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."
Are you talking about the sam Pat Buchannan who arrived at a Detroit rally when he was running for president in a Mercedes?????
“Depends on what color your skin was.”
The 1950s still were not so bad. While my wife was a little girl in the Soviet Union she would cry about how badly Blacks were treated in the United States. But Blacks had more civile rights in the Jim Crow South than Soviet high Communist Party members had.
Blacks in the 1950 South were free to...
1. Leave the South to seek opportunity elsewhere (many did)
2. Own their own homes and land with low property taxes (many did)
3. Own guns to protect their lives and property (many did)
4. Attend Southern medical schools for Blacks (many did and the first Black female had already been accepted to the University of Arkansas Medical School)
5. Attend any of a great number of colleges (many did)
6. Vote in multi-party elections (many did)
Take your skin color comments back to Russia.
14 billion here, 14 billion there, soon you’re talking some real money. Anyway, isn’t this just the first payment?
Yup, this global economy has worked out really great for America.
Pat Buchanan is a stupid Hitler apologist.
Not only that, he has the gall to defend America. We should jail him for speaking out!
The same ones that look at the 1950s with disdain, while trying to convince the easily led that what we have now in America is somehow a good thing.
Yes, the 50’s were a strong time for American economics...the economy grew....and grew by manufacturing and creating jobs in America....not shipping those things overseas...
While at the same time the European economy was finally expanding after the war...esp the German Economic Miracle...done by lowering business taxes AND not shipping manufacturing overseas
They’ll still be good jobs without the UAW, Pat.
This morning Pat was showing his love for Caroline Kennedy.
Blech
Chrysler repaid it’s loan.
WE are not shutting down Detroit. The car manufacturers and the Unions in Detroit are. They made their bed and we are supposed to sleep in it? No, our children are supposed to sleep in it? We are borrowing our children's money to bail out businesses and Unions that only had their short term interests in mind.
This does not come down on the people who are against the bail out. This goes on all those involved in the process of rotting these businesses from within.
“Oliver Wendell Holmes phrased it a little differently: ‘Freedom of Speech doesn’t give one the right to runn into a crowded theatre and yell “Fire!” when there isn’t one.”
Hopw on earth is that applicable? If you figure that leaving international trade to its own devices, as we do with interstate trade for instance, would result in the equivalent of panic and suffocation, then you don’t believe in the free market. Let me say this right now, I think America’s history of tariff’s specifically and protectionism generally is shameful. I’m sure we would have been better off without it.
But alas, we are stuck thinking of foreigners as our enemies. In the eyes of some it is not enough that people from two different nations mutually benefit from trade. One country must win, and one must lose. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. All we have to care about is ourselves. Leave the rest of the world to its own concerns. And don’t get me wrong, China might think itself our enemy. It may actually be our enemy at some point, but not until it acts overtly, in my opinion. If in the meantime we subsidize its aggrandizement, so be it. At least we got something in return for it.
It was just an analogy to why we need manufacturing plants. I know what they fly now. And if you read my other post you will see that Ford makes a good product. You are out of touch with what goes on with Ford and G.M.
GM out sold Toyota by about 1.2 million vehicles in the U.S. and Ford outsold Honda by 850,000 and Nissan by 1.2 million in the U.S. GM was the world’s No. 1 automaker beating Toyota by 3,000 units.
did you realize that Chevy makes the Malibu and Ford makes the Fusion that were both rated over the Camry and Accord by J.D. Power independent survey on initial quality? Did you bother to read the Consumer Report that rated Ford on par with good Japanese auto makers.
Did you realize Big Three’s gas guzzlers include the 33 mpg Malibu that beats the Accord. And for ‘09 Ford introduces the Hybrid Fusion whose 39 mpg is the best midsize, beating the Camry Hybrid. Ford’s Focus beats the Corolla and Chevy’s Cobalt beats the Civic.
Did you realize that both GM and Ford offer more hybrid models than Nissan or Honda. Between 2005 and 2007, Ford alone has invested more than $22 billion in research and development of technologies such as Eco Boost, flex fuel, clean diesel, hybrids, plug in hybrids and hydrogen cars.
“Were on the verge of a depression, our government is so corrupted they now control banking”
What do you mean “now”? Where have you been for the last century?
Ford already said they are OK and they really don't need a bailout. I am sticking to my guns and holding my position. And the good things is, I aint the one who is scared.
Another thing that I know that calms me down is that we are Americans and we will adapt, improvise, and overcome.
the UAW is NOT America!!
Uaw pearl harbored us with obama support.
Native Texan, not Russian, so try again.
No FR "discussion" is complete without a Luv-it-or-leave-it flip-off, eh?
Where in the Bible is it mandated that cars have to be made in Detroit?
“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.”
Is this true? If so, that’s not exactly ‘free trade’, is it?
The real problem with “Free Trade” is that no one really practices it...except liberal Free Traders in this country.
Such nuttiness is killing the US economy
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