Americans love to shift the blame

We all know that American car companies (other than Ford) aren’t doing so well nowadays. They seem to be baring the brunt of the American public’s anger with this financial crisis for a simple reason: people understand what car makers do. They produce cars, it is pretty simple. If people buy those cars, the company makes a profit. Compare that to leveraged buyouts of bundled mortgages (if that’s even a thing) and I can understand why people are blaming the car companies.

That being said, it is one thing to blame a faceless corporation and quite another to attack a model hired to look pretty next to said faceless corporation’s product at a trade show and say this:

At Auto Show, Presenters Meet a Tough Crowd – NYTimes.com: “One G.M. presenter said a woman told her the company was responsible for the death of American soldiers in Iraq. The logic went like this: if G.M. made more fuel-efficient cars, the country would not need so much oil, and if the country did not need oil, United States troops would never have invaded.”

That’s pretty harsh, and downright stupid. The car companies kept pumping out gas guzzlers because that’s what people wanted to buy (can you say Hummer?).

My point is this: get mad at the company all you want, just leave their models alone.