Let Detroit Go On Strike

The  members of the United Auto Workers union are on strike against all of the big three Detroit automakers - General Motors, Ford and the brand group formerly known as Chrysler - in a few factories and possibly more later on, demanding a 40 percent pay raise that the companies' CEOs refuse to pay because it would cut deeply into theirs profit and prevent them for giving . . . themselves a raise!  This is the first time autoworkers have gone on strike against all three companies at once. 

Personally, I'm for the workers, of course, though part of the reason I want to see the automakers suffer is because of all the pain they've caused with their business practices - buying and dismantling the streetcars in American cities, polluting the waterways in Michigan, outsourcing jobs to Mexico and China, planned obsolescence to make us buy more expensive cars with features we don't want, bland engineering that gave us lousy rides,  and - to top it all off - convincing four out of five Americans with TV commercials showing rugged mountains and dense forests to buy sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks to bring a gallon of milk home in and then getting rid of the small, cheap cars that provide basic, simple transportation.  Ford's CEO, Jim Farley, who is the late comedian Chris Farley's cousin, said that if Ford had to pay workers as much money as he pays himself and as much as his shareholders make, Ford would go out of business.

Somehow, I think Jim Farley missed his calling.  He should have been a comedian himself; he's funnier than Chris ever was!

Oh, well, it Ford does go out of business, I'll be happy to see the F-150 go out of existence.

It's really incredible to see workers finally rise up on the watch of President Joe Biden, the best friend union members have had in the White House in decades.  Some of the more recent Democratic Presidents haven't been completely in with rank-and-file workers, mainly because they've learned the wrong lesson about unions since Walter Mondale, the last of the lunch-pail Democrats, ran for President in 1984 and won the District of Columbia and all but 49 states.  Indeed, a Democratic would-be President helped lay the groundwork for that party's growing appeal with the managerial and administrative classes.  I need only bring up Gary Hart, the cartoon-Kennedy icon that my generation actually found inspiring. They likely found Hart inspiring because he said he had new ideas, but they somehow seemed to miss (as did I back then) the fact that he felt that blue-collar jobs should be allowed to wither away and that folks should be trained for more technology-oriented fields that, quite frankly, offered few opportunities for unionization.  Hart also scoffed at increased government spending on domestic programs, calling instead for "strategic investments" - i.e., investing in industries that open up new markets that benefit the employers but not necessarily the employees.  Hart even signed on supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, who justified tax cuts for the rich, as an advisor to his second (and short-lived) 1988 presidential campaign.

An Americans thought Hart's biggest drawback was that he had a young blonde in his townhouse?  (You can't spell "Great American Phony" without "Gary Hart.")

Alas, this "New Democrat" mentality took hold of the Democratic Party and gave us Bill Clinton and his triangulation as well as Barack Obama and his conciliatory efforts toward Republicans.   

Let Detroit go on strike.  Let the actors and screenwriters stay on strike.  Let more people go on strike, as is happening in other occupational fields, such as nursing.  After forty years of an economic system benefitting the rich and taxing work over wealth, it's time that people rise up and get their share.

Just like Tracy Chapman said would happen . . . in 1988.

Detroit Auto Show Blues

After a three-year absence brought on by COVID, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit returned this month, today being the last day of the show.  The most notable display at the show may have been this vehicle.

That sums it up.

Any auto show that relies on a display of the Flintmobile car that George Barris developed for the 1994 "Flintstones" movie to draw crowds can't be all that good.  And to think, in 1994, while The Flintstones was being shown in theaters, the auto show circuit that year featured the Volkswagen Concept One, which became the New Beetle.  My, how times have changed.

By all accounts, this show has been a big snooze fest.  Only two highlights came out of it - President Biden's visit to promote new American EVs and the debut of the seventh-generation 2024 Ford Mustang, the last real car Ford produces in this country.  Most of the displays were smaller than before, according to Lalita Chemello of Jalpnik.com, with almost nothing in between - least of all live bodies. In short, like Detroit itself. "More than anything," she wrote, "what was most notable was the emptiness — the swaths of blank walls, the shocking amount of bare space between cars."

She's right.  Look.

