Posted on 12/16/2008 9:41:55 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
"GOP to Detroit: Drop Dead!"
So may have read the headline Friday, had not President Bush stepped in to save GM, Ford and Chrysler, which Senate Republicans had just voted to send to the knacker's yard.
What are Republicans thinking of, pulling the plug, at Christmas, on GM, risking swift death for the greatest manufacturing company in American history, a strategic asset and pillar of the U.S. economy.
The $14 billion loan to the Big Three that Republican senators filibustered to death is just 2 percent of the $700 billion the Senate voted to bail out Wall Street. Having gone along with bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie, Freddie and CitiGroup, why refuse a reprieve to an industry upon which millions of the best blue-collar jobs in America depend?
In a good year, Americans buy 17 million cars. A more populous EU probably buys as many. Three billion people in India, Southeast Asia and China, four times as many people as there are in the EU and United States, are moving toward the middle class. They, too, will be wanting cars. And millions of them love American cars.
Is the Republican Party so fanatic in its ideology that, rather than sin against a commandment of Milton Friedman, it is willing to see America written forever out of this fantastic market, let millions of jobs vanish and write off the industrial Midwest?
So it would seem. "Companies fail every day, and others take their place," said Sen. Richard Shelby on "Face the Nation."
Presumably, the companies that will "take their place," when GM, Ford and Chrysler die, are German, Japanese or Korean, like the ones lured into Shelby's state of Alabama, with the bait of subsidies free-market Republicans are supposed to abhor.
In 1993, Alabama put together a $258 million package to bring a Mercedes plant in. In 1999, Honda was offered $158 million to build a plant there. In 2002, Alabama won a Hyundai plant by offering a $252 million subsidy.
"We have a number of profitable automakers in America, and they should not be disadvantaged for making wise business decisions while failure is rewarded," says Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
DeMint is referring to "profitable automakers" like BMW, which sited a plant in Spartanburg, after South Carolina offered the Germans a $150 million subsidy and $80 million to expand.
Be it BMW, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi or Hyundai, the South has become a sanctuary for foreign assembly plants, for which Southern states have been paying subsidies.
Fine. But why this "Let-them-eat-cake!" coldness toward U.S. auto companies? General Motors employs more workers than all these foreign plants combined. And, unlike Mitsubishi, General Motors didn't bomb Pearl Harbor.
Do these Southern senators understand why the foreign automakers suddenly up and decided to build plants in the United States?
It was the economic nationalism of Ronald Reagan.
When an icon of American industry, Harley-Davidson, was being run out of business by cutthroat Japanese dumping of big bikes to kill the "Harley Hog," Reagan slapped 50 percent tariffs on their motorcycles and imposed quotas on imported Japanese cars. Message to Tokyo. If you folks want to keep selling cars here, start building them here.
Fear of Reaganism brought those foreign automakers, lickety-split, to America's shores, not any love of Southern cooking.
Do the Republicans not yet understand how they lost the New Majority coalition that gave them three landslides and five victories in six presidential races from 1968 to 1988? Do they not know why the Reagan Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan are going home?
The Republican Party gave their jobs away!
How? By telling U.S. manufacturers they could shut plants here, get rid of their U.S. workers, build factories in Mexico, Asia or China, and ship their products back, free of charge.
Republican globalists gave U.S. manufacturers every incentive to go abroad and take their jobs with them, the jobs of Middle America.
And, for 30 years, that is what U.S. manufacturers have done, have been forced to do, as their competitors closed down and moved their plants abroad in search of low-wage Third World labor.
It's Herbert Hoover time in here, Vice President Cheney is said to have told the Senate Republicans -- as they prepared to march out onto the floor and turn thumbs down on any reprieve for General Motors.
In today's world, America faces nationalistic trade rivals who manipulate currencies, employ nontariff barriers, subsidize their manufacturers, rebate value-added taxes on exports to us and impose value-added taxes on imports from us, all to capture our markets and kill our great companies. And we have a Republican Party blissfully ignorant that we live in a world of us or them. It doesn't even know who "us" is.
We need a new team on the field and a new coach who believes with Vince Lombardi that "winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."
I have found out that a lot of people are not up to speed on the fact that the Big 3 do make good cars now. I know they suckes in the 80s but this is not the 80s
You are exactly right.
The Chrysler bailout is a joke. They are by far the most auto company in America. They are now owned by a private company, who is now begging other bankrupt companies to buy them.
It’s another example of why these companies need to fix their business model before the beg for taxpayer money.
It was the economic nationalism of Ronald Reagan.
Fear of Reaganism brought those foreign automakers, lickety-split, to America's shores, not any love of Southern cooking.
There may be a small shred of truth to this, but for the most part it's a lot of nonsense. Most of these plants were opened in the South long after Reagan left office, and their arrival was driven by many factors other than "fear of netionalism." I'll name few:
1. Auto manufacturing is one of the few industries where the economics of two influences -- the mass production of consumer goods and the cost of transporting finished products -- makes it very practical to build cars as close as possible to the markets where they are sold.
2. The complexity of the auto manufacturing process requires infrastructure and supporting industries that don't just spring up overnight like a factory for cheap plastic crap in China. Think of the steel, plastic, high-tech components, etc. that go into a car, and then realize that it takes well-functioning highway and rail systems to ensure that they all get there on time.
