Well, that didn’t take long.
Via the BBC, China National Radio is reporting that the nation’s communist government has decided that Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, which struck a tentative agreement with General Motors to buy Hummer, will not be allowed to complete the deal because of environmental concerns.
Chinese regulators are also said to be unenthusiastic about the deal because Sichuan Tengzhong doesn’t have the institutional know-how to take over Hummer successfully. (We’d argue it’s doubtful any company in the world could save Hummer, which is the very epitome of unfettered excess and greed).
Hummer deserves to go out of business. The brand is a symbol of waste and gluttony. At a time when so millions, even billions, of people are impoverished and lack access to healthy food, clean drinking water, and shelter, the least the rest of us can do is live simply so that they may simply live.