WASHINGTON (CNN) — A national poll suggests that six in 10 Americans oppose using taxpayer money to help the ailing major U.S. auto companies.

Auto industry executives testify November 19 before Congress.

Sixty-one percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey out Wednesday are dead set against the federal government providing billions of dollars in assistance the the auto makers, with 36 percent favoring such a bailout.

“Only 15 percent say that they would be immediately affected if the auto companies went bankrupt,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “Seven in 10 say that a bailout would be unfair to American taxpayers.”

It is simply amazing that so many Americans still don’t understand the importance of the Big Three U.S. Automakers in this country.

The Big Three directly and indirectly employ millions of Americans who used to enjoy a middle class living. These are the same people who buy houses and pay mortgages. They also used to buy new vehicles, refrigerators, furniture, tv’s, home improvement supplies, and many other durable goods that make up the bulk of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

They also used to be able to send their kids to college.

When is this country going to understand that we need labor unions and domestic manufacturing in the U.S.?

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The nation’s top banking regulator warned Tuesday that help for troubled homeowners is failing to keep pace with the foreclosure crisis.

“We’re definitely behind the curve, and we fall further behind the curve every day,” FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair told an audience at the Fortune 500 Forum in Washington, D.C.

According to Bair, the nation’s financial system would be in much better condition today if earlier warnings she made about mortgage modification had been heeded.

Bair began sounding the alarm more than two years ago, warning that lenders had to shore up capital reserves to offset non-performing loans. In October 2007, she told lenders that they should start modifying more at-risk mortgages so borrowers could afford to stay in their homes.

Meanwhile the mortgage mess has ballooned, expanding beyond the housing market into the entire financial sector and the overall economy.

Both the government and the banking industry have tried to slow the mortgage meltdown. Hope Now, the Bush-administration led coalition of banks, loan servicers and community advocacy groups created to tackle the foreclosure problem, says it has has helped 2.7 million homeowners keep their homes since July 2007.

Lenders like JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) have all recently implemented new loan modification programs.

She told the Fortune 500 Forum that it’s not too late to step up foreclosure prevention initiatives.

“The sooner we do it the better,” she replied. “I see higher delinquencies growing through 2010.”

Acting now would help many families who would otherwise lose their homes. And that would benefit everyone.

“Attacking the financial problem at its roots is the fiscally responsible and smart thing to do,” she said.

U.S. Steel Corp. said late Tuesday that it will temporarily idle its Great Lakes Works plant in Ecorse and two other facilities in a move to reduce production amid falling demand for its steel products.

The action will affect roughly 3,500 workers at the three plants, the Pittsburgh-based company said. Great Lakes employs about 2,005 people. The plant produces sheet products primarily for the automotive industry.

Over the next several weeks, U.S. Steel is also idling Keetac, an iron ore mining and pelletizing facility in Keewatin, Minn., and Granite City Works near St. Louis.

U.S. Steel, which has more than 49,000 employees, said it plans to temporarily concentrate production at Mon Valley Works near Pittsburgh; Gary Works in Gary, Ind.; Fairfield Works near Birmingham, Ala.; and Lake Erie Works in Nanticoke, Ontario.

“The largest percentage of employees (affected) are union workers, but this idling cuts across all categories: hourly, management and professional,” said D. John Armstrong, manager of public affairs.

Armstrong could not project how long the idling would last, only that it would be determined by market conditions.

This is the part of our nation’s surreal economic crisis that seems particularly surreal:

The US auto industry, which employs 3 million Americans in auto plants, parts and supplier networks and dealerships nationwide is broadly understood as being essential to maintaining America as an industrial force.

It’s financial collapse, which even critics of moves to bailout the industry suggest is imminent, would devastate workers, retirees and communities in every state of the nation.

Despite the grumbling from anti-union zealots, the auto giants have radically retooled in a manner that makes the cost of producing a vehicle at a unionized plant of General Motors, Ford or Chrysler roughly equivalent to the cost of running a car off the line at a non-union plant.

And to top it all off: Auto plants actually produce something that most Americans consider to be useful.

Yet, proposals to provide what now seems to be a very small bailout — $25 billion — are currently stalled.

At the same time, the whole of the federal government is scrambling to buy as much as $50 billion in “toxic assets” — bad loans and other products of irresponsible financial practices that are of dubious value — from Citigroup, a global banking concern that makes money by charging working families exorbitant interest rates for credit.

Perhaps, in some wild calculation of American interest, Citicorp is worthy of a bailout.

But what mad calculus would make Citigroup more worthy than the auto industry?

