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."
Some perspective:
30% of black men in US will go to jail
Gary Younge in New York
August 2003
Black men born in the United States in 2001 will have a one in three chance of going to prison during their lifetime if current trends continue, according to a report by the US justice department.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/19/usa.garyyounge
In 2005, 69.5 percent of all births to non-Hispanic black women, 63.3 percent of births of American Indian or Alaskan native woman, and 47.9 percent of births to Hispanic women occurred outside of marriage, compared with 25.4 percent for non-Hispanic white women and 16.2 percent for Asian or Pacific Islander women (preliminary estimates)
http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/indicators/75UnmarriedBirths.cfm
That is utter tripe.
Republicans don't “give jobs away”. International competition, cheaper products from more competitive countries, the inability of some US firms to adapt, insane demands from unions, have ended up giving American jobs away.
Your question reminds me of the value of a Chevy truck. You buy it for $25K to $30K. When you drive it off the lot, it’s worth $20K or less. If you’re lucky.
There is nothing wrong with me. Thank you. This is about issues and ideas not personal attacks. Facts are facts. It wasn’t the big three that caused this recession. And in Michigan we have been in this soup for a lot longer than the rest of you. Did you also read that foreign companies subsidize their car companies?
“Did you also read that foreign companies subsidize their car companies?”
I don’t want to subsidize a losing business model. If GM wants to move their plants to the south and scrap the UAW, then I would listen to their request. I am not going to support giving them money without seeing change FIRST!
And electing Obama. Don’t forget that.
The big 3 have been in their own little recession for years. They don't need no economic slowdown to lose market share and do badly in the market.
True..the American cars are much better made now. I am in the process of getting a new car...and it will definitely be an AMERICAN one
don’t want to subsidize a losing business model. If GM wants to move their plants to the south and scrap the UAW, then I would listen to their request. I am not going to support giving them money without seeing change FIRST!
The Japanese car makers would be losing money, too, if they were not being subsidized....by their own government and some US state governments.
You dont see the GOP Senators asking for tax dollars back from the foreign car makers they subsidized, do you?
...and straight back into the pockets of Liberal Democrat politicians, minus the handling fee.
Now he may....but he ran for president more than ten years ago....and he was silly enough to drive a Mercedes to Detroit.
You are absolutely right about perception. I face it often, and no matter what the facts are, some refuse to believe them. That's an indication of what the mainstream press has fed the public for years. It's along the same lines as Republican Bad, Democrat Good.
He never drove the Mercedes to Detroit. Bush I ran an ad attacking Pat for driving a Mercedes. I’ll bet Michigan voters wish they could vote for Pat today; he has been a staunch defender of the American auto industry, unlike the “Toyota Republicans” who reveled in running down the American auto industry and praising foreign car companies.
I supported and voted for Senator John McCain for two, and ONLY two reasons: 1.) His name was not Barack Obama. 2.) Governor Sarah Palin was his running mate. If you conflate that with someone being my "hero", so be it.
Part of the reason Detroit can't make small cars is because of the UAW. But remember, the small car market is a distortion of reality, because we have been forced into it by our lack of Oil. And that's Washington's fault. Were we able to drill and produce our own oil, the mid-size to large car market would be more prevalent, which is Detroit's strength.
I don’t want to see either of the three go under, but busiess as usual wont cut it.
As for Pat as a conservative, I find it interesting that he criticizes Republicans in the south for giving deals to foreign automakers to get assembly plants in their states, but has nothing to say to Dems who won’t cut taxes for these troubled US auto makers or make similar concessions.
If Dems were so worried about the loss of jobs in the northeast, why have they taxed and regulated these businesses out of existence? And why can’t Pat, the so-called uber conservative be balanced enough to point that out.
The cure to the economic mess from coast to coast if for Govt to stop spending money like Drunken Kennedys and cut taxes.
Hell, if they announced a total elimination of capital gains alone you would see the stock market blast off into the stratosphere and the housing market turn around on a dime, IMHO.
Idiots are running this country.
Certainly isn't tripe...That's what Buchanan's talking about...Reagan put a tariff on the cheaper foreign competition so Ameirican manufacturing stayed in America...
Americans can't compete with companies in China and Indonesia unless you want to live like the Chinese and Indonesians...How can you not know that???
Well no. “It makes more sense than ever for a Japanese company to manufacture in the U.S”.
I beg to differ for this reason: A weak Yen has given the Japanese a huge advantage in the U.S. market. Exporting units into the U.S. markets, Japan has taken our dollars and translated them into mega Yen. A stronger Yen will mean less in exchanging their “export” earned dollars for Yen.
For the same reason their transplant factories will experience a reduction in Yen, when at the end of the day they send their “dollar” profits home. In both cases they will have to raise prices in order to maintain their current level of profit. With the U.S. economy in recession, and the car market in a severe downturn, Japan will have to either cut exports to the U.S. or close plants in the U.S. I think they will choose to do the later.
“Americans can’t compete with companies in China......unless you want to live like the Chinese....”
A sad but true statement and bears repeating.
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