It will be left to the Obama administration to sort out whether, or in what way, the government might advance new billions to GM and Ford. As Tom Friedman writes this morning, past failings of management at these companies are well known: they failed to support healthcare reform in the early 1990s, and they are now choking on health management costs; much more important, they decided to profit from SUVs, that is, from truck bodies and cheap oil, and foul the atmosphere. The smug attitudes of GM executives in particular--so I thought during my days editing at the Harvard Business Review--gave you some idea of why the Reds shot Kulaks.

Nevertheless, a couple of million jobs are at stake, at least until other global auto makers can take over some of this plant capacity. Should new public money believe in, as Secretary Paulson put it this morning, the sustainability of American car companies? I can see the macroeconomic arguments in favor, and I don't need Michael Moore to imagine the misery of new shut-downs. But before we spend more on this management, we should see that their worst failure is actually recent, not in some fading past. I mean their failure to remain competitive on the most basic principles of design and manufacturing, using global, peer-to-peer information platforms; principles Volkswagen Group, Toyota, and Nissan-Renault, have exploited, and GM and Ford have half-exploited, even as profits mounted from SUVs and endogenous quality improved.

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