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The Tennessean newspaper ran an interesting story this morning, entitled "Slumping Saturn Has Some Rethinking To Do." The article is about the current state of Saturn.

Lying with statistics is not only a universally preferred form of communication -- it's also a lot of fun. For instance: At the rate of market share loss it sustained last year, DaimlerChrysler will be out of business in the United States in 13 years. GM will last about 26 years while Ford's U.S. operations will expire around Labor Day 2040.

This was the factory that was going to revive the American automobile industry, proving that Detroit could build quality cars and win back buyers who had defected to the Japanese. Built at a time when auto companies were closing plants and cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs, GM's Saturn plant here was a rare opportunity for the auto company and its workers to leave the industry's old ways behind and embrace some of the lessons that Japan was teaching, with an American twist.

Three theories of modern business have crippled Detroit.

When Detroit executives a few years ago rolled out the idea of "modular manufacturing," Big Labor only saw jobs going out the door. For a while, unions managed to thwart this approach, in which the assembly of large chunks of cars is farmed out to suppliers. But momentum is building once again, and this time around labor seems willing to budge.