President Biden's appearance at the Detroit auto show was notable for the vast emptiness around him, and it had less to do with providing maximum security for the President than the paucity of show attractions - there was simply nothing there.  Looking toward the end of the pandemic during an interview with "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley as the two of them walked through the convention center, the President noted that no one was wearing face coverings.  Well, of course they weren't, there was plenty of room for social distancing!

Chemello wonders if auto shows have a future.  It's increasingly unlikely that they'll survive, given how more efficient it is for automakers to promote new product online and how expensive it is to set up a traveling show of props and product presenters for the auto show circuit every year.  Heck, the cars themselves are uninspiring - more and more SUVs and pickup trucks, and they're dominating the electric-vehicle market as much as the traditional internal-combustion-engine car market.  I can count the number of new cars I find impressive on one hand with fingers to spare, and that's certainly not much of an incentive to attend an auto show when I would have to spend more time getting there and going home than actually being there.         

I'm sure President Biden had a good time at the Detroit show.  He probably didn't have to pay to get in.

At least the Detroit show is now being held in September, at the start of the new-car model year. Who the heck wants to go to an auto show in Detroit in January anyway? 

Panic In Detroit

Mitch McConnell boasts about having spent his Senate career ensuring that America won't become like Europe (right, good schools, gun control, public support for the arts, a humane criminal justice system, universal health care, high-speed rail, who wants any of that?), and recent polling shows that Democratic voters, while ready for a change from Trump, aren't prepared to go all the way down the European social democratic path anyway.  They may want universal health care, but not Medicare for all.  They may want Amtrak and even local public transit, but the don't want to give up their Explorers and F-150s for Yarises.  They may want immigration reform, but that don't want to decriminalize non-sanctioned border crossings.  They do want a moderate presidential candidate, but they don't want Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.  Though progressives would blame the centrist media for suggesting all that and telling you want to think.  But I, as someone who voted for Jill Stein in 2016, have come to the conclusion that Democrats cannot have a progressive presidential candidate for 2020.  A progressive agenda would have been possible for 2016, but Donald Trump has taken us so far backwards that we have to get back to where we were when Barack Obama left the White House before we can start dreaming big again about emulating European social democracies.

So the two-part debate in Detroit this past week satisfied no one. In the first night, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders stood in solidarity for their progressive goals, but the so-called moderates (any Democrat not liberal enough for the Sanders/Warren crowd is called one) had the upper hand as a group.  But no one centrist candidate dominated the field like Sanders and Warren did, exposing the weak standings of these lower-tier candidates as they wait to take the mantle of the leading centrist or center-left candidate should Joe Biden fumble in the long run.

Biden did not fumble in the second night, despite a mass onslaught from opponents like New Jersey senator Cory Booker, and he did better than in Miami, but he didn't do great either.  This led many to wonder if he can take on Trump in a general election debate.  But what was really eye-opening were the other candidates on the second night going after the President's record.  Not Trump - Obama.  They picked on Obama's various failings as President as if they were running against him.  And Biden, Obama's Vice President, staunchly defended Obama, which makes him look good in the longer run.  The piling on top of Obama's record proved to be too much for many rank-and-file Democrats to stomach, especially when Trump exploited it in a rally in Cincinnati the following day.

The only reason Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez isn't pulling his hair out is because he's bald.    

The primary/caucus debates get harder to qualify for after this, but the field is hardly going to winnow any time soon, because there are likely enough Democratic presidential candidates who can get enough support from the polls and individual donors to keep on going and make the next couple of debates a two-night affair like Miami and Detroit were.  And they'll debate about the same old things - immigration, Medicare expansion - and not talk so much about the economy and the everyday struggles of ordinary Americans.  Good grief, a GM transmission factory in the Detroit suburb of Warren just closed, and even that couldn't spark a discussion among the candidates in the Detroit debate on what they could do for average voters who don't want to hear about exotic or revolutionary programs when all they want to know is how they're going to make it.  The factory closing was a tailor-made subject for someone like Tim Ryan, yet he was unable to get the opportunity to break out of the pack. As for Biden, he wants to talk about meat-and-potatoes issues, but he's constrained by what many of the other candidates want to talk about, and, say, rebuilding our infrastructure isn't one of them.  So don't expect him to stand up for Amtrak - a pet issue of his - any time soon in one of these debates.

And you know the Democrats are in trouble when pundits are actually finding Marianne Williamson impressive.

