Rambler doesn't usually weigh into politics much. Enough others making too much noise on that front. But I will say after some soul searching that Congress should help out Detroit. If we can bail out a slew of firms whose basic contribution, to paraphrase from Wall Street, is to live off the buying and selling of others, then we need to rescue GM, which actually creates.
A Forbes columnist hit it on the head:
"The U.S. is lending $120 billion to an insurance company. There's $700 billion set aside for banks and others whose leaders enriched themselves while ruining their companies and the U.S. economy.
The leaders of GM have made their mistakes--plenty of them--but they didn't enrich themselves beyond decency as those other executives did. Today's economic problems, brought on by subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, a credit freeze and a stock market collapse, were caused by those other folks.
The U.S. needs to decide if it wants a domestically controlled auto industry. We won't run out of cars. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes and BMW will make sure of that. But the auto industry created American society as it's known today. If this industry can't survive, what can?
We might ask ourselves if Japan would allow Toyota to go down in these circumstances or if Germany would let Volkswagen fail. The U.S. should also ask whether those companies will build the tanks and trucks that it might need someday.
A collapse of GM would bring a huge job loss, close to 100,000 people on its own payroll, plus hundreds of thousands of others in dealerships and supplier industries. The U.S. would pay a price for this in unemployment insurance, medical costs, the squeeze on schools because of tax losses and all the things that go with such devastation.
Maybe an American driving his Mercedes to work is thinking: `What has GM done for me lately? We're not a manufacturing economy anymore. We're technology, service, finance. Let those autoworkers, who make too much money anyway, get jobs at Wal-Mart.' But when GM gets killed, it's bad for business everywhere, and something needs to be done about it."
OK, so he lifted that last sentence from The Maltese Falcon. Dude still knows what he's talking about.
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I still love Detroit, the city, the way that you would root for a boxer who is constantly getting knocked out.
The city has taken so many hits it's unbelievable that anything is still standing. The wasteland I worked in many years ago keeps trying to stand on its own two feet.
The one thing that could inspire some civic pride was looking downtown to the Fort Whitey Renaissance Center. After GM moved into the center, they put a giant GM sign on top of the tallest building there. Just looking at it reminded you that yes, Detroit is still important in at least one way.
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