During the campaign, Barack Obama often decried "American corporations that send jobs overseas."  When he became President, he said, there would be no “tax breaks” for those companies.

This was a great applause line during the campaign, but now complicated reality intrudes.  Take, for example, the case of the U.S. automobile industry.

General Motors, once the world's largest corporation, is close to bankruptcy and is asking for a Federal bailout.  This was one of the topics of discussion for the President Elect and President Bush when they met at the White House on Monday.  Obama appears to be pushing for some sort of aid package to GM.

GM does have plenty of cause for concern.  On Monday, GM's stock fell to its lowest level since 1946.  In the third quarter of this year, GM has reported losses of $2.5 billion dollars — more than $50 billion (!) in losses in the last year and a half .  It has shed more than 12,000 American workers in this decade and last week announced that another 3,600 would be laid off beginning early next year.

Ford and Chrysler have also been plummeting.

But at the same time these multinationals are collapsing at home, in some foreign markets things have never been better.

Take Russia for instance.  Just last week, GM opened a new assembly plant near St. Petersburg, which will produce 70,000  Chevys per year and employ  1,700 Russian workers.  It was such a milestone that Russian President Medvedev and the U.S. Ambassador were in attendance.

In the United States, GM can't sell a Buick to save its life, but in China, the made-in-China Buick is flying off the showroom floors.

How did this come to pass?

Last summer, while Russia was enjoying selling its surplus oil for $140 per barrel, the United States and her citizens were discovering that this translated to $4 per gallon gasoline at the pump.

Sales plummeted of the kinds of vehicles made in Detroit while oil exporters such as Russia laughed all the way to the pump.  Not only did Russia's treasury benefit from the inflated price of oil on the world market, at home Russian drivers saw the price of gasoline hold steady, thanks to state subsidies and controls.

Now, of course, the shock waves of the worldwide financial crisis are being felt in Russia, too.  Oil exporters are not laughing so hard now that the price of oil has fallen to $60 a barrel.

President Elect Obama may indeed have to bail out the (not so) "Big Three," but he must insist — as he did in his famous May 2007 speech before the Economic Club of Detroit — that the Motor City finally learn to produce vehicles that are more fuel efficient and made to take advantage of new, climate-friendly technologies.

Look at the statistics for Toyota.  More than a half-million hybrid cars sold in the U.S., fewer U.S. workers laid off, more fuel efficient vehicles overall produced and sold.  Toyota is actually building plants in the U.S. to produce more hybrid cars for the U.S. market.

Granted, all major carmakers are being hit hard by the world economic downturn, but Detroit's Big Three would be in far better shape right now if they had followed some of the lessons that they have learned in foreign markets and that foreign producers have learned in America.