GM: We Need $25 Billion Just For Spittoons, Hat Stands, White-Out

GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner today told a hastily assembled Detroit, Michigan news conference that the company needed an initial $25 billion bailout “just to cover our annual expenses for spittoons, hat stands, White-Out, and other essential items for our 57,000 executive offices.

“Dealing with our cash problems, obsolescent automobile line, union featherbedding, and health care costs will cost even more. But we’ve got to start somewhere.”

Wagoner said that “each of the 57,000 current GM executives, like their forebears going back to the founding of the company, is entitled by contract to a new spittoon and hat stand each year. We stand by our commitment to our executives to honor this clause in their contracts, which costs us roughly $19 billion a year.”

Wagoner also pointed to a $6 billion line item for White-Out, “because sometimes our typing pool makes errors if they can’t read their dictation that they took in their steno pads. We go through a lot of White-Out, because nobody’s perfect.”

Reporters pointed out that few, if any, current GM executives still chewed tobacco or had other uses for spittoons in their offices, and that those few execs who still wore hats could use the same hat stand for more than one year.

“Yes,” Wagoner replied, looking disdainfully at the reporters. “In theory, our executives could use the same hat stands for more than one year. And the same spittoons as well.

“But if they did, we wouldn’t be GM.”