford/Firestone fiasco a couple of years ago, for instance, both of those firms launched forgiveness campaigns.

What’s a little more unusual is a company coming out and apologizing for just being generally lousy over the past couple of decades. But that is essentially what GM is doing now, with a curious campaign touting its journey on “the road to redemption.” GM has run big two-page ads in major newspapers and also spins its tale on the Web.

Like all ad campaigns, the bottom line is that GM, right now, is a fine, high-quality company, whose products you should buy immediately. It’s the journey to this obvious destination that’s interesting. “Thirty years ago, GM quality was the best in the world,” the print ad starts. “Twenty years ago, it wasn’t.”

And apparently the company muddled along in a sub-par manner for 10 years before deciding to change. “The hard part [was] breaking out of our own bureaucratic gridlock,” the ad copy continues, and “learning some humbling lessons from our competitors.” After a “painful” decade of effort, they’re now back up to snuff, putting out great cars, etc., etc. The ad cites positive consumer-satisfaction research and recent automotive awards, presumably the hook for the campaign. “The road to redemption has no finish line,” the copy concludes. “But it does have a corner. And it’s fair to say we’ve turned it.”

Five years after that “we sucked” ad campaign they come around begging for $34 billion and warning of imminent collapse if they don’t get it soon. They didn’t change after promising to in 2003. There was supposedly a “road to redemption” that they were on a half-decade ago. How well did that go? Five years later they’re asking for a bailout because, once again, they say they failed.

But don’t worry; They promise to change this time. Really. They mean it.