Warren Brown: Everyone Has Something To Hide Except Me And My Automakers
WaPo columnist Warren Brown never turns down an opportunity to show Detroit some love. Or at least lash out at its haters. Today he takes on the “sophist nonsense… spun by people who haven’t bothered to check the numbers, and who have paid even less regard to the history of their supposed knowledge,” otherwise known as opposition to the government bailout of a failing industry. And like Michael Jackson’s greatest music video, the arguments appeal to the sense of pathos rather than logic or reason. The financial sector and price-conscious consumers are blamed for dragging down Detroit, despite the fact that both have supported Detroit for decades. The automakers may have slurped all the credit they could get for years, and consumers may have only purchased Detroit iron on price alone, but they’re the ones to blame for the industry’s downfall, reckons Brown. But like the gloved one, Detroit can’t create its own very public trainwreck and then blame people for noticing. Or if you must damn the media and public for calling your failures like they see them, at least do it with a sense of humor. Even Michael Jackson knows that.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
Comments
Join the conversation
Since Warren Brown is calling me names, I'll retaliate: Warren Brown is a stuttering midget.
The WB sounds a lot like our good friend and contributor Phil Ressler. Their arguments are perhaps not the most sophisticated but they do have a patina of economic populism that these times call for. And his broadside at Washington is spot-on. It's a little known fact mentioned already by somebody from Michigan in another thread that the richest counties in the US are mostly around Washington DC. How do these people get their high incomes? Certainly not by producing anything but by lobbying and redistributing the wealth from the federal government. And from this loot they buy Italian designer bags, French colognes and German cars while laughing at those ignoramuses in Detroit, blue and white collar. They don't know or perhaps don't care that their whole lifestyle is made possible by parts of the country where there is still something being produced including Detroit even though they themselves would never buy anything made there.
I'm not sure why TTAC goes to DetN for a WaPo article, especially since there's a week or so delay, but here's a link to this week's article if you want to read more. This week Warren calls us haters again (but this time he's coined a "witty" term for us, MOP since apparently his dictionary couldn't help him), and again boards the FAILboat when it comes to high-school debate class. This time, it's an attempt to say that UAW folks aren't overpaid because they aren't paid as much as the haters. Pundits Peddle Revisionism in Attacking U.S. Automakers
WEGIV: I'm guessing most if not all of the 'pundits' here make less than a typical UAW worker. He's right that we can't blame the D3 for making trucks and SUVs when everyone was buying them. We can blame them for not building competitive small cars at the same time.