Now that Congress has balked at bailing out the Big Three automakers, their CEOs have all gone back to Detroit, not in a Ford Expedition or a Chevy Suburban or in a Lincoln Navigator, one of which would hold them all, but on their individual jets. Even President-elect Obama expressed surprise that they came only with their hands out and without a plan. He said he hoped they’d work something up before they come back.

Follow up:

When I was buying my first car, I fell in love with the Corvair. It was adorable, I thought, and economical and would just fit my image (as what I can’t even remember). The Chevrolet dealer, truly a good neighbor, took my dad aside and told him that I wouldn’t be safe. They tried to interest me in a used Impala, but instead I settled on a baby blue Ford Fairlane. Boring but serviceable. Later, I moved up to a much sexier gold Firebird, a car that’s still on the market and still not very safe.

Truth be told, Detroit flunks on the main criteria that should drive our automobile industry: fuel efficiency and safety. For years, comfort and style, driven by advertising, have been in the driver’s seat, and we can’t afford that any more.

Listening to G. Richard Wagoner, Jr., CEO of General Motors, drone on in an interview about his “team,” I could only think that there must be hundreds of entrepreneurs with fresher ideas and a will to solve problems other than by closing plants and cutting jobs. Why should U.S. taxpayers pour $25 billion into Detroit just to perpetuate vehicles like the Cadillac Escalade SUV, which GM touts as an “icon” of today’s generation? Even in its hybrid version, the Escalade gets only 21 miles to the gallon on the highway and costs around $75,000.

As one of the miniscule number of Americans who does not own an automobile, perhaps it’s facetious of me to say so, but I have a plan: we should buy out the Big Three and get to work making the kind of vehicles we need to kick our oil habit and clean up the environment. US Motors could be a viable competitor to Honda or Toyota and perhaps surpass them, and for once we would have the capability to domestically manufacture new vehicles for public transportation, especially rail transportation. Imagine how much safer our highways would be if we could get most of those monster trucks with their exhausted drivers off the road; moving their cargo to electric-powered trains would also cut pollution.

Now that our last oil price spike has subsided, and gas is cheaper once again, the temptation is to sink back into satisfaction over cars that get 20 or maybe 30 miles per gallon. But surely Al Gore has convinced us that even if the gas were free, the internal combustion engine is mucking up the air we breathe and making it more difficult to address global warming. Predictably, the right-wing Heritage Foundation is still trying to convince folks that global warming is over-rated and we should put aside our concerns to advance the economy. http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/bg2213.cfm).

Detroit often blames the health benefits of workers and retirees as the main barrier to its success. No doubt they are a burden. According to the Center for American Progress, Detroit manufacturers spent more last year on health benefits than on steel http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/11/18/auto-health/. The Center says that Toyota put a plant in Ontario 2005 rather than in the States, because Canada has a much better health care system than we do. But that’s not the fault of our autoworkers. By failing to deal with access to health care as a national issue, we have weighted down an entire industry that was once quintessentially USA. Reforming health care may be essential to our economic recovery rather than a burden to be dealt with. Solving the health care dilemma would bring into sharper relief the deficiencies of the auto industry’s management.

I know, I know, taking over the auto companies is socialistic, just the kind of thing Republicans said Obama was scheming to do once he got into office. But even good Republicans are against this bail out. Autoworkers and their families have suffered enough. Letting the manufacturers go bankrupt is only going to make their lives worse. Besides, as long as we’re going to sink money into the automobile industry, isn’t it better to own it than to make one bad loan after another? If we buy it, we can fix it.