An Injection of Cash for Detroit's Big Three?

I have friends who work in the food-chain of the Detroit Automotive Industry. More than a few of them are nervous, but feel their jobs, wages, and mortgages will be secure.

There are a lot of families in the auto industry that have not been that lucky over the last twenty years.

Detroit Steel has spent the last twenty years figuring every way they could to close US plants, break contracts bargained with the unions in good faith, get people to work harder at the same jobs for less money, and export jobs outside the US to non-union labor. Yes there are auto workers who make good money. There are also a lot of auto-workers who spend half the year laid off on “slow downs” because of management incompetence.

The Big Three don’t want a bail out or a loan. They want government welfare to subsidize their twenty years of lazy, short-sighted, quick-fix, inept, visionless leadership. Reagan and his henchmen spent the eighties wagging their collective fingers and demonizing families and single mothers who wanted to use government aid to help “pay their bills”. Bill Clinton even beat the drum for welfare reform, because it was politically expedient. Now that the Big Three are failing at an industry that they created, because of a failed business model that they chose to let fester, now welfare is not only okay, but necessary? All the fiscal conservatives that watched auto plant closings devastate families and turn cities and neighborhoods into bankrupt wastelands, and said it was just the holy “Invisible Hand of the free market”, none of them minded when it was working families getting slapped around by the Invisible Hand. Now that the unseen hand has become a fist, and is catching Detroit Steel in the jaw, now all of sudden “Big Government” is okay. Now Reagan’s ideas of Supply-side Economics that failed in the eighties, that Bush in his neo-conservative crew tried to bring back, now those ideas of Trickle-Down Economics suddenly don’t hold water? If social and economic Darwinism was okay when working families were the ones struggling, then natural selection is just as good right now. Cars will be made in the US. I’d love it if they were made in my home state of Michigan. But if the Big Three become the Big One, I’m okay with that.

You don’t give good money to a drug addict. It serves no purpose and doesn’t change behavior. The people that have mismanaged the auto industry have needle marks all over their arms and between their toes. They don’t want to quit cold turkey, and I don’t want to pay for their habit. They let cities and communities die on the vine, with no remorse. I think democratizing some of that pain will help the future industry execs that are left standing create a more responsible and sustainable business model. Call it tough love or just lying in the bed that one has made. Even if it is a bed of nails that was meant for somebody else.

Letting those chickes come home to roost might even give our business leaders a long overdue lesson in the consequences of economic exploitation.