The Big Three

I've lived in the Rust Belt for a large percentage of my life. My father worked, during his summers in school, at a steel mill in eastern Ohio. Friends from college went to work for Ford. I've driven foreign cars in fear through the streets of Detroit. I've spent nights in hotels with the logos of car manufacturers stuck on the side, 60 stories up. I went to grad school with people whose parents got them full-body warranties on their Jeeps. Full body. That included tire changes, even.

I marked trips from one town to another by the auto manufacturing plants I passed. I've driven through Flint, passing hulks of buildings that could be full of people making trucks or could be as empty as a Coke can. I know enough to look for the display outside of the plant, so you can see what vehicles are manufactured at that location. I know better than to drive my Mini onto the lot at UAW. I park down the street.

I have no doubt that the auto companies have squandered a lifetime's worth of knowledge and money, pissing it away to line pockets and fabricate golden parachutes. I know that the unions, similarly, have hamstrung management into providing full medical and retirement benefits in an age when most people have no coverage whatsoever and, if they have any, still have to pay out the nose once in a while. I understand that if the union gives up an inch, they think management will take a mile and they'll lose everything they ever fought for in the first place.

But a union can't exist if there isn't anywhere to work and, more and more, that's the way it is looking. The companies, labeled as fat cats and environmentally unsound and technologically inept, aren't going to make it much longer. And, frankly, they are reaping what they've sown. They've spent a lot of years paying lobbyists to keep Congress from setting air quality standards that would affect them. And they were about twenty years behind the times at making their cars affordable and problem-free. Now that they're finally starting to see the light, it is too late for them.

I know that people are angry about the auto industry, that the companies have made ridicuous amounts of money and have apparently pissed it all away, with nothing to show for it. But at least they are companies that make something, that manufacture something, that develop and produce a product. Not like AIG or WaMu or other financial institutions, that simply move money from one account to another, or sell insurance, or collect interest.

GM and Ford and Chrysler have something to show for their work. They contributed to the structure and growth of this country. Without them, we wouldn't have the infrastructure we have today. We wouldn't have a lot of things. And we wouldn't have been able to do a lot of things. Like put out fires with fire trucks. Or get kids to schools on school busses. Or, you know, win WWII. With tanks and planes and Jeeps, all manufactured in plants in the U.S.

If these companies go bust, if they close up shop. Not only will they put thousands of workers out of work, they'll close shop for the folks that make the lights in the dashboards. That manufacture the carpet on the floorboards. That make tires. That make headlights. That do car repair. That sell cars.

We've shipped so much elsewhere. People in Indian call centers are handling my American Express account. We buy clothes from China and India and everywhere else. Toys aren't manufactured here, even as children are getting poisoned by paint in those same toys. And the people who tell you to buy American? Those are the same people who aren't going to give Detroit a loan.

I feel like, in a few years, I'm going to be living in a jobless wasteland.

So much for buying American.