d*amning Detroit

In the paper today I read that the Detroit car makers are concerned that with gas prices just a tad below $4 a gallon and climbing that people might, just maybe, stop buying their SUV, Hummers, and BIG trucks for guys with small wee-wees.

In a word, f*cking duh.

Look, guys, we’ve all known since the 1970s that eventually we were going to run out of oil, or that the Arab countries would get miffed at us and shut off the taps, or that some disaster (like Katrina) was going to take most or all of our production off line.

And what did you do in those thirty years?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

You have refused to develop more efficient cars. You have declined to give any but the most token effort to hybrids. You have staged PR campaigns about hydrogen vehicles, but — let’s be honest — you never had any real intention of putting them on the market or investing in the infrastructure necessary to make them possible. You’ve just gone and on, doing what you had always done, and getting us all deeper and deeper into a hole.

In short, you got yourselves into this mess, and if yours were really profit-making entities in a competitive free enterprise system, then we ought to just let you go chapter 12 the way you damn well deserve.

But there’s the rub. In spite of all your claims to the contrary, you’re not profit-making entities in a competitive free enterprise system. You’re members of a thinly disguised cartel which has managed to dictate how we use energy and how the economy functions. Thus, when you go down, you take us with you.

So . . . I got a modest proposal. Forget chapter 12. That’s for businesses. For you . . . we reserve the consequences of incompetence in government and state-craft.

You’ll love the prison at Guantanamo. It’s so tropical.