The heads of the Big Three Detroit automakers went to the White House last week to complain about foreign competition. The only thing missing as they voiced a mixture of legitimate concerns, special pleading and sheer nonsense was a violinist playing a mournful tune.
Joining Rick Wagoner of General Motors and Alan Mulally of Ford was Tom LaSorda of Chrysler. The last time I looked, Chrysler was a division of DaimlerChrysler, a German company headed by Dieter Zetsche. It thus pays less at home for employee healthcare than US companies, one of Detroit's beefs to President George W Bush.
Their biggest target was the Japanese companies - Toyota, Nissan and Honda - that have eroded their sales with the devious Oriental tactic of making high-quality vehicles that Americans like to drive. GM seems to be pulling out of its recent crisis but Ford is laid low and there is talk of Daimler shedding Chrysler.
As it happened, I watched the White House summit in Hollywood, which has given the thumbs-down to Detroit. There are lots of cars in Los Angeles but no self-respecting actor, agent or studio head would be seen dead in an American one, with the exception of the Cadillac Escalade, a flashy luxury sport utility vehicle that has brought some life back to GM's luxury brand.
The keys handed to parking valets across Beverly Hills and Burbank are those of BMWs, Mercedes and Audis, along with a few Toyota Prius hybrids to be friendly to the environment. Wilshire Boulevard is hardly Main Street but it does not say much for Detroit that those who narrate the American dream treat American vehicles with such disdain.
Detroit is again in such dire straits that there is talk of a government bail-out along the lines of the rescue of Chrysler in 1979. Rightly, in spite of his bail-out of airlines and egregious protection of the steel industry, Mr Bush will hear none of it. Detroit ought instead to make "relevant product", he said earlier this year, a reasonable point that provoked a lot of huffing and puffing.
Messrs LaSorda, Mulally and Wagoner blame the US and Japanese governments for much of their troubles. They would like cheaper healthcare for workers, cheaper steel, tax incentives to make ethanol-fuelled cars and a weaker dollar (or, as they put it, an end to "currency manipulation" by the Bank of Japan to drive down the yen).
The Detroit spinners are right that the US healthcare system is costly and inefficient. They carry a greater burden than Toyota and Nissan do in the latter's US plants because they pay health insurance for hundreds of thousands of retired workers. Health costs add up to $1,000 for each vehicle they make in the US, one reason why they have lost so much money.
But they have made things worse for themselves by letting Japanese competition take hold. As they have lost sales to Toyota and others, they have had to shut plants and lay off workers, piling health costs on fewer vehicles. Even if the US managed to slow the rise of employers' health insurance premiums - the best the big three can expect - it would do little to solve this legacy.
They are also correct that tariffs to protect the US steel industry are well past their sell-by date. There, their wisdom runs out. Although they do not like US government protection for steel, they seek subsidies for cars. They want tax incentives to make vehicles that run on flexfuel, a mixture of petrol and ethanol, and for petrol companies to install flexfuel pumps at filling stations.
Flexfuel is better than petrol for the environment, although energy is needed to distil ethanol from corn. But corn growing is already heavily subsidised and protected in the US, including tariffs on the import of ethanol from Brazil. Flexfuel is the kind of quick fix that Detroit prefers: it is environmentalism on the cheap compared with Toyota's long-term investment in hybrids.
The Detroit spinners do not stop there. They also want Mr Bush to reverse the fall of the yen against the dollar, which they blame on market intervention by the Bank of Japan to encourage the export of Japanese cars. Oh, come on. Not only are most Japanese cars sold in the US manufactured there - 3.7m last year compared with 1.7m imported from Japan - but the yen is weak for a host of other reasons.
Behind all this is a misplaced appeal to patriotism: Detroit thinks that, since it employs a lot of Americans and purchases 80 per cent of US-produced auto components, it deserves favourable treatment. I remember that line being spouted by badly managed UK car companies before they collapsed or were acquired. Yet these foreign-owned companies make more cars and employ 220,000 British people.
Things are tough for the big three but that does not mean that the competition is unfair or unbeatable. Ford's Mr Mulally should know this. His former employer, Boeing, used to bellyache about the unfair subsidies allegedly available to Airbus. But Boeing still beat Airbus when it designed an aircraft - the 787 - that airlines wanted to buy.
Detroit once had huge brand and distribution advantages over Japanese companies in the US but Toyota and Nissan managed to outsmart them by building better vehicles. The big three will pull out of their decline only if they respond in kind. Tariff barriers, government subsidies and mudslinging at the Japanese will merely prolong their agony.
- Financial Times