I'm not supporting anyone for President in the Democratic nomination process because I'm an independent.  Instead, I've been continuing my quixotic efforts to get Volkswagen to keep the standard Golf in its North American lineup when the eighth-generation model debuts.  Between that and supporting a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, I'd rather continue to fight to keep the standard Golf in this market.  At least I know I have a better chance of success there.     

Motor City Mobility

Back in 1987, the year of the Iran-contra hearings and Gary Hart's fateful cruise to Bimini, the city of Detroit opened its first light-rail line since the city's original streetcar system was retired in the 1950s.  The "People Mover," as it was called, is an elevated light-rail system using driverless trains that encircles the downtown area on a track just under three miles long, just as the elevated heavy-rail train lines in Chicago encircle that city's central business district, known affectionately as the Loop.  But while the the train lines encircling downtown Chicago serve as a hub for other elevated lines that transport people from other parts of the city into the Loop, Detroit's People Mover - which borrowed its name from a similar train once used at Disneyland in Anaheim, California - only serves the city's downtown area.  The idea is to use it to get from one location in the central business district to the other, but the area it encircles is conveniently navigable on foot - meaning that it's easier to walk, which is why the few people who frequent downtown Detroit prefer to do so.  Ridership on the People Mover (below, seen passing the so-called Renaissance Center) is so low - 2.5 percent of its daily peak capacity - that it's been called a "ghost train" . . . a ghost train for a ghost town.

Now, however, there is a new effort to bring back at least some of the conventional streetcar system that served Detroit in the first half of the twentieth century . . . but that too has its problems.              

This is the new streetcar line along Woodward Avenue, the main drag through the center of Detroit.  Plans for the line go as far back as 2006, when the city expressed interest in bringing back rapid transit after the last of the original surface streetcars ran in 1956, and it initially got support from the federal government.  The line was to run on Woodward Avenue for about nine miles.  In 2011, though, Washington withdrew its support for the proposed M-1 line (so called because Woodward Avenue is part of Michigan State Route 1, or M-1 for short) when then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, then-Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and Michigan governor Rick Snyder decided it would be better to promote a bus system connecting the city and its neighborhoods with the suburbs.  Yet the desire for a streetcar line remained, and private investors, who had supported a shorter line, got such a line going.  The home-mortgage lender Quicken Loans, a Detroit business, was a main supporter of the project, and the M-1 line was named the QLine when Quicken bought the naming rights to it.  It opened in May 2017.  The QLine runs three miles and connects the downtown area with Grand Boulevard to the north.  Sounds pretty good, right?

Wrong.  The Woodward Avenue streetcar is efficient, and it uses conventional technology not unlike the streetcar lines in European cities like Brussels and in American cities fortunate enough to have street-surface light rail, like Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon.  But only ten percent of Detroit's residents live within a reasonable walking distance of the QLine, meaning that most Detroiters are unlikely to use it.  It doesn't work in concert with the city's buses, either, as there's no transfer system between the buses and the QLine.  Therefore, the QLine is no more effective as a serious urban public transit line than the People Mover.

Ironically, the city that put America in automobiles has a proud streetcar heritage.  In the 1920s, Detroit's streetcar network ran 534 miles through the city's neighborhoods, and it was the most effective and most cost-efficient way to get to work at the car factory or at the office downtown.  Bear in mind also that Detroit's public light-rail system was one of the first such systems to become public in the truest sense of the word; the city purchased it in 1922 from Detroit United Railway (DUR), the private company that had built it, but the sale had been anticipated by DUR long before it happened, so the company deliberately underinvested in it.  Nevertheless, the city kept the streetcars running for 34 years after the purchase, ultimately giving in to the transition to city buses, a move promoted in cities nationwide by General Motors.  (General Motors made new buses and and sold them to cities, all right, but it also sold more cars, as most people didn't want to ride buses.)  The new QLine is both a shadow of the old streetcar system and an insult to the efforts of men like Hazen Pingree, Detroit's mayor in the late 1890s, who had championed public ownership of urban transit.

But there's another wrinkle.  Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans and a native Detroiter, relentlessly promoted the QLine - which somehow got $30 million in public funds - for a reason, and it wasn't because he wanted to help the city come back from the dead.  Apparently, a good deal of land near the Woodward Avenue corridor is ripe for redevelopment, and any mortgage lender, especially a notoriously unscrupulous mortgage lender like Gilbert, will tell you that when you build a public rail transit line through such an area, real estate values increase exponentially.  And guess who owns a large number of downtown properties near the new streetcar line.  If you said "Dan Gilbert," congratulations - you win the $64 jackpot prize!  (I'm only kidding . . . about the $64.)