3. Railroad mergers in the eastern U.S. in the late 1990s likely accelerated a trend that was already well underway before then. In particular, the breakup of Conrail and its acquisition by Norfolk Southern and CSX provided competitive freight rail service in the Northeast for the first time in 25 years -- and gave auto manufacturers the ability to locate plants in the South that could ship cars economically to the largest consumer markets in the Northeast.
Buchanan is one of those who really drive me insane... Part of the time, the man makes more sense than anyone else. Then he goes off the deep end the other direction that you wonder what rock he just crawled out from under. While I know that Buchanan is a protectionist, his view on this issue is so wrong as to make him look like a fool.
Exactly how much did he get paid by the UAW to write that piece?
Yes, you are right. If the Big Three go under, look for the Japanese to start slowly pulling out of the US. The Japanese plants were built here for political reasons--as a hedge against American protectionism--and once the threat of American protectionism is gone, because the Big Three are gone, the Japanese will shift production back to Japan, or to a low-wage country like Mexico. And we won't be able to do anything about it, because they will control our auto market.
Pat can you say: U.A.W.? They are the problem.
And that's who Congress would be bailing out. Not GM, Ford or Chrysler.
The fricken UAW ain't budging an inch, nor giving up a thing. That Jobs Bank scam was already on the table to be phased out.
btw Pat, since you're stuck in a 1958 time warp, how's your Packard running?
Or do you still have that Green Nash?
Remember -- this is the guy who spent the better part of that primary campaign railing against the "globalist" George H. W. Bush, and presenting himself as an American populist out to save American manufacturing jobs.
And yet he himself was driving around in a MERCEDES-BENZ back then.
My belief is that Japanese companies do a better job of managing the press than American companies, and that there is a bias against American companies in the general consumer press, though not the Automotive journals. A glaring example of this, is that in 2007 Toyota recalled more cars than it sold. Yet that news was not on the front page of local newspapers. Toyota did a great job of managing the recalls, masking them as service updates and the like.
There are also Japanese manufacturers whose reliability and initial quality has often been an issue, such as Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Mazda. Yet they don't seem to drag down the perception of Japanese cars.
In the midsize segment, where American cars compete effectively, the most reliable car (JD Powers results of 3 years of ownership) is the Buick Century. Yet everyone assumes it's the Camry or the Accord. The Accord finished behind the Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable, and the Buick Century and LaCrosse. The Camry was tied with them.
Now having said this, there are many issues with the American car industry. Some problems are self inflicted, many are not.
No way...Pat in the here and now, 2008...
Do the Republicans not yet understand how they lost the New Majority coalition that gave them three landslides and five victories in six presidential races from 1968 to 1988? Do they not know why the Reagan Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan are going home?
The Republican Party gave their jobs away!
And John McCain was your hero...
Look where we are at...Pat's got the same ideas Reagan had and you badmouth him...
Unfortunately, the country's gettin' what only you guys deserve...You gave us Obama...And you are giving us the new Depression...Thanks...
Well, no. With the yen rising against the dollar, it makes more sense than ever before for a Japanese company to manufacture in the U.S.
I suspect the suspension/delay of that plant in Mississippi has been driven entirely by the fact that Toyota was planning to build the Prius there, starting in 2010. Toyota has probably done some serious thinking about this, and now realizes that they aren't going to be selling enough hybrid cars here in the U.S. to make the plant profitable. For one thing, fuel costs are way down . . . and secondly, the hybrid technology is relatively untested and there may be long-term flaws in it anyway.
Perhaps. My personal experience begs to differ, however. While there are a number of things I like about my GMC van, I probably would not buy another: things break that shouldn't break (door locks and door panels, for example), and GM wants several hundred of dollars to fix them. No thanks.
And no matter how spiffy-swell you say American cars are these days, the perception still remains, having been instilled over decades. I think that, as a salesman, you have to acknowledge that perception is a huge factor in peoples' buying decisions.
None of this is to say that American car companies' positions are hopeless -- but they've got to make some really big changes if they want to become competitive again.
Of course, there's also a broader cultural problem that spans American society, which also contributes to the Big 3's problems (they are, actually, kinda like gigantic canaries in the coal mine...). The costly aspects of Americans' sense of entitlement is highly concentrated in the manufacturing sector -- and the biggest companies are probably the ones that skate closest to the edge.
Nope.
His point was that Republicans “told” US manufacturers to to build factories in China.
Well as it turns out, top European firms like Nokia, Siemens, and Japanese firms like Sony, manufacture most of their products in China as well,, and for the same reasons Us firms make their products in China, a hard working labor force at reasonable wages.
It's got nothing to do with “Republicans” telling anyone to go manufacture anything anywhere. That's the most stupid thing I ever heard.
Buchanan drives a 10 year old Lincoln Navigator, which he loves: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16wwln-domains-t.html
And for that I am thankful...
Just this summer, my company put a newly hired employee on a stand up lift truck without providing any training for the young man...
The driver of the truck inadvertantly apparently, allowed one of his legs to stick out too far...
Ripped his leg off right there on the shop floor...
Big fines and massive training for all old and new lift truck drivers...Thanks to OSHA...
“GM out sold Toyota by about 1.2 million vehicles in the U.S”
What the hell is wrong with you? They lost billions! If we give them the $25billion they are asking for, and they will out produce Toyota and lose even more money. We should pay them not to produce cars.
Pat is overreacting. Just because the Auto makers go into Chapter 11 does not mean they go into liquidation and disappear. The UAW wants, indeed demands, to keep the legacy benefits and will promote every bit of hysteria to keep them.
Geeez man, you’re going to confuse them with the facts...
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