“DEATH MARCH” OR “PLANE CRASH” IN D.C. FOR THE DETROIT 3

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The Big Bankrupt Three Detroit automakers crashed and burned in front of Congress.

The poverty pilgrimage of Ford Motor Company’s Alan Mulally, General Motors’ Rick Wagoner, Chrysler’s Bob Nardelli and the United Auto Workers’ Ron Gettelfinger was an Edsel-sized disaster. A fiasco. A flop.

In a breathtaking show of tone-deafness, the hat-in-hand witnesses reportedly breezed into town on a fleet of “luxury private jets.”

A skeptical media – the same one that couldn’t be bothered with doing real stories about President-Elect Obama before the election – noticed the irony . . or the hypocrisy.

One would have thought that somebody in the huge public relations operations would have dreamed up something better. Something more symbolic.

A bus ride.

A convoy with thousands of employees who would get fired and lose their homes when the Detroit automakers are parted-out and stripped like a stolen Corvette in bankruptcy.

On the other hand, the dwindling cadre of logical engineers as well as the myopic bean-counters who plague Detroit would recognize that flying by private jet to Washington D.C. undoubtedly saved 3-5 hours of travel time (not insignificant when your time is worth $1,000/hour or more to your employer). It allowed Mulally, Wagoner and Nardelli the option to surround themselves with advisers and staff. It permitted them to conduct rehearsals and other work in flight (not possible on a commercial flight). It was also more secure than commercial air travel.

$20,000 in travel costs is chump change when you need $25-100 Billion! When Senators junket to exotic locales on “fact-finding” forays, they often take even more expensive military aircraft. And these same Senators vote to spend billions earmarks for “landscaping,” “nature walks,” “bicycle trails”, “beautification” and a museums for arcana such as the Woodstock Music Festival.

Nonetheless, all of that logic will be lost in the battle for public perceptions. It was as tone-deaf as driving a 1960 Corvair to a Ralph Nader birthday bash. . . .

Maybe they could have call the jets “air ambulances . . . .”

As for the main event -- the scene exuded all of the foregone “drama” of a Figure-Eight Jalopy race.

As Autoextremist Peter M. DeLorenzo put it:

"The din out there in the media right now is so anti-Detroit, anti-'bailout' that I welcome the opportunity to present the other side of the debate, even if it appears with each passing day that Detroit is running out of time and unable to break through the negative media clutter that envelopes the industry at every turn. And after that death march of a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday, I’m even more pessimistic.

When Alan Mulally, Rick Wagoner, Bob Nardelli and Ron Gettelfinger sat down in front of the microphones, I knew it wasn’t going to be good . . . ."

In fact, it was a total set-up from the get-go.

Later, even the hapless Mitt Romney weighted in, reminding everybody that his Daddy was among the old-line of Detroit managers who barely kept now-defunct American Motors afloat back in the halcyon days of the 1960s with frugality.

Mitt even claimed that helping the Detroit 3 avoid certain liquidation in bankruptcy would virtually guarantee the “demise” of the Ford, GM and Chrysler! (Don’t worry, Flipper Mitty will probably flip-flop to supporting aid . . . after it is too late.)

The journalists also dredged up the example of nationalized U.K. automaker British Leyland as an example of why “bailouts” won’t work.

Of course, the bulk of British Leyland did survive into the 21st century – which it likely would not have if the ratchets of over-regulation, hyperinflation, and government coddling of labor unions had not been leavened by bridge loan funding.

The vandals and visigoths seeking to burn down what’s left of Detroit conveniently ignore any success stories. They just don't fit the narrative.

Chrysler’s resurrection in the early ‘80s is wholly discounted as “prolonging the inevitable” even though every taxpayer dollar invested was fully repaid ahead of time and with interest.

“[T]he case of Renault, which combined fresh money and new management in the 1980s, showed that government bailouts can be beneficial.”

“The French government help for Renault also came amid increasing losses for the company. . . . [U]nlike British Leyland, Renault was able to use the financing to create new car models that were ultimately successful. That, along with tough cost-cutting by a newly installed chairman, cleared the road to profitability by the time the government began privatizing Renault in the 1990s.”

Renault even picked up the dregs of the weakened American company that Mitt Romney’s frugal Mormon pappy ran!

None of this matters to the Toyota-driving, Consumer Reports-worshiping, know-it-all Mob who want Detroit to “pay” for not eradicating the UAW forty years ago and who erroneously believe Vegas and Pintos accurately represent the quality of Detroit’s current products.

None of this matters to a hoard of finger-in-the-wind politicians who would spend billions more on pork and special interests, and anticipate heaping on billions more in unfunded mandates, but who will not lift a money-grubbing finger to save one of our most basic industries.

Romney, of course, is right when he says that the wages and benefits for UAW-represented workers must track with those of their “scab” counterparts in the right-to-work Southern and Midwestern assembly plants of the Japanese invaders. Yet, nobody in Washington D.C. has the bravado to suggest that the political branches of government have the power to make this happen. After all, it was FDR's "New Deal" that saddled the Detroit 3 with decades of labor trouble. Washington broke it and now they should fix it.

Instead, the Democrats and the GOP continue to squabble over the meaningless minutae of whether the already-appropriated $25 Billion for fuel efficient cars can or cannot be diverted to the more pressing need of avoiding a total shut-down of the industry. Stupid. Selfish. Tragic. Politics as usual.

Detroit is burning to the ground. Meanwhile all of those with fire extinguishers are acting as if they think fire is good.