is to use the crisis to jack down wages and dismantle benefits, and of course, layoffs. The official version being crafted now is that the reason the auto industry is in the mess it's in is the greed of the workers. Blame the victim. They have no business demanding golden parachutes.

I'm not saying there isn't some truth to that, but it also obscures thirty years of bad management, corporate greed, and executive malfeasance.

If I had my druthers, I'd pull the plug on them and let them go down the tubes. On the other hand, the auto workers, and all the industries that supply and service them, are being held hostage. The ripples from the unemployment would eventually drown the whole country. The time to have started working on this problem was the moment it was clear that Volkswagens were selling like hotcakes. Critics of Detroit have been telling them since the seventies that they were pushing the wrong cars, and that short term profits were coming at the expense of long term sustainability, and all they did was smugly scoff at the Cassandras.

Right now I haven't a clue how to go about fixing this mess. What we shouldn't do is take any more advice from those who created it, and profited from it.