So how do you define success? Making a company look stupid or making a company think about the issues and what it might mean to their ability to compete?

I applaud GM for leaving up ads that attack the company's products and policies.

I would be far more worried if GM had screened every ad and controlled what was being said. That would tell me the company's management has no interest in change or dialogue.

Rather than seeing it as some kind of spin, why not take it as a signal that perhaps GM is open to change? Engage them, if you really care.

So I applaud them -- and everyone who put them in this situation.

I see no losers here. Only winners. The only downside to what has happened is that GM's "surprising" openness was the focus of the media and most blog coverage, rather than the underlying issues.

But this is just the start of a conversation and I sense that GM is receptive, unlike a lot of companies out there.

Thanks for the comment, Dominic.

Making a company look stupid isn't an objective, but it's a damn handy tactic. In my work with Greenpeace I've seen it flip dozens of major corporate policies.

The tough part tends to be finding the sweet spot where the cost of changing a way of doing business is smaller than the potential brand damage from continuing.

I too applaud Chevy for leaving MOST of the ads up -- though mileage varies -- and I applaud your idealism in seeing no losers here. But given the pace at which the auto industry has embraced change in general, and the need to respond to global warming in particular, my cynicism about how they take this forward stands.

I think we as activists have a whole lot more work to do to create an environment in which GM's profit imperative is compelled to align with the world's environmental imperative.

And while I wish they'd make that alignment proactively for the good of the planet, I'm yet to see an annual report which puts the welfare of my kids' future on the bottom line.

It's nice that GM is open to us talking to them, but the most important audience here isn't the company: it's the American zeitgeist, and the consumers who hold the power to change the world.

--b

General Motors is not open to significant change because they cannot be open to such change without destroying themselves. The sabotage of their advertising campaign represents a fundamental challenge to the values that provide the foundation for everything they do as a corporation.

To understand capitalism is to understand that endless growth is its imperative that cannot be compromised. Without growth, it would not be a capitalist marketplace, because capital investors would receive no return on their investment from surplus production.

I think the idea that GM or any other corporation can be reformed to embrace ecological wisdom is largely a fantasy. So is the idea of confrontations in which there will be "only winners" despite looming energy scarcity and ecological collapse. Economic solutions that are "win-win" will soon be relics of an age in which we had the abundant energy to make everyone a "winner."

In the short term, my only question is how to save these acts of commercial disobedience so that we can (1) haunt General Motors with them to their fucking grave and (2) hasten the day they're dead and buried.