Lessons from the Big 3 auto industry crisis

Real-time confirmation of basic principles from Barbarians to Bureaucrats - a book which helped me understand how organizations work:

1. Unions are organized because management is not paying attention to workers. Unions and corporations often become so rigid in their interactions that they become involved in death-spirals. Everyone wants security, but when everyone starts to feel too secure, things fall apart.

2. Boards of Directors who pay massive salaries and bonuses to executives are often not acting in the interests of the stockholders. This distorts the ethical system upon which the corporation should be built. When leaders of corporations are out of touch with their customers, stockholders and employees, they enter a state of aristocratic decline, much like the decline of an entire civilization. These leaders start to exhibit signs of madness. Sort of like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Question from the Right Coast: Is it too late to institute a French-style socialist solution? I don't see any handy, efficient "barbarians" around to reform the Big 3 without getting us into deeper trouble. Nimble Japanese car companies are doing a good job of rolling over the Big 3, another function of "barbarians".

Update: Revisiting Michael Moore's first big success. And, why couldn't GM adjust fast enough to world changes? And, why aren't our aristocratic members of Congress held responsible for their part in the disaster? Especially their failure to give assurances to the auto makers that future legislation would not destroy the value of investments the automakers were ready to make to meet the contemporaneous demands of Congress?