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Bankruptcy, now!

The opinion of a car crazy .

By: Josh Painter (Diary)  |  November 23rd, 2008 at 04:22 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

I’m a car guy. Always have been. I’ve lived, breathed and dreamed about things automotive for almost all of my life. Years before I even reached the legal age to get a learner’s permit, I was digesting car books from cover to cover, building scale-model cars from kits and lusting after a ’49 Mercury coupe just like the one James Dean drove in “Rebel Without A Cause.” That car, which is now at home in Reno, NV at the National Automobile Museum, was the essence of cool for a car-crazy kid growing up in the 1950s.




I’ve owned, enjoyed and occasionally cursed all manner of automotive iron including a brand new 1966 Mustang, an MGB roadster of the same vintage (but not so new), an Olds Cutlass 4-4-2, a ’68 Dodge Charger which had a fuel gauge you could actually see move downward when you stomped on the go-pedal, an ’85 Volvo Turbo sedan that was the quintessential “sleeper,” a wickedly-quick Taurus SHO, three Jeep Cherokees, one Jeep Grand Cherokee, an F-100 pickup, a Ranger pickup and a Nissan pickup, among others.



Though I’ve owned foreign and domestic, I’ve always rooted for the guys in Detroit as a matter of national pride. I know that they can build great cars. I’ve owned two Accords, and the ’06 Ford Fusion I currently drive is as solidly-built, comfortable and quiet on the road as either of those Hondas. It even goes them one better when the two-lane blacktops here in the Ozarks turn twisty, because it handles much better than the Accord or the Camry. The Fusion is a better driver’s car, and given the competitive segment of the market in which it competes, that’s saying a lot.



So it’s no small irony that just when Detroit starts to figure out how to build cars that measure up to what their competitors design in Europe and Japan, they run out of money. American automakers have some good product out there, and even better offerings are in the pipeline. If you doubt what I’m saying here, test drive a Cadillac CTS. When I was a kid I never dreamed that you would be able to buy a Caddy with a standard shift and BMW-class handling for thousands less. GM’s engineers put some Corvette into that Cadillac, and it shows. Ford did extensive marketing research and interviewed thousands of consumers before it designed the Fusion. So don’t listen to the crap that moron Michael Moore is selling about the big three not listening to its customers.



Detroit’s problem has never been with its designers, engineers or market researchers. It’s the guys up on the top floors who make the decisions who have dropped the ball. When Ford CEO Alan Mulally arrived in Dearborn after having turned around Boeing, he couldn’t believe that the company was wasting so much money by designing, engineering and building cars separately in several different parts of the world. Even worse, engineers and designers in Michigan weren’t even talking to their counterparts in Germany and Australia. It was the old “Not Invented Here” syndrome, an ailment which has plagued the Big 3 for decades. He put an end to it at Ford, and rather quickly, too, considering how loathe the captains of the American auto industry have been to change the inbred ways they had of doing business. For years, buyers of Ford’s bread-and-butter Focus model have been forced to settle for a car which isn’t bad, but it’s not the same Focus that won so many awards in the rest of the world. The 2010 model of the Focus will be essentially the same the world over. The Fusion, as good as it is, isn’t as good as the Mondeo, a similarly-sized Ford which is another award-winner for the company’s foreign divisions. So the Mondeo and the Fusion will fuse sometime around 2011 or 2012.



So it’s not only high labor and benefits costs which are hurting Detroit, it’s bad decisions from the top down such as a refusal to take advantage of economies of scale by consolidating the efforts of its engineers and designers from around the world. Like Ford, GM has its overseas divisions and is beginning to cut down on the duplication of effort among its various divisions. Both companies are building better cars than they have in the past. Other bad decisions by top management have been equally responsible for the sorry state of affairs our domestic automakers find themselves in. Continuing to rely on higher-profit trucks and SUVs and getting caught with their pants down when oil prices spiked is another. It also didn’t help when the captains of this industry showed up in Washington D.C. begging for a bailout after stepping off of their respective plush corporate jets. Now a chagrined GM has announced that it’s selling off part of their bizjet fleet. Memo to the CEO: Take a cue from Gov. Sarah Palin. The time to get rid of the trappings of office are when you first take the job, not after the Gulfstream V generates bad PR for you.



I’m one of those who believes that bankruptcy is the best medicine for for what ails Detroit. Reorganizing will open an opportunity to sit down with the unions and renegotiate those high costs of labor and health care that the companies keep saying are tilting the playing field in favor of their competitors. It will also buy some time for those better products currently in the pipeline to make their way to the marketplace. I think that Ford and even GM can survive austerity programs, if they have the courage and the foresight to implement them.



