Maven: Unusual Bedfellows

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If you think your parents were an unlikely pair, get a load of what Automotive News reports this morning.

Ford(F Quote) and General Motors(GM Quote) have, it says, talked merger and alliance.

Meanwhile, over in the newspaper business, The Wall Street Journal gives an update on the latest in one of the most interesting standoffs in recent corporate history.

The Los Angeles Times' editor and publisher have been refusing Tribune's(TRB Quote) demands for more job cuts. If nothing else, the two should at least earn a few days' good credit on cutting the line in the newsroom cafeteria.

The Journal reports that now, a group of powerful local citizens is leaning on Tribune to sell the paper to them.

This won't work, says Tribune. (Speaking of alliances, it uses Los Angeles Times articles as filler for its other troubled papers.) No word on any alliance between Tribune and the Taurus brand.

But The International Herald Tribune reports on the latest failed newspaper.

Liberation, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and a bunch of communists, has, apparently, no longer been paying its workers. It's actually a miracle that it lasted this long, as the paper used to refuse advertising.

Now it's thinking of going the capitalist route and selling shares to readers. From commies to capitalists who think there is a sucker born every minute; The Business Press Maven smells progress.

One of the most commonly lamented aspects of the American economy is a top reason that The Business Press Maven is bullish about our nation's long-term economic prospects, despite housing's coming downfall and no matter what sort of dolt warms the White House.

Manufacturing, that dirty, cyclical, low-margin, recession-prone and physically exhausting former basis of the American economy, is in permanent decline.

And don't let the door hit it on the way out.