Which is ironic, considering all of Gilbert's sports-franchises investments in . . . Cleveland.  (He owns the Cavaliers basketball team, among other teams in various sports and leagues.  So, LeBron James works for him, essentially.) 

Sean Tobin of Progress Michigan explains why this is a big, fat hairy deal.  "It is plain to see," Tobin wrote in March 2016, "that this rail is a private venture, hijacked by private dollars, and is not meant to support rebuilding Detroit but rather pad the pockets of predatory home loan maker Dan Gilbert, all the while leaving tens of thousands of Detroit bus riders in the lurch. The fact that the rail should be renamed to honor a company that sold the city on derivatives and profited off of so many on bad mortgages - both of which are widely accepted as main causes of the Detroit bankruptcy - is like feeding the wolf that is going to keep biting you."

But - and there's always a "but" when talking about mass transit - there is an opportunity for the Woodward Avenue streetcar line to succeed.  For starters, it connects the downtown area to another part of town instead of literally going around in a circle like the ill-fated People Mover.  Also, it connects Detroit's Amtrak station at Baltimore Street directly with downtown, providing a rail lifeline between the two points that hadn't existed before, which will make Amtrak travel into the city from Chicago more attractive (Amtrak also connects Detroit with Pontiac in Oakland County, Michigan).  The QLine has potential.  There are actually reasons to use it.  And success breeds success, so once the Woodward Avenue corridor does become more populated, as more people and businesses move into the area to take advantage of the streetcar, there should be an incentive to get the QLine's backers to figure out how QLine riders and passengers of local bus lines can transfer between the streetcars and the buses.  And once everything does fall in to place, the biggest question in Detroit will not be, "Why do we need a streetcar that doesn't serve my neighborhood?"  It will be, "When is the streetcar coming to my neighborhood?"

And hopefully by then, someone other than Dan Gilbert - say, the folks in City Hall - will be able to answer that question.              

A Star-Crossed Mayor

He was a charismatic, ambitious Irish-American politician who first gained notoriety when he was elected mayor of one of America's largest cities while still in his mid-thirties.  His mayoral administration was dedicated to improving the quality of life in his city and increasing the effectiveness of the police department.  He made efforts to address persistent problems within his city's large black population.  Many people compared him to John F. Kennedy, and some pundits declared him a rising star in the Democratic Party who might one day become President of the United States - the first President to have served as a big-city mayor since Grover Cleveland.

Unfortunately, a riot stemming from a heavy-handed policing incident in a black slum neighborhood doomed his ambitions for higher office.

No, I'm not talking about Martin O'Malley of Baltimore . . .

. . . I'm talking about Jerome Cavanagh, who served as mayor of Detroit from 1962 to 1970.

The resemblance between the two is striking, though, to say the least.  Both Cavanagh and O'Malley set out to prove that a major American city could still be governed competently in spite of systemic machine politics and continued middle-class flight to the suburbs.  Cavanagh was quick to reform the Detroit police and push affirmative-action programs to get more blacks in municipal government, even as his Newark, New Jersey counterpart, Hugh Addonizio, did little to involve blacks in his administration, and Richard J. Daley ignored the need for urban-government and civil-rights reforms as mayor of Chicago.  As mayor of Baltimore in the post-civil-rights era after Baltimore became a black-majority city, O'Malley concentrated on using the CitiStat management program to improve city services and to pinpoint violent crime to get as many criminals off the streets and make black as well as white neighborhoods safe.  The program also helped to spur investment in Baltimore and get people to move there.  O'Malley later claimed that he had reduced violent crime in Baltimore by 39 percent by the end of his two terms, though some crime reporters and O'Malley's political opponents found his methodology to be flawed.  But both men established themselves as mayors who could get things done.

In addition to his reforms, Cavanagh was quick to make Detroit a showcase for smart urban renewal by getting his city to participate in the now-defunct Model Cities program.  This program was an initiative set up by President Lyndon Johnson's administration to find ways to fight urban poverty and improve infrastructure while promoting new development in the form of new skyscrapers and public buildings. Cavanagh secured money to aid economic growth for the city and promote downtown property values.  