About Chrysler, I’m not so sure. That company doesn’t have the strong foreign operations that GM and Ford have, and product-wise, the pentastar company has been lagging. While GM and Ford produced the Malibu and Fusion respectively, both strong entries into the most competitive class in the auto industry, the Dodge Avenger and Chrysler Sebring are turkeys. The V6 engines in many MoPar models gets poorer gas mileage than the V8s from the competition. Sure, the Dodge Challenger is a sweet ride, but it won’t save Chrysler. Nor will the ugly-duckling Jeep Compass nor the me-too Dodge Nitro. Someone will buy Chrysler just to get their hands on the Jeep brand. The lion’s share of rest of the company’s models will likely get the ax.



So from the point of view of a car guy, let them eat bankruptcy. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it might just save two-thirds of the Big 3. Otherwise, I fear, we will wind up with an American version of British Leyland, and we know how well that turned out. I’m telling my congresscritters that as far as an automaker bailout is concerned – bankruptcy, now! What will you tell yours?



- JP

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  • kowalski

    So it’s no small irony that just when Detroit starts to figure out how to build cars that measure up to what their competitors design in Europe and Japan, they run out of money.

    It’s not an irony, it’s a deliberate decision on their part. GM and Ford are very active in Europe and for decades have sold cars there. They’re very well aware of the European market. They deliberately chose not to market many of their European designs in America in favor of great big profitable trucks and SUVs. They would have continued doing that forever and ever and ever if the price of gasoline hadn’t gotten in their way.

    • kowalski

      By saying, essentially, that they were just “following the market of what Americans wanted to buy” — making them blameless.

      It’s not true. They created the market for their own vehicles through their advertising.

      I’m old enough to remember when a truck was a truck and a car was a car and never the twain shall meet. If you really needed a truck, you bought one, but it wasn’t something you were encouraged to have to go to the movies or the 7-11.

      What the Big 3 did was to dress 5,000 pound trucks with 300 horsepower engines up as luxury vehicles and sell them to Americans and hip-hop stars, and market them as necessary status symbols and ways as necessary vehicles for families. Now they want a bailout.

      I say no.

  • Spiral

    You are absolutely correct. For the the Big Three to end up in Bankruptcy would be equivilent to an alcoholic deciding to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and say, “I’m an alcoholic,” publicly to dozens of people.

    It’s the first step towards recovery.

    You know that giving the Big Three 25 billion dollars is just going to result in wasted money when they say, “There’s nothing wrong with out business model. We have been hit with the financial/credit crisis.”

    In other words: We’re broke. But it’s not our fault.

    I think we know lots of broke young adults who tell their parents the same thing when they want a “bailout.”

  • kowalski

    James Dean lost his life in one of the most beautiful sports cars in the world. A very light, lithe, small and foreign car with a (relatively tiny) engine: A Porsche 550 Spyder, the “Little Bastard.”

    Like a lot of self-important and egotistical actors, James Dean looked super but didn’t know how to control the things he drove. All style, no substance.

    Jerry Seinfeld almost suffered a similar fate recently driving his 1967 Fiat BTM when the brakes failed, causing him to roll the car.

    Clearly there is a middle ground we should try to achieve, here.

    • mbecker908

      with UAW for the last 40 years.

      Personally, I hope they shutter every GM plant in the US. I’m only slightly more sympathetic to Ford and Chrysler.

  • Scope

    Josh- My husband is a Dodge kinda guy, never liked Fords, never owned one. I think that’s an old family tradition as grandfathers and others worked for GM. Can’t believe he agreed to go Dodge. He is impatitently waiting for Barrett Jackson auctions to come on again in Feb.

    His sister and her husband worked for the GM plant in Newark NJ. My brother in law worked there about 9 years, and my sister in law made it to 5 years there. When they announced they were closing within a year my sister in law was about 6-7 months away from her journeyman’s license. Her husband took the buy out and left and went onto another non-union job. The sister in law had a boss that liked her and allowed her to stay until she qualified for the license on her 5 year mark, and gave her alot more buy out money. She got $60,000. plus medical benefits for a year, and I understand her husband got a substantially higher amount along with extended medical benefits. That is the story of just 2 employees at that location. I don’t know the total employee count there. They were also offered to keep there jobs if they were willing to relocate to another facility.

