The fundamentals are wrong. We haven't bought cars from the big three for some years because other cars better fit our needs. The fact that the kings of Detroit pursued the wrong market niche has nothing to do with "labor" as your Wall Street guest suggests.
Eliminating competition and having taxpayers pay for the mistakes of the kings won't change the fundamentals either. American business and government suffers from magical thinking-- massive tax breaks for the rich without any rational connection to investment in the productive US economy was a massive failure and motivated unrestrained and massive gambling, there was no requirement that anything trickle down. Giving money to Wall Street with magical hopes was just as foolish. We need to support the productive aspects of our economy, but so long as we are just pouring money into little kingdoms, or even one big kingdom, the fundamentals are still flawed. Reduction of competition in the airline industry, where I work, has not changed the fundamentals (we still oversell flights), and is hurting the consumer.
We don't need more kingdoms, we need ratonale business democracies, which will require an almost unimagineable paradigm shift. The talents and imagination of the majority of workers are squandered or ignored by hierarchical structures.
Until then, the best way to "bailout" American business of all sorts is to provide universal health care, to eliminate that excuse from their blame labor costs repertroire and to give taxpayers a sense of security so they will consume. These crises are good reasons to do it on an emergency basis-- a reverse of what Naomi Klein identifies as the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism. Please consider discussion a shock doctrine of populism in response to the disaster of greed and corruption.
Thank you.