Well, the title doesn't matter. I think it is a fait accompli. Some Coastal Democrats might be suspicious of the car culture, but they have empathy for the problems which emerge from de-industrialization. Republicans have no credibility or capital. A bailout will happen, but I believe that most people will see that it is going to simply put off the inevitable. Megan McCardle talks about the de-industrialization of the "Other Rustbelt," towns centered around less iconic firms:
Just as the auto industry made (and broke) Detroit, Rochester was the creation of Eastman Kodak. Kodak bonus day was like Christmas without the tree: celebratory dinners at the local restaurants, shopping trips at the Midtown Plaza, which locals claim as America's first enclosed mall. Then in the 1970s, it all began to change. Smaller companies filed antitrust suits. Fuji and Polaroid nibbled away at their film business. In 1997, Fuji started a price war from which Kodak's stock price has never fully recovered. And the advent of digital cameras has been devastating. Kodak has made up some of the lost ground by making cameras, but this is a fiercely competitive business much difference from the old core business of selling the cameras cheap and the film dear. At its peak, Kodak employed 60,000 people in a city of perhaps 300,000. Now the city's population has dropped to 210,000--but Kodak employment has fallen to less than 15,000.
When I was a kid I actually lived in upstate New York. I was confused when I opened up The World Almanac and saw that my town had a population which was declining decennially! I know whereof she speaks. I spent my adolescence in what might be termed a "resource industry" region in the Pacific Northwest. Some of my friends had fathers who had an expectation of making $20-30 per hour in the logging industry. This was good money, though dangerous work. We know what happened to that way of life.... Detroit will fail. It is just a matter of time. They have structural legacies from the era of American corporatism in which organizational entities made deals which were predicated on the fact that the United States was the only major industrial power to make it through World War II with their capital base intact. We obviously don't have that competitive advantage now, over six decades past World War II, but the legacy of the deals labor and management made in the wake of that era is still with is. The children of loggers who wanted to make $20-30/hour knew that they had one choice: go to college, get a degree, and go into the white collar track. The same is true of most of the auto-industry, but there are no eco-romantics relocating to the Rust-Belt to challenge the emotional arguments of labor unions.... Addendum: There's an independent symmetry between the decline of various types of "mom" & pop" enterprises and sclerotic industrial era mega-corporations in fields like automotives or steel. Both these types businesses are being outmaneuvered, but from different sides. The new companies have both economies of scale and flexibility in terms of their relationships with labor. Update:Chances Dwindle on Bailout Plan for Automakers. Things that make you go hhhmmm....
