Posted inUncategorized

Losing altitude in America

Two pilots and two crews. Two aircraft in mortal danger. Fate is not always the hunter.

As almost everyone knows, Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger was the pilot of US Airways flight 1549, which last January suffered a bird strike just after leaving LaGuardia Airport that rendered both engines inoperable. Sullenberger performed the remarkable water landing on the Hudson, in the heart of New York, saving all 150 passengers.

Less remembered is a commuter flight from New York City that crashed near its destination of Buffalo the next month, killing 49 aboard and one on the ground. And herein lies yet another tragic, disturbing story about two Americas.

3
Posted inUncategorized

Steering the right course on the auto bailout

General Motors is running out of cash. Think about that. What was once the company that embodied American strength is running out of cash. Little wonder that Detroit is angling to get its own "rescue package" from Washington. We should do it — with serious strings attached.

Anyone who has lived in the Midwest can attest to the foundational nature of the auto industry to American manufacturing. It's not just the Big Three themselves, but the vast supply chain they have spawned, from steelmakers to precision machine tool companies to providers of all manner of parts. As we bail out a "financial services industry" that increasingly made little more than frauds and swindles, the auto industry, even heavily diminished from its former greatness, makes real products and is an essential prop of the middle class, particularly in the heartland. A hollowed-out economy can stand no more losses.

Yet the American industry is the author of many of its own problems. The decline of GM and its sisters began decades ago in an unholy alliance of complacency, greed and contempt for customers between management and labor leaders. Despite 20 years of plant closings and pledges of new days, the carmakers never really reformed. There's one exception: hundreds of thousands of union workers in the Big Three and parts makers lost their jobs — and communities their livelihood. Contrary to a persistent mythology, the decline since the early 1990s has been almost entirely the fault of management, not the United Auto Workers.

3