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Yes, the top management of the big three automakers have been making stupid decisions for years along with most other short sighted executives in the US.
It only seems that way. The truth is very different. I've touched on this in several previous comments, which I'm considering paraphrasing into a book chapter, with footnotes.
What appears to be stupidity is actually the result of certaom constraints on industry, not so much the unions as getting their strings pulled by the US government, Big Oil, and especially Wall Street. Their CEOs are anything but independent actors. They're in large part told what to do. The auto market can be viciously competitive.
The US auto industry does make mistakes, but not so much in strategic management. Some of their moves over the years have been rather brilliant and have resulted in really spectacular profits. Part of the problem is sustaining profitability when Wall Street is determined to use the industry as a cash cow, limiting reinvestment at the expense of shareholder distributions.
I've found worthwhile research on these issues to be extremely expensive, and you'll find almost none of the real story in the MSM. The general public is seriously, perhaps fatally, ill-informed on these issues, apparently as a matter of long-standing government policies initiated by anti-union conservatives and foreign automakers.
