Article from the Weekly Standard on the slow death of Detroit. My favorite excerpt:
But with millions of jobs on the line, including their own, the Detroit Three honchos went to Washington to endure the kabuki theater, first in their private jets, then in their sad little hybrids. All to get their slats kicked in by Congress (and who has been more profligate than they) in order to secure a bridge loan to withstand an economy wrecked by others who’d secured no-strings bailouts before them. The absurdist spectacle was best summed up by car aficionado Jay Leno: “People who are trillions of dollars in debt, yelling at people who are billions of dollars in debt.”
Looks like Jay Leno can be witty afterall.
EDIT: Also this fun view into the long roots of the auto industry
Like many Detroiters (he lives in a posh suburb, where houses on his block have remained unsold for six years), he’s bracing for one or all of the Big Three going down. He predicts millions will be thrown out of work, right down to the diner owner in Utah who serves lunch to the people who produce the screws which are bought by the widget manufacturers who produce a component that goes into a seat of a Ford automobile. The diner owner thought he wasn’t in the auto business. “But he was,” says Vines. “He just didn’t know it.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/015/945aynyk.asp?pg=1
Written by Adarsh Pandit
Read more posts by Adarsh, and follow Adarsh on Twitter.