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even the bush people are making the argument that how the auto industry got into this position is at the moment irrelevant. the fact that, once you factor in supply and distribution chains, something on the order of 8-10 million jobs are at stake means that most rightwing perspectives on this are irrelevant. what they are trying to stave off is a considerable acceleration of an economic crisis of very significant proportions--->the magnitude of which you do not seem to be able to process. for the bush people, this acceleration of economic crisis is also a political Problem of the first order.
as it should be, given that there are no coherent alternatives to seeing in this cluster-fuck of a situation the fallout of 8 years of george w bush et al. this is how political delegimation unfolds, it seems.
there's little doubt that the auto industry aristocracy banked on the track record of panic-driven ad hoc measure that opened up federal coffers to the tune of 700 billion for the financial sector---and there's little doubt that the actions and non-actions of henry paulson have created their own, separate level of static. so it's complicated.
at the same time, one of the elements of conservative economic policy of the past 30 years that has become obvious even to congress (except, apparently, for the republicans in the senate) is that neoliberalism is a form of class warfare, that the decision to prop up the financial sector and not do shit for manufacturing is also a form of class warfare---as is the desire to use this situation to deliver a bit of republican payback to the uaw for being a union at all.
what i expect to happen is for cowboy george to either order that a chunk of the "troubled asset" fund be diverted in this direction or to try to use executive signing order power in an unprecedented manner to create separate funds---of the two, the former seems more likely.
as for how the american auto industry got into this mess---i think it's time to stop the simple-minded pseudo-analysis of this and start doing a bit of actual research. what's involved is the history of the car industry in general since the 1970s. what's involved is the way in which neoliberalism has changed the world that detriot operated in prior to that time. what's involved is a particular management structure, a particular set of technological and cognitive barriers that set detriot (which is largely still wedded to forms of production that are not amenable to jit organization) against more tightly integrated and flexible technological and supply-chain arrangements. in short, it seems to me that among the major explanations for the situation that detriot now finds itself in follows from the absence of a state industrial policy from the 1970s forward---just-in-time and the other major features of toyotaism were developed in the context of extensive state underwriting of research, development and retooling.
this means that not only is the problem managerial, but it also has to do with the entire american/neoliberal way of thinking about the economy as some separate sphere outside the political, outside the social, that is internally rational etc etc etc.
i'll put up stuff that might lead toward a more coherent view of the paths that lead detriot here--but what;s clear is that you aren't going to learn much of anything coherent from either tv or newspapers at the moment---and this simply because what's involved with this is a history and not a series of discrete decisions by isolated individuals--and the dominant media in the states does not do context well at all.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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