But the most important bit you said is right here:

But we aren’t Japan or China, we have no MITI or ministry of economic trade and development, arguing government’s priorities in these loan negotiations.

There comes a time when change cannot be driven from the bottom up alone, it must be driven from the top down as well. And I’m pretty sure that all of us who are regulars at FDL can agree we have had no leadership to drive change from the top down for a very fricking long time.

Further, there is no leadership arguing the priority not of government, or of the companies, or of the people as separate entities, but of a NATION as a system and not a collection of parts.

Aid for Big Auto is not inherently bad. Neither is paying for “free” highways and bridges, or for a health care system that spends money on care givers, instead of insurers whose profit depends on care not being given. That aid should not finance business as usual or AIG- or Carly Fiorina-style handouts to top managers. Many of them should be scrapped like a bad paint job.

But we aren’t Japan or China, we have no MITI or ministry of economic trade and development, arguing government’s priorities in these loan negotiations. US Government decision-making is dispersed. We have a president who thinks the only good regulator is a dead regulator, who thinks it unchristian to make demands on his fellow bidnessmen. We have a few department heads, like Hank Paulson, who work for him and who are only months away from their Wall Street jobs, and are destined to return to something equally lucrative. And we have a few CongressCritters, waiting to see what the lobbyist farm hands will slop into the trough.

He’s always raiding the hen house himself, or leaving the door open for his fox friends. When he complains that the farmer keeps him on so short leash that he can’t git his work done, the exhausted farmer lets him off his leash it. And, whoosh, all the neighborhood hen houses are soon empty. The foxes git so fat, they should live in the hog pen; and George wanders off, looking for another sucker farmer to put him charge of the farmyard.

No, Bush and his cohort are not about governing. They view government as 19th century Robber Barons viewed the environment: as an inexhaustible source of untaxed wealth. Citizens and taxpayers (more fools, they) are like American Indians, left to wander the plains strewn with buffalo carcasses, the mountaintops that have been plunged into stream beds for an ounce of coal, and the forests, where the largest tree is just large enough to make a foot stool.

Miscik, though, sticks out as a particulary bad dude. Not only her luving her some Iraq WMDs when she was at CIA, but also she was Global Head of Sovereign Risk at Lehman. Anyone who had a high level job there should automatically be disqualified from a responsible job anywhere else.

Somebody told the automakers they wanted those vehicles — and they built them. Chicken or the egg first here, alank?