It was the bugaboo of race, however, that cast a shadow on their respective careers.  Cavanagh's policies in Detroit failed to address the growing disparity between the city's poor black residents and the number of jobs in the auto industry, as the automakers were beginning to invest more in the suburbs, to which many of the city's white middle class residents were relocating.  The Big Three needed more lateral space than what was available in Detroit proper, and middle-class whites simply wanted lower taxes, better schools and bigger lawns.  Also, affordable housing got short shrift at the expense of the mayor's grandiose plans, and Cavanagh failed to see the growing resentment of the black underclass - this at a time when Detroit was hailed as a model for urban racial harmony.  The 1967 riot dispelled that.  As for O'Malley, his zero-tolerance criminal-justice policy was seen as a contributing factor to the 2015 death of criminal suspect Freddie Gray while in police custody, and the riot that followed Gray's death adversely affected O'Malley's presidential ambitions before he even announced his candidacy for the Presidency.  When the Freddie Gray riot started, O'Malley immediately returned to Baltimore from a vacation in Ireland to stand with black residents in the city's riot-torn neighborhoods (below), despite the fact that he was no longer mayor, but many of the residents refused to interact with him and some of them verbally and virulently scorned those who did.  O'Malley's reconciliatory efforts satisfied few if any Democrats looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton as the party's 2016 presidential nominee.

The taunts against O'Malley came swiftly and quickly, especially from black figures.  Baltimore City's state attorney, Marilyn Mosby, squarely blamed O'Malley for Gray's death and the subsequent riot in spite of the fact that he had left the mayor's office eight years earlier, and professor and pundit Michael Eric Dyson laid into him, declaring that O'Malley had a lot of explaining to do for what Dyson judged to be a racist criminal-justice policy.  Dyson later endorsed Hillary Clinton for President, insisting that she could deliver on the promise of civil rights where Barack Obama had failed.  (Yeah, right.)  But "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah may have given O'Malley the ultimate kiss of death when he had O'Malley on his show: "I loved you in 'The Wire,'" he said to him.  Noah, of course, was referring to the fictional Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti on "The Wire," the crime series developed by O'Malley critic David Simon; Carcetti was a composite of real-life Baltimore politicians, including O'Malley.

However, and this is crucial to remember for those of us who may be pessimistic about O'Malley's future presidential ambitions, there are differences between him and Detroit's Cavanagh.  The 1967 Detroit riot happened on Cavanagh's watch, and he was ultimately responsible for failing to handle it, which Cavanagh himself acknowledged; as noted, Freddie Gray's death and the subsequent riot in Baltimore occurred long after O'Malley had left City Hall, which begs the question as to why his successors as mayor weren't able to correct his criminal-justice policy's shortcomings.  Cavanagh had had the federal government invested in his mayoralty; O'Malley had no such support.  Cavanagh failed at his later bids for U.S. Senator and governor of Michigan; O'Malley became a successful two-term governor of Maryland.  One key thing they both have in common, though is this:  Cavanagh (who died in 1979) was not and O'Malley is not racist.  Both Cavanagh and O'Malley did the best they could to ease urban racial animosity, which is like sweeping back the ocean with a broom.  And Michael Eric Dyson, like so many of O'Malley's critics, is guilty of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by shunning O'Malley, a civil rights supporter and a tireless advocate for the rights of Hispanics, Muslims, and immigrants, in favor of the utterly clueless Hillary Clinton, whose nomination for President by the Democrats led to the election of Donald Trump. Oh, that's better.  

While O'Malley, like Cavanagh in Detroit before him, didn't have the sort of tension with his city's black population as mayor of Baltimore like Daley in Chicago and Addonizio in Newark did, I must admit that I fear his compromised reputation among blacks in his adopted hometown will always be a problem.  Case in point:  When John Lewis, the civil rights icon and Georgia congressman, said in January 2017 that Trump was an illegitimate President because of Trump's possible ties to Russia, O'Malley tweeted support for Lewis, saying, "John Lewis is right. Trump wasn't popularly elected. A fascist candidacy based on racist fears [and] Russian help should never be legitimized."  I kept waiting for someone to go after O'Malley by saying that someone who, as mayor of Baltimore, disregarded civil rights by having so many black men in that city arrested by the police (many of the arrests under O'Malley's mayoralty were in fact repeat-offense arrests) had no business expressing solidarity with Lewis.  To the best of my knowledge, that did not happen.

