For the auto industry, a tough few years has turned into a full blown crisis.
EISENSTEIN: I guess they're in the various stages of grief and denial.
That's how auto writer Paul Eisenstein in Detroit sees lumbering auto giants like GM.
EISENSTEIN: For years, you had all the automakers all but refusing to accept that there's a problem. People predicting numbers-sales numbers-that were absurd. Then they began to recognize there's a problem, but still believed that their survival was inevitable.
Eisenstein says there's a sense of panic everywhere in Detroit these days.
GM says, without government cash, it will run out of money by the middle of next year-if not before Barack Obama becomes the next president.
The auto industry already received $25 billion in loans back in September, but that was earmarked specifically for development of fuel efficient vehicles. Eisenstein says that money is not helping.
EISENSTEIN: Though the automakers would have liked to have that cash just to prop up the balance sheet, it's very limited to what it can do in future development. It's nowhere near a bailout. And, not all that money has been passed out yet, in part because a lot of those programs are still in development, and the program is only recently approved.
So, now the industry wants more money, and fast. Congressional democrats and President-elect Barack Obama have said the auto industry is too important to fail. But what should the bailout look like?
Paul Ingrassia, a New York-based Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who frequently covers the auto industry, takes a get-tough approach. He says a GM bailout should wipe out shareholder equity, and remove top management, putting the government temporarily in charge.
INGRASSIA: You're going to give a federal receiver a chance to cut through all the contracts. So void union contracts, dealer contracts, so GM can get down to just 2 or 3 brands-they don't really need 8 brands in the marketplace anymore, with 21 percent in the market or so. So you need someone who can cut through that stuff and insist on a viable business plan, because that's the only way to save these companies going forward. To put more money into the failed system will just be pouring it down the drain.
But Ingrassia fears that whatever aid Washington lawmakers come up with for the automakers will fall short, and just prolong the industry's plight.
INGRASSIA: The danger is here is that we're going to give them money with either few strings attached, or what I call figleaf strings. So figleaf strings would be stipulations that they would have to limit executive pay. Well, big deal, that's something they have to do anyway. Or a figleaf string that says they have to build a certain number of hybrid or fuel efficient cars. Well, sorry the market is going to do that anyway.
Helping the car-makers is fraught with dilemmas. Many believe the automakers misread the market - continuing to build big gas-guzzlers, for instance, even as gas prices started to soar. So, there's a reluctance to reward bad management. But, letting GM collapse could cost millions of jobs across the Midwest and nation.
With thousands of those jobs in Ohio, there's a lot of anger, and not a lot of agreement - as with these callers from Mayfield Heights and Streetsboro.
CALLER 1: If they provide even one penny to the auto industry, it will go down as the first blunder in the administration.
CALLER 1: I think it has much more to do with the federal government not leveling the playing fieldwith Japanese automakers.
It's clear that some sort of bailout plan for U.S. auto companies will be proposed in the coming days or weeks. The question now is whether it will be enough to save them.