The biggest problem was mismanagement. As DFM points out, below, with a few exceptions, all GM products were the same iron with different tinsel.

What the world needs is a durable, well-engineered, relatively inexpensive, economical, good handling, attractive little car.

Well, there is one; they call it a Honda.

GM seems to have recognized that ideal, but typically, they created a new badge - Saturn. I don't know why Detroit simply didn't steal a bunch of Japanese automotive engineers. Think how many Honda and Toyota engineers, designers, and managers could have been attracted to the US of A with the kind of money we've paid to our fat-cat executives, many of whom had no accomplishment other than running our industries into the ground.

Also, and perhaps even more to the point, I don't know why our school system let itself get dumbed down. Consider California. Last time I checked, 40% of H.S. seniors couldn't pass the English competency exam required for graduation. I won't even talk about math and science.

Some of the blame has to go to our experiment with busing, which was supposed to bootstrap kids from poor neighborhoods by hauling them over to good schools in good neighborhoods. However, as critics of forced integration pointed out at the time, the likely result was that the good schools would be dumbed down by the influx of kids from poor neighborhoods, and that's what appears to have happened.

The better plan is to make good schools the foundation of good neighborhoods. When I was a kid, most of us walked to school at least some of the time, and not many kids were even a little chubby.

To make good schools, we need good educators.

Part of the reason our schools are poor is because our teachers are poorly trained to teach. To get a teaching credential in California, the prospective educator, the credential candidate, must fill his curriculum with administrative tripe. Once the "educationalists" - many of whom are feminists - got control of teacher training, our fate was sealed.

We need teachers who have hard skills, rather than educationalist indoctrination.

While all this has been going down, our industrial base has been dismantled, and much of our manufacturing has been out-sourced abroad to countries like China and India, who don't give two hoots in hell about the environment, yet we in the West are made to feel guilty at the same time we have cleaned up our act.

All people are not created equal, nor are teachers, nor are cars.

/rant

S