We now have a plan for automakers. What about their workers?

Does anyone still remember Roger and Me? Michael Moore's 1989 film chronicled the filmmaker's attempts to interview GM Chairman Roger Smith, whose efforts to streamline and downsize had shattered GM's hometown of Flint, Mich. Back then, shutting down plants, cutting benefits, and throwing workers on the proverbial street was depicted as the epitome of corporate heartlessness and greed.

Now it is the policy of the Obama administration. Twenty years after Roger and Me, we are all heartless capitalists. We want efficiency, viability, and fast results, and we're not going to fritter away tens of billions of taxpayers dollars waiting for them. We've agreed that keeping dying companies on life support isn't the solution. But when it comes to creating a plan for what happens next to the workers displaced in the process, we are every bit as lacking in ideas as Roger Smith ever was.

General Motors is in as bad a position as you can imagine. You've read about GM's enormous losses—last year, they came out to about $14,560 for every single employee. The further you drill down into General Motors, the worse it looks. Numbers make the point more efficiently than words. Since last year, GM's U.S. sales are down an amazing 55 percent. Its production is down 61 percent. Its production of passenger cars is down 71 percent. (You won't find that number in GM's monthly sales figures; you need to do some math to get to that level of dreariness.) Even if GM made no more vehicles, the ones standing on dealers' lots right now would cover all of GM's sales for 161 days.

We've been told over and over again that the government doesn't want to run the U.S. auto companies, but what the government is doing is no different from what any buyout fund—such as Cerberus, which bought, to its regret, the equally hopeless Chrysler—would do. It is insisting on radical restructuring (the president used the words restructure or restructuring 10 times in today's address), a word that everyone understands translates to shutdowns and layoffs.

Ironically, that's what Wagoner, Roger Smith's successor, showed himself unable to do. Just last month, Wagoner announced a plan—selling Saab, shutting Saturn—that made the cliché about shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic almost unavoidable. In a month in which GM's truck business tanked and its passenger car business essentially disappeared—it sold a mere 37,000 cars in the United States in February, many of those to fleet operators—Wagoner talked, incredibly, about GM's commitment to the Pontiac nameplate.

Everyone now sees that what's in question now isn't the survival of Pontiac but the survival of GM—which at best will exist only in a substantially diminished form. There is no room anymore for three American automakers each building a full line of cars and trucks. And while the hopeful talk is about GM re-engineering for a new bright future of fuel-efficient and hybrid vehicles, the numbers tell a different story, with GM's total hybrid sales in one month running at a pathetic 1,087 cars and trucks, about one-seventh of Toyota's Prius sales. Sales for the new hybrid Sierra and Silverado hybrid models? Seven.