As Santa Bush stuffs the stockings of Wall Street firms, developers, and banks this year, he hasn’t forgotten the automakers who lobbied their way onto his “nice list.” As Christians begin the season celebrating the birth of mankind’s savior, GM can celebrate the long history of gifts from its perennial savior—the federal government.

After getting burned in the mid-1960s by Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at any Speed assailed the safety of the Chevy Corvair, GM, and the auto industry as a whole, GM apparently decided that fighting against big-government busy-bodies was not a winning strategy. So GM joined the big-government busy-bodies.

In 1981, police had to evict 20 people from Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Poletown, protestors slowing the work of the bulldozers through the Polish Catholic neighborhood the city had seized through its power of eminent domain. The Constitution implicitly allows governments to use eminent domain to take land for “public use.” The “public use” in this case was a shiny new General Motors plant.

Taking Poletown from the Poles was probably GM’s most notorious government-enabled theft from working people before this month’s bailout, but the U.S.-GM team has a long rap sheet of heists.

Perhaps the cleverest was carried out in the 1970s—in the name of the environment. That was GM’s push to speed up the federal mandate of the catalytic converter—just in time to strike devastating blows to two smaller competitors. More on this one below.

The Wall Street Journal’s late editorial page editor Robert Bartley mentioned this catalytic converter fight in an April 18, 1979, WSJ editorial that, since I read it, has shaped my thinking—it’s provocatively titled “Down With Big Business.” That editorial mentions another GM gem, worth remembering in this season of giving as we’re told that we should bail out the automakers in order to protect their suppliers.

In 1979, GM joined the misguided “fight against inflation” by pledging allegiance to President Jimmy Carter’s campaign to curb wages and prices. In an ad supporting price caps, GM declared, “We have written to our suppliers, informing them of GM’s commitment and asking them all to make the same commitment.”

As Bartley wrote at the time: “GM and Jimmy Carter are ganging up on the XYZ Bumperlight Lens Co. Five years from now, with the help of Mr. Carter … XYZ Bumperlight Lens will be the XYZ plant of the lens section of the light division of the bumper arm of the manufacturing subsidiary of guess who?” Government always imposes a bigger burden on the small guys—to the benefit of the big guys.

But the catalytic converter episode is particularly relevant today, because under President Obama we’re bound to see more Detroit corporate welfare in the name of auto-environmentalism.

In 1970, seeking an issue on which to hitch his 1972 presidential run, Senator Edwin Muskie of Maine took up revisions to escalate the Clean Air Act. Later that year, as other U.S. automakers were decrying Muskie’s efforts, GM president Edward N. Cole said GM could, in fact, make its cars “essentially pollution free.”

GM retreated a bit from that stance a year later, but when Washington was debating in 1974 delaying Muskie’s mandates, Ford, Chrysler, and the late American Motors were resisting. But GM declared that, yes, Washington should mandate cleaner cars now.

 The difference? The labs at GM, with its massive research and development budget, had just mastered the catalytic converter.
When the mandates went into effect, Ford and Chrysler had to get by on more expensive, less effective catalysts, and American Motors—the small man of Detroit—had to buy its catalysts from competitor GM.

So what? the environmentalist inevitably responds. If GM got rich off of cleaning up the air, good for them. But it’s not so clear cut. In order not to ruin catalysts, fuels had to be made less efficient.

Platinum mining in South Africa accelerated while we were debating sanctions on that apartheid government, lead was replaced as an octane enhancer with MTBE and then ethanol—both of which have serious environmental downsides—and catalytic converters make more nitrous oxide and CO2, trading pollution for greenhouse gases.

And, oh yeah, let’s not forget—the catalyst mandate drove Chrysler to the brink of bankruptcy, until President Carter intervened in 1979 with a $1.5 billion bailout.

So, as consumers and taxpayers, we start another year serving as Santa’s slave-elves involuntarily working to load up GM’s stocking. Let’s face Detroit and say, “bah humbug.”

Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney is editor of the Evans-Novak Political Report. His Examiner column appears on Fridays.