The shots keep coming, aimed squarely at Detroit's auto industry.
In a recent appearance on the television news program Meet the Press, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama accused Detroit's auto executives of a persistent "head-in-the sand approach" to long-festering problems.
He also said the U.S. Congress should "hold the auto industry's feet to the fire" for its mistakes.
Being a supporter of government assistance to prevent Detroit's demise, Obama can be expected to do just that himself when he becomes president on Jan. 20.
As for the current White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino has told reporters that assistance for Detroit's car companies is based on the premise that the companies getting help are "willing to make the difficult decisions across the scope of their businesses to be viable and competitive."
In Canada, federal Industry Minister Tony Clement has said about government help: "Before committing taxpayer dollars, we need to review the plans to ensure that they have met our requirements and contain a long-term solution that sustains the industry in Canada."The underlying assumption in these and other criticisms of Detroit's auto makers is that they have done little or nothing to fix their troubled businesses over these past few years.
That's not true and a long list of current and coming new models from Detroit suggests making good products does matter in Detroit, though Ford, General Motors and Chrysler have made different commitments to their product future.
Unfortunately, the turnaround efforts in Detroit have been aimed at a festering litany of old problems, most of them the result of poor decision-making and a failure to commit to making the painful changes required to be competitive in the global auto industry.
For decades, critics, shareholders, employees, analysts and many government officials have tried in vain to get Detroit to prepare for a world of international competition.
But through the 1990s and into the early part of this decade, Detroit fought change. Ford, GM and Chrysler enjoyed booming sales of highly profitable SUVs and pickups, but as it turned out, Detroit's success there was based on a boom-and-bust vehicle segment that has largely gone bust.
Today, Detroit is on the very brink, the last straw being a global financial crisis linked to bad mortgages and even worse decision-making by financial firms around the world.
But any fair and close examination of what's been going on in Detroit for the past few years would have to conclude that, while there has plenty of kicking and screaming, the Motor City companies have at least been trying to change, to become globally competitive.
And, unlike what happened in Japan during the 1970s and 1980s, the Detroit car business has not been driven to change by an interventionist government — at least not yet, though that appears to be in the works.
It is, indeed, easy to forget that three decades ago the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry helped push forward the Japanese car industry when it was still in its relative infancy. The successes now enjoyed by such global powerhouses as Toyota and Honda are no accident.
The Japanese trade ministry nudged Japanese companies toward consolidation, and even tried to mandate which parts of the market each could go into — to the point where Honda was told — unsuccessfully it turns out — to limit its business to making only motorcycles. Japan's industrial policy for the auto industry was one of the reasons Canada and the United States fought for and ultimately got voluntary import limits on Japanese vehicles.
There is an argument to be made that Detroit's auto makers — Ford and General Motors in particular — have spent the past few years sowing the seeds for what could be a successful long-term turnaround.