On balance, though, O'Malley is in better position for a comeback than Jerome Cavanagh ever was.  He has a more solid record for getting results and for being committed to public service as a vehicle to advance the greater good.  His leadership qualities are bound to be reappraised and positively appreciated.    

Modesty In Motown

The North American International Auto Show in Detroit kicked off with much less glitz and glitter in a much more subdued fashion. Good ol' American showmanship remained in high gear (no pun intended) on the auto show circuit during the last great recession of 1981 and 1982, when General Motors was so full of itself it boasted it could build a small car just as good as anything from the Japanese . . . and demonstrated their inability to do so with the Chevrolet Cavalier. Even the start of Persian Gulf War in 1991 didn't dampen the enthusiasm at that year's Detroit show. Now GM and Chrysler, humbled by the bad decisions and inferior product, don't talk so loud, especially after they needed government bailouts to stay in business. GM's Pontiac and Saturn brands are down to one car or two each in their last year, and they're not represented at the show. (Even Oldsmobile had a display on the auto show circuit in 2004, its last year.) GMC Truck offers an SUV concept that's about the size of a traditional station wagon. And Chrysler's most exciting products are the Fiat-based Chryslers and Dodges that aren't on sale yet.

Ford is much better off, winning the 2010 Motor Trend Car of the Year award for its Fusion sedan and getting good press for two smaller vehicles due in showrooms soon, the next-generation Focus and the new Fiesta, the latter car set to return to America following a thirty-year hiatus.

The Japanese continue to demonstrate their affinity for hybrids, Toyota displaying a FT-Ch concept hybrid compact and Honda showing a new CR-Z gas/electric sport coupe. Meanwhile, Volkswagen, to quote an old VW tagline, does it again. The German automaker, Europe's largest, unveiled a new concept car - a compact two-door coupe obviously based on the new, upcoming sixth-generation Jetta sedan. This will likely be a two-door Jetta, the first since 1991. This coupe is quite stylish, offering impressive fuel economy and a seven-speed DSG transmission mated to Volkswagen's TSI gasoline engine with a supplementary electric motor. And the company is on track to continue expanding in the United States, as Consumer Reports recommends eight VW models and the new Tennessee factory is on schedule. Learn more - a whole lot more - by watching the video here.

I'm a little embarrassed by the dancers at the end of the presentation. Volkswagen is notoriously famous for avoiding the showbiz razzmatazz at auto shows favored by GM or Chrysler. But they have less reason for such showmanship, which is why they have none this year (no pickups dropping from the ceiling), and VW is bucking the trends of the recession, so I'll give VW a pass.

Breakdown

The latest news from Detroit, the city of lack of opportunity and of impossibility and the place where anything can go wrong (and does), is the elimination of several GM and Chrysler dealerships in the U.S. to get Chrysler out of bankruptcy and to save GM from it. Roughly forty percent of dealers representing each company are to go out of business as soon as possible.

Most of the dealerships being eliminated are small, local ones that stick to one GM or Chrysler brand, and each company hopes to cut costs on maintaining their franchises by relying on the larger dealerships. Wayne Dodge - a small dealership that handles the immediate area in Wayne, New Jersey, based in the township's Mountain View section - is one of the many small local dealers known for friendly, one-on-one service that is closing down. By cutting out local dealers - some of whom have been in business since the Wilson administration (including Chrysler-affiliated dealers who predate the company itself and probably started out selling Maxwells) - and staying with the big, impersonal dealers known more for their obnoxious radio commercials than for quality service or a strong commitment to their customers, GM and Chrysler are only proving themselves to be more out of touch with the consumer.

Either way, there'll be a whole lot fewer dealers, and thus fewer opportunities for reasonable, sound deals. A lot of customers are going to get screwed.

Meanwhile, GM is looking to sell Opel and Vauxhall to Fiat. Since these brands (Vauxhalls, sold in Britain, are just rebadged Opels with right-hand drive) are the crown jewel of GM's foreign operations, it only goes to show how far the General has fallen. To leave Europe and to sever itself from Opel's stellar engineering and design (not to mention the GM employees responsible for it) shows how diminished the once-mighty company has become.

