As a native son of Michigan, and now ex-patriate, this article is close to my heart.

I find reading some of the statements of Michiganders blathering on about how they need big gas-guzzling trucks to tow their boats to be disheartening. What a confused bunch. So distracted by the love of their cars that they are lead to vote against their own long-term interests.

As long as GM, Ford, and Chrysler are the three biggest employers statewide, the residents will always be caught in a conundrum: to vote and support pro-automobile programs that employ them, yet are socially and environmentally destructive (and therefore unsustainable in the long run), or bite the bullet, and suffer short term, with hopes of rebuilding urban areas and developing new native industries. McCain has got it right: those jobs aren't coming back. There's no way Michigan can be competitive with Korea or Japan. Time for the people of Michigan to make an agonizing reappraisal of their situation.

Southeastern Michigan / Metro-Detroit is the economic center of the state, and the only real hope for any sort of urban revanche. Yet as it currently stands, it is the epitome of sprawl. Miles and miles of infrastructure, coupled with low-density suburban living, leaves no firm tax base to support said infrustructure. And has lead to a mass exodus of the state's well-educated youth: what 20 something college grad wants to live in the suburbs? Without well planned urban areas, the intellectual driving force of the population will go elsewhere. Though the effects of the "brain drain" aren't immediately evident, they will be crushing later on.

Unless the auto-companies accept some drastic long term changes in the politics they back, this will be the legacy they leave Michigan with: miles and miles of vacant areas that once constituted some of the most productive and prosperous industry the world has ever known. Sad as it may sound, I think this will be the result. Michigan won't see any sort of return to prosperity until the domestic auto-companies go belly up and leave it alone.

As it stands now, the auto companies appear to be stubbornly clinging to the old ways: more highways, strip malls, and subdivisions; fervent, and almost suicidal opposition to any sort of mass transit system, or urban renewal in Detroit.

However, I find it interesting that the Big Three are now backing Universal Health care. As myopic as they might be, they've seen the light in this regard, since health care costs have really hammered the bottom line. I guess it's a sign of how impotent the American auto industry is: they can't even get the GOP's ear in this regard.

But let's take a deep breath before we get too het up about foreign governments influencing the strategic decisions of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.

I agree generally; I'm not buying into the hysteria. Without really delving into the numbers here, this reminds me of the anti-Japanese hysteria of the late-80's, early 90's. I remember all the alarmist talk about how the Japanese had bought the Rockefeller Center, and were buying up our nation's infrastructure... and then the Japanese economy overstretched, crashed, and they sold it all back on the cheap.

That's just the thing here; I have to imagine that China is getting way ahead of themselves. They are making some bad investments, and it will come back to bite them. Unless there really is some shadowy conspiracy here. But to presume they really are a threat, you'd have to assume Chinese financiers and economists have a leg up on Wall Street, and our economic brain trust. And those guys wrote the book on dirty tricks...

Could they really manage to wreak more havoc than what the home-grown bumblers in charge of those institutions have already caused?

Yes, and then there's that... unfettered by political forces in the U.S., they could reform these institutions and set them straight. I suppose we'd all be better off then.

It all rests on the assumption of whether the brains behind the foreign capital investments are malicious, or just out looking for a profit like any old American capitalist would do.

Bernanke is a total pushover. I'm guessing the people on Wall Street are aware of this too. How can they continue to lower interest rates in place of skyrocketing inflation and enormous deficit spending? Where is the money for a tax break going to come from?

They might think they are being reassuring here, but chasing bad money with good money isn't going to prop things up. Something has got to give here, and I'm guessing it's going to be the American economy.