[2.7RACER]

This is a difficult problem. In the '70's Detroit was so arrogant that they just ignored the 10% penetration of foriegn cars in the US market. They said it was just a left coast thing that would blow over.
All of the US manufacturers made poor quality small cars and not much better quality large cars.
In the '80 when cars just weren't selling much of the blame went to the Americans that bought foriegn cars. Detroit lost 200,000 auto workers in five years.
I was there, I saw the people lined up in the snow for unemployment benefits. I saw the value of homes drop 15% to 20% and more.
In the '90's the folks in Detroit finally got the message and began building better cars with reliability to match the imports.
Unfortunately the foriegn cars were taking close to 25% of the market. The trend has continued into this century. Americans almost believe Honda's and Toyota's are American cars.
At the premium end BMW, Lexus, Mercedes and others found American buyers looking for quality and value.
The old American premium cars like Cadillac, Lincoln, Chrysler, Buick, etc. somehow got lost in the shuffle. They weren't viewed as the best cars for the money. These are the same brands that were the best in the '50's and '60's.
What happened? My view, an arrogant Detroit reacted too late to the competition from Japan and Germany.
The Japanese and German auto workers are paid very well. The Japanese cars made in America are assembled by well paid American workers.
So the problem isn't only over paid American union workers. The responsibility must be laid at the feet of the decision makers in the Detroit auto business. There are thousands of exec's paid over $100,000 a year to decide what gets built and how much quality goes into the product.
Don't these exec's bear some of the responsibility?
Is all the pain to be laid on the workers?
Is this another case of "well the American worker is going to have to compete on the world market with incompetent leadership".
With all this free trade we find ourselve in the fight of our lives to sustain the American way of life, the middle class.
Either we get better at making truly world class cars and everything else or we just continue the slide into less for us and even less for our children.
We need to look at everything we do, political, education, maybe even backing off some of this free trade.
We can't stand by while our nation slips away.