Government Motors

President Obama pretty much had the government take charge of what's left of the American automobile industry, dismissing GM and Chrysler's survival strategies as insufficient and having them go back to the drawing board . . . and giving Chrysler only a month to finalize a partnership deal with Fiat that has only a slight chance of being completed in that time. The government will now back warranties for GM and Chrysler products, and GM chairman Rick Wagoner has been forced out of a job, with a severance package of $23 million. That's pretty good for someone leading an industry whose remaining employees are asked to make the kind of sacrifices the bankers don't have to worry about.

It seems weird to many that the automakers are being punished so severely for their bad business practices while the banks get even more money on top of the bailout funds they've already received for their bad business practices. But Obama has gotten caught in the devil's bargain. The banks are too big to fail, and money has to be pumped into the system to get credit flowing again. This is what most consumers need to buy a car.

Some of the government's policies in helping out Detroit make sense. GM and Chrysler are overrepresented by too many dealerships meant to cater to a market share that was once much larger than it is now, so dealerships have to be sacrificed. Also, many of GM's brands, which once dominated American highways,have become irrelevant and redundant. Pontiac, after trying to produce a distinctive high performance image for their cars, are once again becoming nothing more than Chevrolets with split radiator grilles; its "newest" model, the G3, is actually a rebadged Chevrolet Aveo. I used to insist that Dodges were Plymouths and Plymouths were Dodges and Chryslers were Dodges and Plymouths with upright grilles, plushly upholstered seats, and more chrome, but even with the Plymouth brand name long gone, Dodges and Chryslers are still rather redundant, and even the distinction of Jeep trucks and SUVs (made by Chrysler since 1987) is getting blurred as some Dodge trucks (like the Nitro SUV) derive much of their styling and engineering from the Jeep lineup.

GM should survive; even though new chairman Fritz Henderson (do you really want a guy whose nickname is slang for something that's broken?) has indicated that bankruptcy is "probable," its new product should help. Many of GM's latest models are more competitive with their Asian counterparts; my own cursory, unscientific census suggests that the all-new Chevrolet Malibu is selling well among the few Americans still buying cars. Chrysler is a question mark; even though some question the logic of its deal with Fiat, due to the fact that Chrysler's 1998 merger with Daimler-Benz was a fiasco, it's worth noting that Fiat makes more cars for the average buyer; its legendary 500 was and the retrograde 500 is the Italian equivalent of the Volkswagen Beetle. This deal will allow Chrysler to make and sell European-engineered cars prices for more of a mass market.

Ironically, despite Obama's call for Detroit to make greener cars, his administration has declared that the coming Chevrolet Volt hybrid is too expensive to turn things around for GM. Its sophisticated components are too costly to produce. And here's another dirty little secret; hybrids are only a small part of the car market. Most people in this country buy cars that use gasoline, and, as long as gas is cheap, prefer bigger cars that use more of it. Unless gas prices go up again and stay up - or unless gasoline subsidies in this country are eliminated and more punitive federal taxes for gas guzzlers are imposed - you won't see many more Aveos or G3s on the road, much less Volts. Which works out fine, since the Aveo/G3 twins are made in Korea anyway.

Obama hopes to save the American auto industry, and I hope he does a better job than the guys who actually ran the industry. But that industry could just as easily disappear, or be reduced to total irrelevance even in the best of circumstances. I'm somewhat skeptical myself. In fact, I saw something really eerie today. On the road, driving home from work, I saw a Model T going the other way. Okay, it was a collector's car, being driven by its eccentric owner. But even though Ford is doing relatively better than GM or Chrysler, the sight of a Model T Ford was still rather symbolic. The Model T is a ghostly symbol of Detroit's glory days, and the sight of one was like a premonition of the industry's death.

After all, Model Ts are black.

(Whew! I certainly didn't go out like a lamb tonight! It's March 31, 2009, and that's the end of the first quarter!:-D)

I Don't Wish Again That I Were In Michigan

I came across a tourist magazine at work today, brought in by someone who just came back from a trip to Michigan. The magazine actually does the impossible - it makes Detroit look like a fun vacation destination.

Detroit is a synonym for hell. The best time to visit is winter, when hell freezes over, because of the auto show - which somehow, despite the current crisis in the auto industry, still went on this year.

Go Lions - to the showers!