Call the Fed, my favorite burger joint down the street is experiencing distress.  Yeah, I’ll take a double with cheese, hold the TARP.

Not really sure how Detroit sees this all working out.  Does the UAW and the “big” three (two public, one private, all three collapsing) still think that they are entitled to some sort of government intervention?  The new White House Administration has made it clear that they are ready to help Detroit, and Speaker Pelosi can’t be any more vociferous of her own intent.  So the question is, where, oh where, will it end?

The automakers priorities have been out of whack for quite some time now.  You cannot help but laugh when you hear GM is the worlds leading purchaser of Viagra.  The Detroit News reported in 2006 that GM spent $17 million dollars on the “little blue pill”.  Admittedly, this is a relatively small portion of the more than $5.6 billion per year that GM spends on health care for their employees (more than $1500 per car in 2006), but the Viagra problem is a symptom of an overall cost management illness.

Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and author (”The World is Flat“), has some interesting insights into the situation in yesterday’s New York Times.  He first recounts the history of our esteemed car companies and their insatiable appetite for funds to, … uh… innovate:

Last September, I was in a hotel room watching CNBC early one morning. They were interviewing Bob Nardelli, the C.E.O. of Chrysler, and he was explaining why the auto industry, at that time, needed $25 billion in loan guarantees. It wasn’t a bailout, he said. It was a way to enable the car companies to retool for innovation. I could not help but shout back at the TV screen: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What business were you people in other than innovation?” If we give you another $25 billion, will you also do accounting?

How could these companies be so bad for so long? Clearly the combination of a very un-innovative business culture, visionless management and overly generous labor contracts explains a lot of it.