– The Big 3 made an executive decision to produce SUVs with the highest profit margin, to the near exclusion of reliable compact cars or hybrid/electric engines, even though the dealers were getting requests from potential customers as far back as the ’90s for alternate, flex fuel, hybrid, electric and/or smaller, more gas-efficient cars. Guess who got all of that business — Japan. (Toyota and Honda can’t keep up with the number of Americans who want hybrid cars.) My friend was told more than once to push the customer into a gas-guzzling SUV no matter what kind of car they wanted to buy.

– Part of the reason for this was that the corporate officers of the Big 3, or their families, also have stock holdings in Big Oil — the more gas a vehicle burns, the more money they make.

– Ironically, all of the BIG 3 were, and still are, making fuel-efficient cars for the foreign market; they just don’t sell them in this country. As was explained to my friend, they (the Big 3) are going to ‘squeeze the suckers here until they pop.’ It’s the new American way.

– While there’s been all of this brouhaha about UAW workers earning ‘high wages’ — real earnings of $14 to $28 an hour before taxes — you don’t read about Alan Mulally, the Ford CEO, who, along with his other Big 3 exec pals, earned over $2,000 an hour while the head of Toyota, for example, earned about $900 an hour. Why can’t Mulally and the other corporate brass cut their pay to bring it into line with what Japanese execs make, as they expect American line workers to do to stay ‘competitive’? (Forget the temporary showboating of taking a dollar a year; reduce all executive salaries by at least half permanently — and no bonuses, stock options or other compensation packages.)

The UAW workers aren’t responsible for designing, manufacturing, nor marketing all of these huge vehicles nobody wants to buy (or can’t buy in Junior’s ruined GOP economy) — why should they be asked to give up even a dime an hour in wages for the terrible decisions of these ‘mentally-challenged’ (like Fox News) execs?

All of the Big 3 and the nation would be better off if the top tier of executives acted like the Roman aristocracy they pretend to be — or Frankie Five-Fingers, as the case may be — and quietly took a hot bath with a straight razor handy; the ancient aristocratic answer to a massive failure in decision-making and — ahem — execution.

And I’ll probably lose it. But I’m not ready to give up on my dreams of the future. Worth a little scratch.