Saw this site today, What I learned Today. It has lots of great economic news coverage with a very nice simple design. It got linked to over at boingboing on this piece about GM.

0.000000435%

is roughly the percent of GM that we each own.

$362 is what each of us paid for that equity stake.

Will you and I get a good ROI?

It's easy to look at this situation in a "where is my money" way. It seems very unlikely that this company will ever be valued at what it used to be valued, and even less likely to be valued nearly 50% more! But thinking about it more, I don't really even know what that means for Gm to be Valued at some billions of dollars. It is such an abstract concept to view any huge company as a dollar figure and even more abstract to think that I have somehow given GM 362 dollars. So I kinda take these numbers lightly.
What I do take very seriously is that if GM thinks itself so important to the American public to be taking billions of dollars from us, it better start acting in the public's interest. To me, straightening up it's operations to continue building cars is not in our interest. We need mass transit, and we need a nod in that direction NOW. And we need action in that direction tomorrow. Cars were great, and we'll be using them for some time before they all break down(a lot faster than if planned obsolescence" wasn't part of their design ethos), I'd say just enough time to wrap our heads around walkable/bikeable cities and a train network. We need a push towards aligning the places humans inhabit with the people who inhabit them, not with huge corporations and far off oil barons.
So how about it GM, want to start thinking of someone other than your own asses for a change? Put your talents to bigger uses, please.

**another great visual tool of GM's footprint, a must see from the Detroit News.