Something is fundamentally wrong with a federal government that offers bankers a bailout and autoworkers as cold shoulder.

LANSING, Mich. — Detroit’s Big Three automakers are forever changed by the current credit crisis, according to a study done by a well-known Michigan economics firm.

The study, from Lansing-based Anderson Economic Group, gives a stark peek into the auto business and reports bankruptcy, radical restructuring and even a merger between two of the auto giants are just a few of the limited options the industry has left.

“Although the metaphor has been abused recently, it is indeed the worst crisis since the Great Depression for the domestic industry,” analysts wrote in the summary of their findings. The study projects annual sales for the Big Three may be less than 10.5 million units.That number is down from 16 million in 2007, a nearly 40 percent drop.

On a more positive note, analysts write in the study that they disagree “with the notion that the entire industry is a herd of ‘dinosaurs’ or that the Detroit 3 do not produce vehicles Americans want.”The next 18 months are both critical and full of possibility for automakers, according to the study.

The feds pump another $20 billion into teetering Citigroup Inc. and insure $306 billion in bad assets just days after Congress slaps Detroit’s automakers for failing to table “a plan” to justify $25 billion in loans and folks ’round here cry, “Double standard! Double standard!”

Double standard? You bet, but it’s more than a geographic cabal of coastal Democrats and anti-union, pro-foreign auto Republicans from the South that clearly has it in for Detroit. It’s money and political alliances, folks, neither of which the boys at General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC have in abundant supply.

How come Citigroup gets a pass and a big fat check? First, failure of its sprawling operations truly would pose a mortal threat to the global financial system. Second, the banking giant is exceedingly well connected to the campaign wallets of the very same folks — and their allies — who are poised to foist draconian terms on Detroit to keep it afloat.

It gets better. This being Thanksgiving Day, launch Google and type in “Chris Dodd campaign contributions.” Up will pop a link to an interesting site called opensecrets.org, a product of the independent Center for Responsive Politics. Who was the top contributor to Dodd between 2003 and 2008?

Citigroup — or, more precisely, its political action committee, whose contributions totaled $316,494. In the 2008 election cycle alone, Dodd received $157,194 from Citigroup’s PAC. From AIG, he garnered $223,478 between ‘03 and ‘08, taking in $98,100 this year from the beleaguered insurer propped up by $150 billion of taxpayer money.

WASHINGTON — President George W. Bush signed a bill Friday that extends unemployment benefits by seven weeks, plus an additional 13 weeks on top of that in hard-hit states such as Michigan.

Michigan’s jobless rate now stands at 9.3 percent.

The additional 13 weeks kick in once the unemployment rate in a state hit 6 percent or higher.

“This is really good news,” said Tom Clementson, an Indian River road construction worker laid off a year ago.

“This will give my son and me a longer time to find a job. Nobody is hiring here,” added Clementson, who exhausted his latest unemployment benefit checks six weeks ago. His son also lost his construction job.

Michigan’s jobless rate is its highest since July 1992. The national average is now 6.5 percent.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A key Republican Senator said on Sunday it was “pretty clear” a $25 billion bailout proposal for U.S. automakers will fail in the U.S. Senate, while Democrats argued saving the industry was critical to the U.S. economy.

The Senate is slated on Monday to begin debating emergency legislation to General Motors Corp, Ford Motor Co, and Chrysler LLC in a special post-election session to deal with the economic crisis.

The leading Democratic plan would authorize up to $25 billion in loans from the Treasury Department’s $700 billion corporate rescue program to help Detroit survive its financial crisis. In return, the government would take equity stakes in the companies and impose limits on executive compensation.

It’s political morning again in America. Arguments over flag lapel pins, plumbers and robocalls are fading from memory, and everybody you bump into recognizes that something huge has happened with the election of Barack Obama. In the grocery line, at the post office, over coffee, we all just sense it.

“I can’t think of another election where the issues were two wars and a crashed economy. There just isn’t any historical precedent for this.” So says Joan Hoff, a former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency in New York City.

“It’s an historic turning point … an exclamation point of major proportions to the civil rights movement that goes back to the 1950s.” That’s James McPherson, the renowned author and professor emeritus of history at Princeton University.

Brinkley, the historian who edited the private White House diaries of Ronald Reagan, agrees that Tuesday’s vote marks “the beginning of a new era” in American politics not seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1932, or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in 1964.

With Obama’s lopsided victory, and the wave that swept more Democrats into both houses of Congress, “a chapter has been closed on the Reagan era, meaning the days of rolling back the Great Society are over,” he says. “A new kind of progressivism will now be taking root.”