It occurred to me, reading Mitt Romney's op ed in the Times this morning (appended below), that this crisis is likely to be "solved" by essentially breaking the UAW. The union may continue to exist in name, but they'll suffer sharp rollbacks in wages and benefits, and the retirees will get screwed. It will be truly amazing if this happens under a Democratic president and a strongly Democratic Congress, but maybe that's the only configuration of power under which it could happen.
Doug
^^^ It's already happened right before your very eyes over the last few years under the configuration of power of Republicans in dominance. The busting of the UAW has already been substantially done under the Bush regime; the process has been going on for several years now. I've been sending the news articles on it to PEN-L for a couple of years.
New autoworkers coming in now are at "half" pay.
I said a while ago (see archives) , back when Cebereus got Chrysler under the Bush regime, that it seemed like the Big Three should be able to figure out how to make competitive cars by now, since the challenge from the Japanese companies is over thirty years old. It is very fishy that with all those engineers and marketeers they couldn't meet the Japanese competition. Good chance Wall Street and GM-Ford-Chrysler ( finance capital is a merger of finance and industrial capital ) have been cooking this up for a long time as a way to bust the UAW, or just significantly reduce wages and benefits. Class struggle.
What will be left for the Democrat might be nationalizing the auto industry since those big banks have already been significantly nationalized as the precedent. Bourgeois TV finance news last night was using the term "socialized" (!) to refer to what the TARP does to Wall Street banks. Hey , how about socializing the airline companies next ? Everything "too big to fail " should be owned by the People.
Charles
This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com