So when does the good news start?

Just the other night my wife attempted to "wrestle" the remote away from me in order to watch the 11 o'clock news. My response was "why would I want to get depressed just before bed?". Are there any feel good news stories anymore or can we only hear about how "bad" the economy is? Is there any reason that we need to know the minute by minute status of the stock market? What do the Dow Jones averages mean to me anyway? Remember the day by day rise of gas prices? It's all anyone could talk about when they came into the Motorplex! I haven't heard any mention on the news about how far crude prices have dropped lately!
I guess the BIG THREE are going to occupy every newscast for days to come. Since I grew up in a GM dealership and owned one for 13 years, it is hard for me to see just how far GM has fallen. And you know what? I think what has happened can be reduced to a simplistic form: Management at the Big 3 lost focus on who was buying their cars and were blinded by the huge profit per vehicle that big SUV's and trucks provided. I remember a phone call I got from a good friend who had "moved up" in the GM hierarchy. He used to call me from Detroit for what he called "reality checks from someone who lived in the real world." It was summer of 1993 and he called to tell me that GM had just set a "record" for profit per vehicle and wanted me to guess which unit set the mark! I correctly guessed a Suburban (the biggest SUV at the time) and he asked me to guess the amount per unit. I told him that if GM made $3,500 per unit that it would be tremendous (especially since the dealers made about $1,800). He laughed and said to guess again. I said that if it was over $8,000 that it would be disgusting and that GM didn't have a conscious! The record setting number was $12,000 per unit! Do ya think that those kind of cash cow profits may have "blinded" reality? Could you imagine a GM executive wanting to push for development of a hybrid or highly fuel efficient car? Not a chance. Small cars were money "losers" and were only used to help raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy which meant that they could sell even more big $UV's. You build a few gas misers in order to help the sales weighted average. Even TOYOTA couldn't resist the temptation to "invade" the sacred cow full sized truck market in the US and built a new high output truck plant in Texas, the mainstay of big GM trucks. That is a move that they now are having serious doubts about!
The end result is now we have the CEO's of what used to be the BIG 3 waltzing in to DC hat-in-hand asking for 30 plus BILLION (is that 30,000 millions?) in order to survive through THIS DECEMBER? I guess you could say that GREED just left the Big 3 out of touch with reality.
And to think. All during my youth I idolized General Motors. They got blinded by reckless consumption and as long as big suv's were the "in thing" times were good. LIVING WITHIN YOUR MEANS goes for big corporations, too! It's the consumer who needs to be listened to the most. Let's hope that the Big 3 get jolted back to reality before it's too late.