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."
It is time to set up the US Conservative Party with a solid conservative platfrom. I do not understand what the Republican Party is about anymore these days. Like Sharon had the audacity to break the traditional 2-party system and created the Kadima party.
Then let them buy them.
“GOP to Detroit: Drop Dead!”
I don't think it was only republicans who were opposed to this UAW bailout.
Yes they did! Now something interesting happened in Tupelo, Mississippi yesterday. Toyota announced they were suspending construction of a taxpayer subsidized assembly plant to build gas efficient cars. Will they pay the subsidies back? Don't really know, but with the Yen rising against the dollar they are going to have to raise prices substantially for their American built vehicles or shut down and go home!! If gas stays cheap, Ford F150 sales and SUV sales will begin to recover market share. The irony in all this is that the Dems are supporting the loans to the Big 3, which will help them survive to sell full sized vehicles again, and the Repubs are opposing the loans, which will help the imports change Americas buying habits forever, in the direction of “Green environmentally friendly compact cars”. How convoluted this whole mess has become. Freepers oppose the loans and thereby support the environmental wackos goal of driving cute little tin cans that will save us from global warming. Al Gore must love these Repubs!!
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.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Yes and early too.
The cars and the music were cool. The cold war, Korean War, dig a hole in your backyard fallout shelters were less so!
What constitutional authority gives congress the right to donate my hardearned money to a failing or at-risk PRIVATE company? Christmas or not, the financial bailout and any auto bailout are equally anathema to constitutional governance.
1950’s were not great. Alot of child abuse (hidden) wife beating (hidden) and a lot of other unspeakable stuff.
The GM of the 50's is not the GM of today. If the UAW were in the railroad industry, we'd be looking a bailing out steam engine production.
Ya can you crank out a B-24 every hour like the Willow Run Ford plant did during the 40’s?
isn't Pat Buchanan involved with KooKs like Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura ?
“When it comes to economic matters, Buchanan is purely and simply a statist.”
I would much prefer Mr. Buchanan as my “statist” to the statism of Mr. Obama.
Which is what we’re going to get....
- John
Dear Pat B,
You must have been asleep for the past couple of months, the union folks voted for Obama. Now you are crying about the bad old Republicans not helping out those same union voters. News flash, union members and blacks ALWAYS vote Democrate. Republicans can kow-tow to the unions until the cows come home and still not get their votes. So f’um, the unions can beg the Obama for my tax money next year.
You're assuming that the money will actually save the jobs in the first place. I don't think it will make a damn bit of difference in the long run, but it will only extend a bad precedent.
“Has Pat Buchanan ever heard of the low wages in China , backed by very hard working Chinese workers who are very good at making consumer electronics products like cell phones, TV sets, laptops etc?”
I believe that you just proved his point.
At the end of WWII, pretty much every other major industrial power had its industrial infrastructure in ruins. The US economy had very little competition and the world needed us to build as many good as as we possibly could.
But, it's now 60 years later. Japan and Germany have rebuilt, as have the other industrial powers. China's industry is growing, as are the industries of other, formerly undeveloped, nations.
I take it you can see why the economic situation in 2008 is different from that of 1950, right?
Is this true? If so, that's not exactly 'free trade', is it?
You both make good points in posts# 47 and #48, and from both sides of the issue.
Re-framed the issue might be: in this economic `triage’, can these patients be saved, and we have the option of asking—should they be saved?
A month ago we were told that if we didn’t revive Wall Street with tax dollars, we wouldn’t be able to write checks come Christmas. Now the automakers (and UAW) are saying, don’t help us and millions of Americans are out of work. I don’t know what to believe.
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