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 don’t want GM, Ford, and Chrysler to drop dead. I want the UAW to drop dead. Until the UAW is broken, the big three will constantly operate on the very edge of disaster.
Pat Buchanan can go.... well, I can’t SAY what he can go do or I’ll get Banned from FR!
The 1950’s weren’t so bad, my friend.
When will he just go away...
When will Pat just go away?
Because at some point it just becomes throwing good money at bad. 14 billion here, 14 billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money Pat.
Having been born in 1960, I will have to take your word for it (missed them by 35 days!) However, it’s not the 1950’s anymore.
At almost the same time, we were typing almost the same sentence. That’s pretty neat.
And just who allowed the UAW to get as big as they are? A pox on both their houses.
I actually agree with him. I mostly just feel that the UAW needs to be broken.
I would reluctantly tolerate a big three bailout in the interests of national security, so that we have companies that have the capability of manufacturing weapons should we get involved in a conventional conflict. However, the UAW has hamstrung the auto makers to the point that they can’t fulfill this function anyway. With that in mind, I see no reason to bailout the people who got this crap started to begin with.
I don’t read the article as saying “Break the UAW”; I read it as “shovel more money at them”.
Correct me if I am wrong but did Chrysler not repay their lon from the 80’s?
Depends on what color your skin was.
With this statement, Pat proves he is still stuck in the 1940's. Idiotic, but his observation about Reagan's pro-American stance is spot on. Reagan understood the difference between free trade as an ideology and Kool-Aid drinking free trade as carried to the extreme we have today-- a class of privileged plutocrats like the politicians, the U.A.W. and their servant-enablers who suckle from the government teat, and the rest of us who are expected to pay the freight.
And the funny thing about Reagan's philosophy, is that he is still loved and respected by the Japanese-- they understand a leader who will look out for the interests of our own (American) middle class is also looking out for the interest of Japan's middle class. The reason is simple: If America is transformed from a society of rulers and the ruled, Japan may not be that far behind. How badly we need another Reagan! And maybe he or she is out there, possibly running a state like Alaska or Louisiana.
Pat doesn’t get the basic premise.
We don’t want GM out of business.
We want the union out of GM.
And that isn’t going to happen with $50 billion in taxpayer money funneled straight into UAW pockets.
I hear ya, Pat. And I agree with you regarding the damage Washington has wrought on American manufacturing over the years.
But nostalgia doesn’t get the job done, my friend. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and these bailouts are wrongs.
Enough of bigwig con-men and union extortionists holding our country hostage. Enough of paying the ransoms they demand. Enough of the extortion.
They wanna drive this country off the cliff with Washington at the wheel? Fine, let’s go. Right now, instead of waiting until they’re dead and buried, having lived a life of luxury paid for by my sweat.
Enough.
The party is dead, anyway. Rebuilding has got to start somewhere - and smashing the UAW/Democrat money machine is a good beginning.
Pat's problem is that he thinks Republicans can actually get back into the game with a little populist tweaking...not this time. If they want to play again they are going to have to step back for a few years, let Obama fail in Carter-like fashion, then attempt a return as vigorous advocates of small government. It may not work, but the current corrupt and bloated Republican Party heirarchy is not sustainable.
Pat is an idiot!
I watched the Senate ‘debate’.
The Republicans ‘fell’ into the Dem cesspool of ‘debate’ again. They’re like Charlie Brown to the Dems Lucy. They fall for it and look bad every time. (Of course it doesn’t help for the MSM and folks like Pat to denegrade their points every time.)
I just want to know where will the jobs come from when businesses refuse to hire workers? And I do mean REFUSE!
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