And it's been severely lacking in Detroit, Washington and New York for decades. Many of the problems facing America today are interrelated and few people have had the guts to say that. (For example, the automobile industry sees the merging of America's energy, environmental and healthcare problems.)

Up until recently, it was taken as dogma that the "free market" could cure the problems eventually. That, of course, is a lie: the free market is inherently incapable of fixing the problems we currently have and, if anything, has exacerbated them. But the argument was used by those leaders and politicians too lazy or afraid to make the tough choices necessary to move America forward and who were willing to let the problems fester on the backburner until they could no longer be ignored.

Hopefully, this crisis will see a visionary national plan of action to tackle all or most of our problems at once such that we emerge stronger than before. Call it socialism, government interference in the markets, whatever you want, but America needs it.

A.L.

Any bailout, restructuring, or government-overseen bankruptcy should be accompanied by comprehensive health care reform for all workers, along with substantial improvements in the safety net such as wage insurance, extended unemployment benefits, training and education subsidies.

I feel as if I beat my head against a wall when bringing this up myself. And Elephantman doesn't help either, what with the CAFE standards stuff.

In fact, I would go even further than this article, and say that the only way to afford healthcare for current workers, retirees, and all the severely disabled veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan at alarming rates is to put EVERYBODY in the country -- including the veterans -- into a common pool so we can balance the risks of care for these most vulnerable citizens with the care of the healthier general population.

When you consider the number of TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) patients we need to care for, the only way to amortize their costs and provide them with the first-class care they deserve, is to blend them into a pool which includes all of us who are not traumatic-brain-injured -- those for whose benefit they served.

Call it socialism, government interference in the markets, whatever you want, but America needs it.

I'm still trying to figure out how "capitalism" acquired so many good connotations. Perhaps it was a side effect of the McCarty era paranoia about communism: If communism was bad, than capitalism must have been good.

In any case, capitalism and communism have one thing in common: They both sound a lot better in theory than they work in practice.

What we are witnessing here is a dress rehearsal for the day the United States effectively goes bankrupt, except then there will be nobody big enough to come to our rescue.

For years now companies have been making promises to their employees based on a) assuming the future looks bright, and b) passing the buck to future generations by underfunding today. But when a) times turn dark, and b) there are too few workers-to-retirees, the companies either go belly-up (or at least threaten to) and pass the debt onto the taxpayers - or rather tomorrow's taxpayers. The steel companies did it and now the car companies want to too, but who is going to bail out we the people when we are out of borrowing power and we the boomers are looking down the generations to support our healthy retirement, as promised?

This Hair Of The Dog theorem, that the way out of a pit caused by too much borrowing is to to borrow even more, is merely to postpone the day of the ultimate hangover. I am an older boomer, so I might just escape it if I don't outlive my actuarial expiration date, but as for our children and so on down the line, I don't think even God will be able to help them when our bills come due.

Prices are being slashed by auto makers and retail chains. Where are the concessions from the health care industry?

My modest paycheck (I'm grateful I still have one) shows $560 deducted for all of my taxes, including federal, state, medicare, and $897 deducted to fund health care for my husband and myself. Cut that in half and I'll go out and buy a new car and a 42" TV.

It's worth noting, for the thousandth time, that US car companies are in trouble for two reasons -

1) First and foremost, they make a product that doesn't sell.

Whenever they could sell cars in the past, unions notwithstanding, they did well. However, they remained inflexibly glued to a model of mediocre quality but big and relatively expensive cars. Why? Probably just some cultural bias thing, although incestuous relationships with oil companies may also play a role. They had a chance to learn the need for flexibility once, but they didn't, so now they're really screwed.

2) The US health system screws everyone and everything in the US except health insurance companies. If the US had a Canadian style health insurance for working people, as we already do for retired and disabled people (except that Medicare is a national system, whereas Canadian systems are administered by the provinces), Detroit might have been able to survive long enough to develop something that would sell.

In 1950, when the auto companies agreed to pensions and retiree health benefits, they should have started funding them. Good companies do this. They have their pensions and such pre-funded. That means they have no legacy costs.

The North American auto companies apparently did not do this. It appears they played games with their pensions, e.g. I recall that GM declared all its pensions "fully funded" during the dot com bubble.

This was a huge management sin, but current management hopes we all are too stupid to understand the situation. That's why they invented the term, "legacy costs."

Finally, all their talk about retiree health insurance is baloney. US Medicare pays most of their retirees' health costs. The real problem is current medical and dental benefits for current employees. And management should be ashamed, they should be put in jail for trying to trim what they have promised.

In manufacturing, the North American Three are fantastic, leanest, most efficient in world history. But in benefits, they are criminal.