I nominate Bob Lutz, father of the Mustang, Iacocca aide, GM senior statesman, and so on.

P.S. Poster Ides, you are a champ who actually knows the auto industry and Detroit.

Sure, their lives will suck compare to what they are like now, but that's just the breaks if you work in a dying industry.

Thanks a lot for your compassion. Asshole.

My husband works for a supplier making bolts and other fasteners. It's hot, smoky, filthy, physically demanding, and sometimes dangerous work. Their shop is UAW and they earn about $25/hour. The UAW isn't perfect, but I dare anyone who blames this crisis on lazy workers to do the job my husband and his coworkers do for a week (or even a day) and then say that hourly wage (and their not-great benefits) is not well-deserved. And even non-Union shops in our area (metro Detroit) earn about $20/hour, so it is tough work that you have to pay a decent wage for.

Thank you for summing it so well in your posts.

I get so frustrated at people who are bitter because a "mere janitor" might make a good wage b/c the person doesn't think a "mere janitor" deserves that much money. Well guess what? That person deserves to make living like anyone else. IF they had the mental acuity to join a union and negotiate a good raise, who is to say they don't deserve it? And who are other people to judge their worth? Fine. When you get a company, you pay your janitor minimum wage and hope they don't join the UAW.

I always say I am a lawyer because I couldn't be an assembly line worker. It was the hardest job I ever had and I sucked at it. I could not imagine doing it 8 hours a day (let alone the mandated 12s we were runniing) and decided that I better get my ass through school. As far as I am concerned, they couldnt' have paid me enough at that job.

And I am STILL not sure how the workers could possibly be blamed for managerial decisions. Every union should bargain for the best they can get their people and its up to management to decide waht they can and can't do. The buck stops there.

So you were off by an order of magnitude. That's pretty amusing.

And sure, I could use Google to find some things, but you were demanding the author give citations, why shouldn't you have to do the same.

And that's all you've got? 1 guy giving a speech? Where's the peer-reviewed paper? Where are the supporting articles? You claim to advocate scientific rigor, but can't be bothered to practice it for yourself?

Reading this story reminds me of the efforts to bail out Chrysler in the late 1970's.

Back then, Lee Iacooca asked for $1 billion in loans and cut his salary to a dollar a year. By 1983, Chrysler had repaid the loans, but their product line was mostly front wheel drive K-cars that were sized for each market. That was not enough to secure the future for Chrysler, so they bought American Motors to get Jeep.

Today, Jeep is the reason that GM is discussing a merger with Chrysler. I'd rather see GM, Ford and Chrysler develop their own products with government assistance than see the Big Three turn into the Big Two, or become combined with Toyota or Nissan. Competition has given us better cars than we could have dreamed of owning thirty years ago.

I would support a public stimulus for the Big Three, provided some conditions were met. First is executive compensation. If the government has a piece of the action, then the senior executives should agree to cut their salaries. Not to a dollar a year, as Iacocca did, but tothe salary of the President of the United States which is $400,000 a year. That's hardly chicken feed, and is fair considering that the CEO of an auto company is responsible for thousands of jobs.

Back in the Seventies, Chrysler had to get labor leaders to agree to a lower wage scale in order for Congress to approve loans. That's less realistic today, as the Big Three have already announced plans for thousands of layoffs. However, the auto industry will not be like this forever.

A future for the auto industry must not only be connected to more fuel efficient cars, but also new jobs in the U.S. Any loans should be tied to commitments for new jobs at home as conditions become more profitable. These jobs don't need to be on the assembly line; they could be investments in spin-off firms or in young hires in engineering and the sciences.

I also believe the industry must respect more stringent fuel economy standards. For one thing, they lead car buyers to take better care of their cars. As gas prices rose to over four dollars a gallon, drivers aggressively looked for ways to conserve fuel. The easiest way to do that was to follow the maintenance manual. The stricter standards also spur innovation, which creates and maintains jobs.

Not to mention the industry can consider compliance to be their contribution to patriotism. A war for energy independence from Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil demands as much support by the automobile industry as a military conflict.

and what will you end up with? Rich execs running off with the money and factories still making cars that the rest of the world (and many Americans) don't want.

Call all these clever capitalists' bluff: Refuse to give them socialism when they run into trouble.

THEY said "We get paid so much because we take risk", but now they come crying to the little guy when they come short!

The money will be wasted. Don't let a bailout happen.

Mr. Romm is letting his bitterness over the failings of the American auto industry influence him too much. While everything he says about them is true he is ignoring the importance of the auto industry to the over-all economy. I believe something like one in ten workers in the U.S. work for the auto industry. If GM (or Ford or Chrysler) goes bankrupt they will take most of their suppliers with them. A lot of people work for those companies. If those workers quit spending in the businesses that rely on them for their business there will be an unemployment chain reaction the likes of which haven't been seen since the great depression. It's like this, if an autoworker loses his job he doesn't buy as much from the grocer; the grocer lays some of his workers off; those laid-off workers don’t buy any airline tickets for their vacation in Cancun; the airline doesn’t buy any more airplanes; the airplane manufacturer doesn’t build any more airplanes and lays me off; I quit spending money on non-essentials such as a subscription to Salon, and so forth. You can probably guess that I support the Detroit bail-out. This will also give the country a chance to make sure they build the cars that we need for the future.