As for Detroit, the carmakers should have been in bankruptcy months ago. And it is a bankruptcy court that should have fired GM’s Wagoner and his board. Along with some serious pain for bondholders, bankruptcy would have broken the high-cost labor contracts with the UAW as well as carmaker contracts with dealers across the country. That’s what bankruptcy courts are for. They’re part of the free-market capitalist system.

Former SEC chair Richard Breeden is arguing against a systemic uber-regulator for banks, and in favor of special financial bankruptcy courts. Once again, the story is court-ordered restructuring, not government control by political bureaucrats who like their power so much they want to keep running the various companies in question.

And why isn’t Obama’s special auto task force ordering a replacement for Ron Gettelfinger, the UAW’s president? Weren’t their oversized pay and benefit packages a big part of the problem? Well, that’s never gonna happen. The election power of the union is too strong. But this does reveal the political nature of these government bailout operations.

Incidentally, in President Obama’s speech on Monday about the Wagoner firing, as well as in Treasury term sheets for GM and Chrysler, there are multiple references to “the next generation of clean cars,” to new CAFE-standard mileage increases, and to green power-train developments. All this is a big green climate-change priority for the new administration.

But the simple fact is, small, tinny, and expensive green cars just don’t work for consumers. And even if those cars are designed better, the cost structure of the carmakers will have to be brought down so far that UAW wages will be forced below those of the non-union shops in Detroit south (including Honda, Toyota, and other foreign carmakers who are now producing in the United States).

So add the green revolution to the industrial-policy plans of the White House. Expect a big increase in CAFE fuel standards, even though small cars are simply not profitable. And plan on bailout nation taking a new left-turn toward the kind of central planning that has held down economic growth in Europe and Japan for so very long.