So you are watching MSNBC or CNN or CNBC or Fox or Lordy, the “local news” and in a frequency effect game you promise yourself a drink of Gray Goose every time a suited type explains that Detroit’s problems are the direct result of employee benefits, as if the unprecedented collapse of credit to consumers has not occured; as if the auto industry has not failed to invest in a new generation of cars that will get better mileage–say for the sake of argument we’re talking about the same mileage that cars are getting in Europe.
You start to get a little drunk. The unions are at fault over at CNN. Have another drink. Don’t think at all about the fact that the Big 3 U.S. auto makers have been replicating largely unsaleable product lines for over a decade. Don’t imagine that management has had a key role in undermining the health of our nation’s leading manufacturing industry. Look. Even today on MSNBC a suit was overheard saying that the unions are the problem. Pour some more Goose. Drink like a rich man or woman. Play at selective economic memory loss. Ignore that American workers are not the problem and that their benefits are a minor slice of Detroit’s shrinking pie.
You might as well play the drinking game all the way to its conclusion. Pay no attention to the fact that a national health care plan would be good for business and for industry or that the business of union bashing is essentially an argument against the inclusion of blue collar workers in the middle class.
Peter S. Boyer writes over at the New Yorker that the whole sad decline of the U.S. auto industry has to do with the unions but in fact the estimated $1,500 that Boyer asserts must be added to the cost of an American car as opposed to a Nissan that’s manufactured in Tennessee where there are no unions is a red herring. If Barack Obama’s efforts to bring low cost medical insurance to every American can be realized those costs in the arguments concerning Detroit’s woes will be erased.
Planet of the Blind 
It appears that you are attempting to apply logic, math and vodka to the narrative of corporations and pundits. I must warn you that this combination that could have lethal consequences–you will die of alcohol poisoning while making sense. Vodka alone, to preclude both logic and math will be effective at much lower doses. Mixing could be deadly.
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For a few months I have been carefully reading about the auto industry. I doing this for selfish reasons–my old car with 100,000+ miles is no longer dependable. My search for a new car highlights a problem that will take a long time to overcome–the alienation of a generation of consumers. Why are consumers alienated? American cars are over priced, poorly made, and grossly inferior. Exceptions exist but why bother searching them out when inexpensive and reliable Hondas or Toyotas abound.
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