    That is what took place at just that one location that closed down. Many others have closed down over the years. Say there were 500 employees at that plant (that’s a guess), and use the $60,000 amount, that would mean they were, according to the union contract, to shell out $30 million dollars, plus medical benefit costs. That would have covered the bailout they are looking for now. Isn’t hindsight wonderful.

    The management has been piss-poor, but, I really do see the unions as well as the government mandates to have been playing a major role in their current condition. Pelosi said today that Congress may have to fire the Big 3 leaders, their next pink slips are going to go to the Oil Co. execs, even though they are making huge profits and are not looking for bailouts.

  • towdogInCal

    Ford vs Chevy was always the big 2 choices in my youth. Everything else was “Mopar”. If someone had pulled up to me at a light in a Honda in my ‘Stang I’d have died laughing.

    Today, my wife drives the Tahoe, I drive the Toyota. Who’d a thunk it?

    GM tells me via its press releases and blurbs if they go bankrupt, I’ll never be able to get parts for the Tahoe again. Parts supplies will dry up, warranties will go unserviced.

    First off, when I need a starter for the Chevy I didn’t go to the dealer, I went to Kragen. Second, when it needs service I take it to a local mechanic named “Brett”, not “Mr. Goodwrench”.

    I watched my beloved Harley-Davidson, sold by AMF, struggle to stay alive. I don’t recall them asking for a handout from the feds, but they did ask for protection which they received in the form of a 45% import tariff on bikes 700cc or above. It seems HD learned something from what’s been happening to GM and Ford.

    Many, especially in the media, blame the GM workers for their exorbitant benefits that created the costs that have made Detroit uncompetitive. I don’t. I blame their management. Management was also at the negotiating table. They didn’t look very far into the future to envision an environment with serious competitors. They didn’t care that their worker compensation structures and packages were skewing far above the norm. And therefore they couldn’t, and didn’t, try to explain the upcoming competitive reality to their workers. That management failure led to their current problems.

    • SteveLA

      towdogin

      I’d love one of those new Camero’s, and you are right on, dead on, 100 percent correct about the Big Three management’s role in saying yes to stupid UAW contracts. But I would point out that stockholders also have something to do with the problem too.

      If any of the Big Three had taken the UAW to the mat, had held out for a real labor contract which resulted in a prolonged strike say 3 years ago, Wall Street would have destroyed the CEO and the managers. Sometimes it takes something like what we are seeing now to get the old wake up call going. Republicans just have to keep Democrats from being enablers for the UAW pimps.

      • NightTwister

        That was my car in H.S. Man I wish I had that thing still. Looked just like this one.

        • Scope

          I miss the vane windows.

  • JamesLBurns

    The numbers on car sales support what you’re saying on the vehicles. The two most popular vehicles by sales are the Ford F Series and the Chevy Silverado (combined with GMC Sierra). Both sold more than 43,000 units in October. Next is the Camry/Solara at 30,000. Nine of the top twenty vehicles in units sold are the big (US) three — Ford (4), GM (4), Chrysler (1).

    Also, the numbers show that building more very-high-milage vehicles isn’t the answer. The only such vehicle in the top twenty is the Prius and, let’s face it, that’s as much a status vehicle as anything. Vehicles like the VW TDI, the Fit, the Echo, etc., don’t sell as many units as a BWM 3 Series. Congress forcing Detroit to build more very-high-milage vehicles won’t save Detroit, it would finish it off.

    Everyone needs to accept that there is a big 4 (Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota) and adjust to that reality.

    • Scope

      I remember last fall when all 3 had their union contracts up for renegotiation. I don’t remember which was first, but, their strike was short lived before they settled. It set the tone for the other two. The management had no ball$ and caved. Gas wasn’t at $4 a gallon then, it was on the rise but it seems that $4 was the tipping point. I am not so sure that they weren’t counting on Obama to put Government Universal Healthcare in place and take that expense away from the unions.

  • AlloySteel

    Does anybody remember the names of the marques that disappeared in the decade of the 1930′s? Pierce-Arrow, Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg, Marmon, Huppmobile, Dort, Graham-Paige, Maxwell, and even the Stanley Steamer? Or the companies that reorganized, like REO, White and International Harvester, leaving the passenger vehicle production altogether and concentrating on heavier-duty trucks?

