Seton Motley has a growing reputation for falsely smearing General Motors in his NewsBusters post, and he continues to live up to it.
In an Oct. 18 NewsBusters post, Motley ironically attacks former auto czar Steven Rattner for allegedly having “a bit of a problem telling the truth.” Of course, it’s Motley who actually has that problem.
He attacks GM for selling the electric Chevy Volt at discount prices — even though that’s standard business practice for dealing with slow-selling inventory.
Motley goes on to attack Rattner for wanting to eliminate a previous practice of maintaining “over-bloated inventories on dealers’ lots,” then links to newspaper articles citing high inventories of GM pickup trucks.
But Motley fails to explain why pickup inventories are elevated: As these industry websites note, the GM plants that make trucks are being shut down for several weeks in order to retool the assembly lines for a redesigned model, and production was increased prior to the shutdown in order to make sure dealers didn’t run out of trucks while the plants were shut down.
Motley serves up even more huffy disingenuousness in an Oct. 23 post, in which he ranted: “Good thing President Obama separated us from our $85 billion – allegedly to “create or save” jobs. Mostly foreign jobs, but…. And as we’ve seen with Ford, no government bailout money was necessary to preserve a gi-normous member of the American auto industry.”
Actually, that $85 billion wasn’t given to GM alone — it was also given to Chrysler and other auto parts suppliers. Much of that money has been paid back, and how much the bailout ultimately costs — probably less than $25 billion — depends on how much the government can get for its remaining stake in GM.
And while Ford did not take any bailout money, the company benefited from it. Ford CEO Alan Mulally told Fox News last month that without the bailout, a failed GM and Chrysler “could have taken down the industry and th U.S. economy from a recession to a depression,” and that the entire auto industry “would have been in real trouble.”
So: More dishonesty from Seton Motley. Anyone surprised?