One Night Only the " Detroit Blues "

With their hats in their hands and a shine on the shoes, like an old Motown blues band -he Big 3 auto executives are in town crooning the Detroit Blues. Singing about "I got no love and I got no money." Boo Hoo. These guys learned how to work both sides of the grift from their idol Henry Paulson.

Let us look at some history first. In 1973 we have a severe oil shortage [because we helped Israel in the yom kippur war] the price of gas does not go up, but you can not get it. This starts the rush to small fuel efficient cars and the start of Japenese imports. Another trend starts because of the severe recessions of the 1970s cities as they start cutting back on their road maintance and pot holes the size of moon craters start swallowing the small cars. People started buying trucks because supposedly they were more durable and useful as most twenty somethings were buying their first homes and remodeling them.

Like everything else in America we had to make it bigger, faster, and more expensive, so we end up in 2008 with ageing baby boomers driving Hummers, Escalades, and huge pick-up trucks that only a major contractor would need. It is like in 1980 we took this fork in the road that took us to the edge of excess in everything and then stopped at a dead end. Now we are turning around and driving back to 1979.

In 1988 America was rated 14th in the world in math and science test scores. Well twenty years later here we are with three auto companies whose cars are poorly engineered and technolgicaly stagnant. While the Japanse auto makers here in America are prospering because their cars are so well made and technolgicaly advanced. The so called Big Three auto companies are in trouble because they make lousy cars and people will not buy them. Giving them billions of dollars to keep making lousy cars and paying auto workers not to work is the equivilent to passing a law forcing people to buy cars they do not want. So much for the free market.

Here is another falsehood the auto workers will suffer. GM and Ford have been closing plants and shipping jobs to Mexico for 15 years. There was 50,000 auto workers in Flint Michigan in 1985,now there are 12,000 and decling daily those jobs were going to Mexico anyway, that was the plan. Here is an idea, instead of giving the Three Amigos billions - let us give every UAW member who gets laid off an unemployment check for two years. We could save billions and feel good about it.

General Motors is lying about running out of money, GM is building a 300 million dollar SUV plant outside of Moscow. How would you feel about helping to pay for that? GM makes lousy cars and too many of them. GM owns DiTech who gave mortgages to anyone and is now drowning in debt. That is why GM needs so much money so fast, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Let them go into managed bankrupcy. Tough love, dude.

Chysler got dumped by Mercedes-Benz for a good reason - the company has no future because it is out of ideas and engineering and it was going bankrupt. Chysler has peaked and can not figure out what to do next. The Cebrus Capital group which owns 80% of Chysler has declared it will not put anymore money into the company even though it has millions on hand. What this really means is that Cebrus Capital does not know anything about building cars and does not want to know anything. All Cebrus wants to do is milk every nickel of equity it can out of the Chysler brand name before it goes under.

Ford is running a short con here. Ford has plenty of money mostly because it stuck to just making cars. They just joined the group to see if they could get their share of all that taxpayer money that is on the table. Ford has a future because Mazda makes all its small cars and trucks.

Anyone who has owned one of these company's cars and shoveled money into it because it was just such a lousy car can only feel outraged that these auto smoothies are standing up in front of the congress and trying to scam the american consumer and taxpayer one more time.