There used to be an inside joke at General Motors, a twist on biologist E.O. Wilson’s finding that ants are individually stupid but collectively brilliant. GM—whose CEO, Rick Wagoner, went before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday to plead for a financial aid package—managed to create a system that produces the opposite: individually brilliant people who are collectively stupid. [...]

Chrysler’s smart execs are about to be paid retention bonuses under Daimler’s “getten outten der Detroitmistaken und schnell” plan that convinced the smart people who run a private fund named after the dog standing guard at the gates of Hades to invest $6.1 billion in Chrysler and pay Daimler $1.4 billion for 80 percent of what Daimler now says is worth “nil, zero, NOSINK!” Not to be outdone in collective dumbness, the smart people at Daimler had paid $36 billion for Chrysler in 1998.

If it weren’t so tragic, it would be hard to keep from laughing out loud. And it gets harder. A few months ago my brilliant former colleagues at GM took a look at their cross-town rival and decided (collectively, no doubt) that it was the perfect time to “absorb” Chrysler. I can’t decide which is a worse fate for Chrysler: to be the blind seeing-eye dog doomed to eternally lead the blind former guard dog around and around inside the circles of Hades or to be absorbed into GM’s individually brilliant but collectively dumb Borg. [...]

Job losses would not be close to being as large as is claimed by the industry’s hired guns at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR). Among job losers if Detroit actually has to restructure and become profitable and productive, they’re counting the wait staff at the Waffle House in Gainesville, Florida under the assumptions that Americans will stop driving, stop vacationing in Fort Myers, and stop stopping for waffles in Gainesville on the way.

And some jobs should be lost: the so-called JOBS Bank required under collective bargaining agreements mean that Detroit has to keep paying workers displaced by technology. They report to “work” and spend the day doing nothing: no card games, no chess games, no reading. The detainees in Guantanamo are more productive.