Recalling Detroit's Finest

The Detroit bailout still has me flummoxed. Even as we read news that the recession is hitting auto dealers hard, with decreases in sales of perhaps 47 percent for the year, I cant help but think about how we got here. You have heard the well-worn arguments about why Detroit isnt competing with foreign producers. They include a failure to increase fuel efficiency standards and a resistance to development of hybrid and other alternative vehicles. And, the credit crisis in the financial markets is very important because it freezes money in the system, for consumers, dealers and suppliers alike. Those arguments all have some validity as far as I can tell, but they just dont add up to the kind of crash we are seeing.

This is a massive sector of the American economy deteriorating before our eyes. There is something else going on. I know I am just sitting here in the cornfields (gold mines, really, if you think about it!) throwing potshots at the carmakers, but here goes anyway.

I saw a GM exec from the big national auto show last week make the argument that GM was really changing because the Chevy Volt will be on storeroom floors in November 2010. Hello! Not even close to fast enough to save that company or the American segment of the industry.

It is the utter failure of corporate management to understand their surroundings, which eerily mirrors the failure of public management in the post-Iraq, post-Katrina era, that is at the root of the failure of the automakers.

Management in the business setting is about looking into the future of the market for your product and making decisions about what products or services to sell and how many people and resources are needed to do that. The movement of those levers up and down IS management. What else is there at the core of that job?

dont know why this isn't getting bigger play in the infamous MSM, but it is useful to remember the blockbuster business deal in late 2007 that sent Chrysler away from the German company Daimler, and back into the hands of Americans and Canadians at Cerberus Capital.

Who was the genius who looked into the future less than a year ago and said "Hey, you know what, we should sink vast sums of private money into an American automaker!!" Who spoke about the deal, pushed for it, and used all possible influence to make it happen, and is now asking the federal government for the most massive bailout of a manufacturing company in the history of the world?

That genius is Cerberus Global International(one of the company's units) Chairman, prominent Republican, and former Vice President Dan Quayle.

Ladies and gentlemen, the 2009 Chrysler Potatoe.