Posted on 12/19/2008 4:42:17 AM PST by IbJensen
“GOP to Detroit: Drop Dead!”
So may have read the headline Friday, had not President George 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 Dick 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.”
Grasshopper, answer this: if you are paying people for doing nothing as Detroit is doing to a lot of UAW workers, do they have jobs to give away?
This is just a collection of bumper sticker slogans. Not even worth a comment from an intelligent person.
Detroit-when you point a finger you have three pointing back at yourself.
The only subsidy a success company needs would be “right to work”, Tax exemption (both employee, products and income), and the government not to nag them to death.
“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?”
But for how long? A month? Two maybe? These morons are so shortsighted. The Big 3 cannot continue at their current way of doing business. Bankruptcy is the only way out of those idiotic union contracts.
Gotcha. Brilliant. And that sure is free-market economics. Not.
The sad fact is that American companies have to go overseas to survive, not because Republicans are incentivizing them to do so, but because government regulations and work rules are forcing them to do so.
Without going international, many American companies would go out of business due to foreign competition.
I guess the alternative is to build the giant walls around the country to keep evertything from goin in or out.
Pat Buchanan proves, once again, that he is no conservative.
He would provide gov’t money to a failing business.
He would provide gov’t money to unions that, in-turn, provide millions of dollars to liberal campaigns and causes.
He would provide gov’t money when the free market offers a reasonable, alternative solution.
How did Peronism do at protecting Argentine industry?
Argentina went from first world to third under strong unions and industrial protectionism.
“It’s Herbert Hoover time in here” warned Cheney?
So instead of being fiscally responsible, the Administration wants to effectively print money for Detroit.
I remember the good old days when GM and Ford were vibrant companies and Pat Buchanan was a conservative.
Pat, get off of your protectionism kick!
The so called U.S. car makers have been shipping jobs to Canada and Mexico for years. Not to mention placing their U.S. badges on cars largely made overseas.
(like my 1971 “Dodge Colt”, made by Mitsubishi)
What America needs Pat, is a business model without the Mafia tax!
Where are the savings? Reduced power usage? That has to be insignificant.
Most of the autos sold in the US are made in the US and more factories are being made for additional autos and SUV and trucks.
If we are to pay the UAW then at least they should have to stop giving over 100 million to the Democrats and keep it for their members.
Also where does all their money go? And what will they do when it is no longer a free country and one has to be a member and pay thousands a year, without being able to have a secret ballot?
Perhaps when I can drive an American car for 200,000 miles and more with no major repairs needed, I’ll stop being a Toyota Republican. In capitalism, its the consumer that counts, Gasbag Pat.
ahh yes, yet another of the reasons why I usually avoid PB’s columns, that he’s no conservative is the understatement of 2008.
Politics is a game. A money game. Smart business players send money to both sides. Many do not like one side or the other, but they send them money anyway. That is how you buy votes, that is how the game is played.
The UAW does not play the game. The UAW has aligned itself completely with one side and has allowed itself to be taken over by partisans for one side. That is dumb strategy.
The UAW has become solely an arm of the Democratic Party. Republican politicians have zero political or monetary incentive incentive to help the UAW and much incentive to try to break it. The UAW can complain all they want, but it is the nature of the game and they chose poorly.
You can also play the game by making your company important to the politicans home base. GM apparently is more important in blue states than in red states. They have not done a very good job of making themselves “too big to fail” in individual Republican districts or states. Wonder why? Now it bites them.
Meanwhile, the competitors of GM and the UAW have moved strongly into red areas and have become important to those areas. Why would GM expect politicians to vote to give their constituent’s tax money to someone competing directly against their constituents and who make more money per hour? Dumb to even think a politician would do that without quid pro quo.
I can behave badly toward my neighbors for years, or ignore them, and then complain when they don’t stand up for me. But I am an idiot for expecting different.
bfltr
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