    Some of these manufacturers, of course, were never big players to begin with, but they were swept aside in the tsunami that ripped through the economic and financial centers not just in the US, but all over the world. America got through the Depression and WW II because there were so many Ford T’s and A’s, and Chevrolets from the 1920′s, all of which could be fixed under the shade tree and kept running far beyond their expected life span. None of those old vehicles averaged even so much as 20 mpg, except in very special circumstances, but they had a basic rugged design and relatively low costs of maintanence, and were amenable to owner modifications that made them both distinctive and fiercely protected by their owners. In 1950, 18 years after the last Model A had come out of Michigan, approximately 50% of them were still in daily use all across the US. Only the advent of the Volkswagen from Germany, in 1956 or so, effectively replaced the rugged reliable cheap old “jalopies”.

  • gamecock

    see if this meets with your approval

    and are you privy as to why Redstate didn’t celebrate

    V-I Day

    • gensec

      Bankruptcy won’t close most of the car factories. Suppose the company fails to reorganize back to profitability in Chapter 11, so goes into liquidation. The surviving car makers would find it profitable buy up most of those plants at fire sale prices, and update them to build Hondas or whatever.

      After a liquidation, a lot of the people building Hondas in that plant would be the same people currently working there. Their wages will probably be somewhat lower, but they’ll still be richer than a lot of people buying the cars they make.

      And it might not even come to that. In chapter 11 bankruptcy the car companies might get back on their feet (without any taxpayer bailout). That may turn out to be the most efficient and least disruptive solution, and if so great; but for me it wouldn’t be as viscerally satisfying as liquidation, seeing the “Big 3″ with their worthless executives and union bosses totally wiped out.

      • mbecker908

        And really, my fondest hope is that the senior management of the three, especially GM, never work anywhere other than maybe doing telemarketing for a MLM. On straight commission.

        And I REALLY hope this destroys the UAW.

        • SteveLA

          gensec

          But what about Joe the assembly line worker, Jane the service writer at the local Ford Store, Jack the mechanic at the local stealership how’s he effected by:

          “but for me it wouldn’t be as viscerally satisfying as liquidation, seeing the “Big 3″ with their worthless executives and union bosses totally wiped out.”

          While I see your point, and it is a valid one, there are a whole bunch of good American workers and their families that would find themselves without an income and on the public dole if that’s what happened. For no other reason, having a job, even at reduced pay is a better thing than going on the scrap heap for us tax payers.

          On a political front, can these nominally Democratic Union voters be attracted to the Republican party through some tough love, or driven further into the arms of the Democratic party mind set of no one is ever responsible for themselves?

  • wolfgang

    …the big three are part of the 2.5 million jobs The Obambi has promised to SAVE or create by 2011. How many jobs are there now?
    Just by giving the Big Three twenty five billion now and another twenty five billion in three or six month and another twenty five billion in a similar additional time period he can buy time and keep all those deserving UAW workers who voted for The Obambi working at their average $93 an hour wages until the economy starts to recover. Or better yet, the billions could go to paying these same UAW workers their $93 an hour wages while they are laid off and idle. The companies could then save on the costs of the raw materials that would have been otherwise spent while producing more and more unsalable vehicles because the economics of the union contract dictate keeping the UAW working since your labor costs are going to be the same, whether you produce gidgets or you don’t produce gidgets.
    There is going to be one heck of glut of cheap new cars when the bankruptcy court orders the stockpiles that GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been building liquidated.
    Do you think Honda will be able to continue sell it’s Accords at $21 thou.. per vehicle when Fusions are flying off the bankrupcty auction floor at two to three thou.. each in the thousands?

    • Achance

      They put up a pretty good fight before WWII. They were essentially nationalized by the War Production Board and forced under pattern union contracts by the War Labor Board. After the war, they adopted pattern bargaining since they had no external competition. None of them cared much what the labor cost was so long as they all had the same labor cost.

      Come the Sixties, a whole bunch of things changed, and they didn’t. American anti-trust laws forced each one to develop its own solutions to American safety and emissions requirements. The foreign makers used consortiums to develop solutions that were then adopted by each individual maker. Ultimately, the American makers were buying the consortion developed technology to avoid the Rube Goldberg solutions that anti-trust had forced on them; remember the sound of every car in a parking lot sitting there doing the diesel run on after it was switched off? All during the seventies and well into the eighties, they couldn’t spend a thing on developing a good car because they were spending every dime on meeting safety and emissions reqirements.

      Add to that the fact that they all do all sorts of government work and sell all sorts of stuff to the government. If you do business with the government, you will do what unions want you to do when there is a Democrat in power. You’ll do at least some of what unions want you to do even when there is a Republican in power. Other than Reagan facing the patently illegal Air Traffic Controllers strike, the last time a Republican was willing to take them on was the 1948 Republican controlled Congress that passed the Taft-Hartley Amendments. It ain’t like the automakers could look to DC for any help.

