By Charles Sercombe

“Is Detroit worth saving?”

That’s the headline in an article written by Joseph Romm in today’s (Nov. 12) salon.com.

Check it out because Romm makes some compelling points on why if the federal government agrees to “bail out” the U.S. auto industry, there ought to be plenty of strings attached.

Why?

Romm says that in the past, despite it being in the best interest of Chrysler, Ford and GM, Detroit’s once mighty Big 3 walked away from developing electric hybrid cars as soon as the Bush administration came into power.

Instead, they concentrated on producing gas-guzzling pick-ups and SUVs. And instead of heeding the desire of Congress for better fuel efficiency, GM spent millions to lobby against increasing fuel standards. In short, now that the Big 3 are facing bankruptcy, they are getting what’s coming to them.

But despite their faults, greed and extremely poor long-range planning, we can’t allow the Big 3 to go out of business.

It would be catastrophic, and would put the US economy in an economic tailspin from which we may never recover. Millions of people here and across the nation would lose their jobs and have little prospect of ever replacing lost income.

This would have a ripple effect. Many are calling it an economic tsunami – you know, a tidal wave we haven’t seen the likes of.

Already, the drop in car sales, home foreclosures, bank failings, job loss and sharp drop-off of consumer spending has eerie parallels to the events leading up to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

President Jimmy Carter paid a stiff price when he once said that the American people, in the mid to late 1970s were suffering from malaise. People jumped on Carter for daring to point out the country was in a mental funk. Carter’s critics said he lacked leadership and was only feeding into the gloominess of the time.

It was no surprise to me when Reagan defeated Carter. People were suckers for a guy who could spin fantasy stories of hard-working people pulling up their boot straps and becoming successes – even when Reagan spent America into massive debt and began the process to de-regulate everything to the point where the banking institutions and Wall Street firms need bailouts.

The US auto industry needs to be saved, but it’s going to take the stern, supervising eye of the Federal government to make sure it doesn’t continue to destroy itself. And one more thing: as bad as the auto industry has acted, consumers are to blame as well.

While the auto industry focused on producing more and more gas-guzzlers, guess what? We were buying them up – the bigger and more wasteful the better. Who is to blame? Gasoline was relatively cheap and, heck, we’re Americans and we deserve to consume as much as we want, anytime we want.

Few people cared about the fact that gasoline is a limited resource and one controlled by people in far-away lands who really don’t like us.

“Is Detroit worth saving?”

I think so, but we, as a country and as a people, need to do some deep soul-searching on how we want to live and work in this new millennium.