What Ex-GM CEO Wagoner Should Have Said to Obama: "You Do Not Have the Authority to Fire Me"

When President Obama and his senior economic advisers decided that GM CEO Wagoner should be fired and this was communicated to Wagoner he responded incorrectly.  He should have said: " You are not my board and you cannot fire me.  I am going to stay until the board fires me."  Consider what a simple refusal would have done -- reasserted the separate roles of public and private industry. Then if and hen Obama had followed up with calls to the GM board, telling them to fire Wagnoer, the board should say: "We will take you advice into account but you do not bind the board, our primary allegiance is to our shareholder and, if insolvent, to our unsecured creditors."  In other words, Wagoner should have grown some cajonies.  And when the President asked Wagoner as he has asked his successor Henderson, to hire adminsitration embedded employees, Wagoner and or Henderson should have said no.  

On the merits of Wagoner's job performance, the board should have fired him because his "reorganization plan" was a joke.  Wagoner, in fashioning a plan, should have laid out significant haircuts to wages and debt repayments, even if the groups had refused to assent, and told the government to condition any bailout grant on their agreement.  If the groups then refused, GM declares Chapter 11.