Detroit and "flower power"

As I write this entry, Detoit auto executives are testifying on Capitol Hill about the need for a $25 billion bailout to save their companies their way of doing business.

In a New York Times op-ed, Mitt Romney, whose father was the CEO of American Motors, argues that the Big Three automakers should go into bankruptcy.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Congress wants the Big Three to change. But the Democratic majority seems to want Detroit to run a flower power. But not as an energy source. The Wall Street Journal explains:

When is $25 billion in taxpayer cash insufficient to bail out Detroit's auto makers? Answer: When the money is a tool of Congressional industrial policy to turn GM, Ford and Chrysler into agents of the Sierra Club and other green lobbies.

That's the little-understood subplot of the Washington melodrama over a taxpayer rescue for Detroit. In their public statements, proponents describe the bailout as an attempt to save jobs, American manufacturing and the middle-class way of life. But look closely and you can see that what's really going on is an attempt to use taxpayer money to remake Detroit in the image of the modern environmental movement. Given a choice between greens and blue-collar workers, Congress puts the greens first.
The automakers already received a $25 billion loan this year--for that Detroit "flower power."

Now they want more cash.

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