      • gensec

        But what about Joe the assembly line worker, Jane the service writer at the local Ford Store, Jack the mechanic at the local stealership

        That as I say in my two paragraphs before the one you quoted. In liquidation, most of the factories and most of the people who work there end up making cars for some other car company. And those cars being produced will need people to sell and service them.

        If the Big 3 dinosaurs do manage to get back to profitability, it will require unloading some redundant employees and dealerships. That’s going to happen regardless whether they successfully reorganize in Chapter 11 bankruptcy or liquidate their assets. It isn’t clear whether more people outside management lose their jobs under reorganization or liquidation.

  • Mike_Dugas

    Even if they go to Chapter 11 there still will be a bailout of sorts as there’s no way those already retired will accept or be given less benefits and most likely it will be picked up by the taxpayer.

    • Leon_H_Wolf

      -nt

      • sc_leeann

        The spaghetti spined upper management at the Big 3 is part of the problem. As a former engineer at GM, I could tell you stories about the UAW that would curl your hair. When I was in the GM plants, UAW members did not even acknowledge their employer as GM, rather the UAW. Bankruptcy will at least rein in the union and hopefully the Big 3 will not find themselves in a similar position again.

        As for the spaghetti spined upper management, I say get rid of them. They can’t control things now, so they won’t control things in reorganization. If they are allowed to stay on, nothing will change and we will be watching a repeat of last week on CSPAN next year.

        • Erick

          I don’t think I’m prepared to celebrate V-I day on the same anniversary as Holocaust Remembrance Day and the day JFK was assassinated.

          Whoever decided to set it down as today should have consulted the calendar better.

          Besides, April 9th was the day Saddam’s statue was toppled in Baghdad.

          • Spiral

            Bankruptcy doesn’t mean the end of automobile jobs in the United States.

            First, there are lots of automobilies jobs in the US at plants owned by Nissan, Toyota and Honda.

            Second, many of the the GM, Ford and Chrysler plants will be making automobiles. Perhaps under a new name. But it’s not like all of that capital will just go up in smoke.

            It’s not an either/or scenario. It’s not like “either we give the Big Three and the UAW what they demand or the whole manufacturing base of the country goes to pot.”

            In fact, kicking the UAW in the teeth will help the manufacturing base of the country enourmously.

          • SteveLA

            Spiral,

            I do realize that it’s not an ether or situation, just that there would be a fair amount of collateral damage to people who just get up every day, go to work and come home.

            The UAW is part of the problem, but so is Wall Street, so is US industrial policy, I won’t try to parse the blame, plenty to go around.

            Still, what I ponder what is the conservative point of view on this topic? Let the market sort it out, or some sort of limited intervention? I’d like to hear what Newt, or one of the new upcoming leadership of the R brand have to say on this topic.

          • gensec

            Whether GM et. al. reorganize or are liquidated, there’s no way that that their automobile production is going to be restored to a sustainable path without losing some unproductive jobs.

            No bailout is going to change that fact beyond postponing it for a year or two, unless we have ongoing bailout appropriations for years to come. Bailouts inflict another kind of collateral damage on taxpayers and on self-sustainability in the automobile industry.

            Reducing the collateral damage is a worthwhile objective, but I don’t see how any feasible bailout (that’s not followed by many more) results in less collateral damage than bankruptcy, whether a successful Chapter 11 reorganization or liquidation. Taking out those worthless managers and the UAW is not collateral damage, it’s a benefit.

          • mbecker908

            I worked with the top people as a major supplier to GM, Ford and Chrysler. Chrysler was very easy to work with as was Ford. They had people in place who could and would make decisions on supply and engineering changes on service parts in a very tight time frame. Of the three, Ford really cared about their service customers the most. Chrysler was next, only because they were going through the Jeep acquisition and their left hand often didn’t know what the right was doing. GM, on the heels of Roger Smith, was the most arrogant organization I’ve ever seen. They couldn’t make a decision if their lives depended on it (unless there were at least five VPs in the room to sign off). And they really didn’t give a damn about their customers.

            While all you say is absolutely true, I’d also point out that they agreed to “pattern bargaining” 40ish years ago and that opened the door to perdition. There has never been even a whiff of “good faith” on either side of the bargaining table in the auto “negotiations”.

            They made their beds. Let ‘em die in them.

