Scary Times

I guess in our government's eyes it's OK to give billions of dollars to failing financial companies - companies that were failing because of PURE GREED on the part of their executives - but it's not OK to help the US auto industry. I guess they figure why should they? If the US auto industry goes belly-up it's only a loss of ONE MILLION JOBS. But, hey, most of those jobs are just "blue collar" jobs. Blue collar workers don't have a lot of money to donate to political campaigns. Why should the government worry, right?

Well, they need to worry. Because besides the loss of jobs it will also mean that the US will join the UK in being the only modern industrialized nation without a homegrown auto industry. Germany, Italy, France, Japan, China, South Korea, Malaysia, India, et al, all have auto industries.

Oh yeah, we will still have a few companies building cars on US soil, but none of them will have their main corporate headquarters here in the US. The task of the US auto worker will now be to build cars for Toyota, Honda, BMW, VW / Audi, etc., etc.

Yep, GM, Chrysler, Ford made some huge mistakes over the past few decades. In a perfect economic world maybe they don't deserve to survive. But this is not a perfect economic world and I don't believe the US can afford to lose another major industry. If we're not making cars in the US, what will we be making? Virtually nothing. We cannot afford to go down that road. Our economy is at stake, our national security is at stake, and our pride is at stake.

Maybe the government should force a merger. Maybe it should nationalize the auto industry. Maybe it needs to bring in management from Toyota, Honda, BMW. VW / Audi, et al. Maybe there are a lot of things the government needs to do. But what it can't do is let the US auto industry disappear.