Look– Ford was profitable in the first quarter.

Most of what you think know about the Detroit auto industry and its product just simply ain’t so.

Let them die so that they can be replaced with better companies with an interest in, you know, creating a better product.

Marvel has had a few “wards” over the years (Captain America and Bucky Barnes; Captain Marvel/The Hulk and Rick Jones, etc.) but rarely (if ever) referred to them as “wards.”

Also note how many “wards” Bruce Wayne has had: there’ve been at least FOUR Robins. (The fourth, a girl, was unauthorized by Wayne, and IIRC she was KIA.)

BTW, that Green Lantern/Green Arrow series from the early 1970s was groundbreaking for its treatment of social issues. The stories are collected in the “Hard Traveling Heroes” trade paperbacks which are worth checking out. Note that the comic cover has a stamp of approval from the Comics Code Authority…a few years earlier, the CCA refused to approve several issues of “Amazing Spider-Man” that dealt with drugs.

Are you on crack?

They are selling shitty cars with bad fuel mileage that no one wants. That’s their biggest problem.

(It doesn’t help that they spend so much money on worker and retiree health care. The government could do that, and do it cheaper.)

Incidentally, I was listening to The Economist podcast about the BRIC auto industry (Brazil-Russia-India-China) and it sounds like America companies actually have been pretty successful overseas. Dealbook’s suggestion that the Big Three slim down their portfolios said for GM to keep Buick based almost entirely on its success in China. I wonder what will happen to those plants?

Give money to the workers to keep their mortgage payments up and to go back to school and …

I’ve had the same question, and have yet to see a convincing answer. I haven’t really seen anyone put forth the argument that we should bail out the auto companies because we have to have an American auto industry. Rather the justification most often given is that it will hurt the workers who lose their jobs. If that is so, then doesn’t it make a lot more sense to provide assistance to those workers more directly?

The trickle-down theory hasn’t worked for economics, why expect it to work for employment? Bailing out a failing business won’t solve the actual concern (unemployed workers).

* After 9/11, Bush used his bully pulpit to encourage consumption
* Wages over the past 8 years have been stagnant, so we utilized our only capital to leverage ourselves to feel like we were making more, i.e. home equity loans/refinancing
* This created the housing bubble
* Wall Street’s greed allowed the Credit Default Swap market to grow to 3.5 times our GDP and firms leveraged themselves to the tune of 50 to 1
* With this leverage, a few foreclosures (less than 1.5% of all mortgages held) collapsed the entire financial market.

Yeah, this was all done on Bush’s watch.

Now combine the above with the triple whammy over the past 12 months:

* Oil prices explode from speculation and emerging markets
* Housing market collapses due to all the reasons above, which leads to…
* Credit dries up!

Because of this triple whammy, the auto industry has completely bottomed out. Sure, we can blame them for being short sighted and having extreme legacy costs, but be aware that Honda/Toyota/Mazda and the rest are also experiencing major problems as well. They are probably tapping their respective banks for bridge loans as well.

I am so sick of hearing how a chapter 11 will be good for the industry: Who the hell is going to buy a car from a company in any form of bankruptcy!?! And the comparisions to airlines and consumer product company’s does not wash. When you but a car you are buying that car for at least 4 – 5 years and the company standing behind that car for just as long.

Lastly, something that has not been said but needs to: We still need to build tanks and transportation vehicles. I for one, do not want a foreign auto/truck maker being the only one to make our ground vehicles for the military. Remember how you felt when you hard that Airbus was awarded the fat air refueling contract? How would you feel if Hyundai was awarded the next generation of Bradley Assault vehicles?

So get off you high horse of condemnation and support a bridge loan (a freakin loan people) to our auto industry.

Jobless claims are a sign that people have lost their jobs and haven’t immediately found new ones. That doesn’t mean that there are no jobs in the country in any sector; it means that there are not jobs in the unemployed person’s neighborhood for which he has the necessary skill set. If there is a sector in which we’re still granting H1 visas and other skilled-work immigration passes, then that’s a sector into which we should be shifting domestic workers. Jaim has the right idea here.

Incidentally, Jay Tea is right that people wanted to buy SUVs when gas prices were low, and that the normal mode of thinking for a manufacturer is to build more of what consumers are demanding. To that degree, I think some blame should be assigned to our government for not exploring the creation of a gas tax that would keep gas prices at a consistently high level, so that both manufacturers and consumers could make decisions based on a reasonably constant price for this essential input. This also might impede the development of more exurbs and sprawl and make our mode of life more efficient overall.

We all seem to agree that the US autoworkers dug their own graves. The problem is they would bury millions of US jobs with them at a time when the economy can’t absorb or withstand the loss.

But nobody has answered me this yet: how does bailing out the Big 3 at the corporate level save jobs in the long-term? Put a band-aid on the sucking chest wound, and maybe you keep those jobs for another year.

Give money to the workers to keep their mortgage payments up and to go back to school and get, off the top of my head, nursing and health-care certifications and degrees, which are high demand in the States right now with the Boomers retiring. Help these people adjust to the fact that the world, including America, thinks Ford/GM/Chrysler cars are shit. Because they are.

Giving any more money to the top-end of these companies is just a waste of cash. My cash, your cash, everyone’s cash.

Government can help here by providing opportunities for people to transition into better occupational fields. Government can hurt here by pretending that America still needs to make cars when the Japanese, the Koreans, and eventually the Chinese and the Indians will make a better product.

This is a complicated issue, to put it mildly. But the fact is, Toyota developed the Prius, and the Big 3 didn’t. As a very conservative friend pointed out, we can give GM all the money in the world, and they can build all the damn cars they want, but if no one wants to buy them…

Which is more of the short-term thinking that has led to the current problem. Far, far better to look ahead and see that fuel prices will rise and the SUV market will shrink. This didn’t require any great Nostradamus level of foresight. Or at least plan for the possibility.

And forgo some of those profits today in return lower profits over a longer period of time.

Which is better: make $1000 a month for one year and kill the company, or $700 a month and keep the company going for several years? Jay Tea says it’s better to take the $12,000 bucks and run, cause anything else would be grossly negligent.