          • gamecock

            When one divides up all the births and deaths and all other worthy events of celebration in between, and divides by 366, …

            As a rooster, I celebrate dawn every day and the Rising of the Lord once every seven days no matter what else happened by chance to occur on that date in history.

            I’m sure the survivors of the Holocaust would be happy to acknowledge the defeat of an evil mass killer and the prevention of another Holocaust in Iraq.

            But hey, there is always non-Nov. 22nds.

            What day will Redstate celebrate the already accomplished victory in Iraq?

            I have another column in me to join in!

            What date?

          • gamecock

            proud.

  • GENE_LALOR

    **LAURIE DAVID?S NEW PLAN TO SAVE THE PLANET (AND DETROIT)

    Not a woman to ever let her brain engage before she starts yapping or typing, Laurie David, (see below if you know not who she is), endorses a simply marvelous scheme to bail out Detroit and the UAW.

    Writing on HuffingtonPost.com, she supports an idea proposed by yet well-known boy genius and economic guru, actor Ashton Kutcher: Let Exxon-Mobil pick up the tab! (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurie-david/detroit-bailout?-let-exb145121.html)

    ?At least we know ExxonMobil can afford it,? the ever-witty David concludes.

    Whether the oil barons are even vaguely interested in coming to the aid of the auto barons is left undetermined but surely they would, no? After all, if GM, Ford, and Chrysler go out of business, Big Oil would suffer mightily with no cars on the roads to burn their oil and gasoline, right?

    Ms. David must never have heard of Honda, Toyota, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Volvo, Saab and the forty or so other foreign car makers who could fill the gap in short order and with superior, and ?greener,? vehicles. We do live in an internationalist economy now.

    David was just reiterating a plan reiterated by Kutcher but she did have an original idea at least once. It involved toilet paper.

    Below is an excerpt from my book, An Immodest Proposal for Ending and Winning the War on Terror, (pp. 31-32):

    ?A little comic relief is always welcome, especially amid all the global warming gloom.

    To the rescue, armed with the most ridiculous suggestion yet for saving Planet Earth, comes Laurie Lennard David.**
    (Read the rest at http://genelalor.com/.)

  • DavidSage

    From a purely political perspective, giving any sort of bailout to the Big 3 would be foolish for Republicans.

    The UAW is never going to return the favor to the GOP. Michigan is not going to suddenly turn Red if the GOP bails them out.

    A bailout would also enrage the conservative base, it completely violates our basic free-market principles. The major reason the Big 3 are in this position is the UAW. All the other non-UAW car companies can make a quality products in the U.S., and they also have well-paid workers. What the Big 3 needs is reform, not more cash. (sort of like our public school system)

    Make the Democrats do the dirty work with this bailout, make them alone own this. An auto bailout will be very unpopular with the electorate for a variety of reasons, my guess is about 60-70% of Americans are opposed to it. From the overpaid, six-figure assembly line workers, to the $20 million dollar a year CEO’s, people aren’t going to like their tax dollars keeping this gravy train rolling, especially for people who are earning more than they do. The only real large voting bloc that supports a Big 3 bailout are UAW workers, which were never going to vote Republican anyway.

    A crippled UAW workforce would be good for the GOP. A severe downsizing by the Big 3 from a bankruptcy would really limit the clout this powerful, Democrat constituency has. Why would Republicans want to stop that from happening?

    One of the nice things about being in the minority is that you can criticize and not have any responsibility.

    My guess is the GOP will find a way to screw it up and come up with some bipartisan bailout.

  • Dencal26

    I think Chrysler has had the best body designers of the 3 in the last decade. From the Sebring to the 300 M. I personally own 3 American cars. A 1998 Sebring, 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee and a 2004 Merc Mountaineer. Due to poor MPH I have used the Mercury less and it has fewer miles. Combined miles on the 2 Chrysler products is 210,000 trouble free miles. The Mountaineer tranny went at 44,000.
    Quality perception is the enemy of US Cars. They need to do a better job on consumer opinion.

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  • Achance

    a really powerful union with lots of friends in the Statehouse and in DC. After you make that brave stand, come back and tell all of us here how it turned out for you.

    It’s all simple if you don’t know enough!

  • gensec

    If indeed reorganization does turn out to be more efficient than liquidation, then I’m ok with that.

    I meant it when I said I’d find it more viscerally satisfying to see those Big 3 execs and UAW get what they deserve in liquidation, but in other contexts I’ve made it clear that letting gut feelings overrule your brain is for infants. Some times, and I’m not sure if this is one of those times, the viscerally satisfying resolution is also the smart one.