Oakland Press: Auto Meldown Fault Of Management. Detroit Free Press: No It's Not!

It's somewhat amusing when the liberal MSM contradicts itself. Sometimes the narrative has blanks that need to be filled and the local libs haven't gotten their talking points down yet. Case in point this weekend is the incessant need to point fingers at the cause of the auto meltdown. The liberal narrative is that the problem is due to greedy capitalists. Outsourcing. The free market. Big SUVs. Not enough small, dangerous 'green' cars. Of course, that doesn't explain why Toyota has seen a huge decrease as well, but anyway. Contrary to the liberal narrative that is being spoon-fed to the populace, the Free Press let in a piece that contradicts the very foundation of those assertions. But first, from the Oakland Press: Corporate greed was the automakers' downfall. This is a special to the OP by Dave Cleveland. Not much special about it.

Corporations are graded by Wall Street for their ability to generate earnings that meet or exceed their projections. If they fall short, Wall Street befalls upon them and stock prices fall. Corporations are no more, and no less, than money-generating machines.

There is no such thing as “free trade,” except for business. To you and me, “free trade” is ripping the heart out of our economy by destroying the wealth, income and purchasing power of Americans.

GM was once the most powerful corporation in the U.S., with more than 850,000 employees. This once guaranteed that each of those employees and a large percentage of the American people would buy at least one, (maybe two) new cars a year!

Then the outsourcing began. Laid-off workers, suppliers and the marketplace quickly lose their brand loyalty and ability to buy cars as incomes decrease. GM and Chrysler have ultimately shot themselves in the foot, but at the demand of Wall Street to show increased earnings, that isn’t going to happen in a “mature economy.”

As a result, their scale of economy has radically changed in the economic downturn. They are now unable to cover their own costs.

Like dinosaurs, they have become too big for sustainability. The very governmental regulations that would have protected them were laid aside in the belief that they were too big to fail — except in a failing economy brought on by their own outsourcing.

The work can be brought back to the U.S. We are still the largest economy in the world, but it will require governmental regulation — in other words, tariffs — and an end to this totally fictional “free-trade policy.”

Funny that the solution to a company too big to be sustainable is regulation by a government that is now too big to be sustainable as we are going into debt of a scale previously unimagined. Funny that "tariffs" have come out as Canada is now imposing a "buy Canada" policy to counteract the "buy American" policy that Canadians are upset about. Yeah - that's really going to work well. In any case, the Detroit Free Press had this this morning: The real roots of the auto crisis. It perhaps unintentionally contradicts the Oakland Press piece.

Listening to Fox News' Greta Van Susteren talk about auto woes last week left David Cole grinding his teeth.

So, too, about a dozen other national reporters and anchors who have called the usually mild-mannered expert in recent weeks for his wisdom on the trials and tribulations of the Detroit Three and broader auto industry.

It's obvious from their questions and comments they just don't understand the reasons for the problems. More important, he said, is that collective lack of knowledge causes many people to get bad information.

"This entire conversation is about the industrial future of our country," Cole told me at the recent Detroit Regional Chamber Policy Conference on Mackinac Island.

"I was watching Greta Van Susteren and she was talking about how this is all management's fault. That just isn't so," said Cole. "She's a smart woman. She just doesn't know what she's talking about."

Cole, a scientist and engineer by training, is chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor and has been seen on nearly every national TV news program explaining the challenges, woes and perils of the troubled industry.

Cole said this auto crisis is not a result of a management problem, but is attributable to the massive collapse of financial markets.

There we have it. This is what we call hitting the nail on the head. Striking the fastener at the apex. The financial market collapsed due to housing. The wealth that people were making purchases with was seen for what it really was - debt. The boom was thus an illusion. A figment of our collective imagination. And in an instant, it was gone.

So the question is - why did the housing market crash? That's simple to answer as well, although it has not been widely reported. Just keep in mind that the federal government required sub-prime lending as basically an affirmative action policy. Here's the video:
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
There. In a nutshell. As for who caused the mortgage crisis, it was people like this: (Barney Frank Busted! Was Responsible For Housing Meltdown After All)

Q.E.D.