A month ahead of schedule: "Boo!!" GM's September sales dropped 45 percent from a year earlier, and Chrysler's fell 42 percent. Sounds like collusion to me. Ford, the only one of the three not directly bailed out, dropped only 5.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the stock market suffered a severe case of the heebie-jeebies, the Dow industrials plummeting 140 points by mid-afternoon in what the WSJ termed a "precipitous drop."

The dismal auto sales figures give us just a taste of what happens when government props are kicked out from under various industries. No more cash for clunkers, so now the Big Two Bankrupt Survivors themselves become the clunkers.

What will happen in various other industries when companies have made about all the layoffs and firings they can make and still keep functioning? Cost-cutting helps the bottom line, but not forever, and it doesn't have shit to do with generating revenue — other than to often make it more difficult. Just one of many brainiacs and even dumb-asses to speak on this was Hong Kong-based Enzio von Pfeil last July on CNBC (when people were still watching CNBC):