Democrats Need to Understand, the Auto Bailout is a Major Left vs Right Battlefield....

RollWithIt

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Thu Nov-13-08 08:29 PM
Original message

Democrats Need to Understand, the Auto Bailout is a Major Left vs Right Battlefield....

If GM and Ford are not bailed out, you will see the final destruction of the City of Detroit. The final nail in the coffin of the United Auto Workers of America. In the end, somewhere in the range of 2 to 3 million individuals will lose their jobs. It's not just the line workers, the designers, the engineers, the executives. It's also the dealers, the loan agents, the neighborhood stores, the realtors, the land investors. I could go on and on and on about the extreme misery that would be caused. We're no longer talking about bailing out banks. We're talking about bailing out real blue collar workers and the cities they live in.

Many will complain that GM & Ford leadership didn't properly prepare for this by investing in alternative technology. That is partially true. Though there is no guarantee at this point that a car could be getting 100 mph and sell well in this economic collapse. That is why the bailout bill has to be structured, just as Obama said in his speeches, "To ReTool so we can make cars of the 21st century." That doesn't mean that bailout bill can't be properly written to force change. Remember the Obama slogan, Change?

Finally, please take the time to read this article by this highly regarded Right-Wing Nutjob. Notice all the standard anti-union codeword phrases he uses.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/13/mitchell.auto/index.html

Editor's Note: Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy research foundation. He formerly worked at The Heritage Foundation and as an economist for Republican Sen. Bob Packwood and the Senate Finance Committee. He also served on the 1988 Bush-Quayle transition team.
Daniel Mitchell says an auto bailout would subsidize bad management and reward inflexible unions.

(CNN) -- General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and the United Auto Workers union are pouring millions of dollars into a lobbying campaign for a taxpayer bailout.

The money devoted to influence peddling in Washington would be better spent on improving quality and finding ways to reduce a bloated cost structure, but both management and UAW have decided that fleecing taxpayers is a better option.

A taxpayer bailout would be a terrible mistake. It would subsidize the shoddy management practices of the corporate bureaucrats at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, and it would reward the intransigent union bosses who have made the synonymous with inflexible and anti-competitive work rules.

Perhaps most important, though, is that a bailout would be bad for the long-term health of the American auto industry. It would discriminate against the 113,000 Americans who have highly-coveted jobs building cars for Nissan, BMW and other auto companies that happen to be headquartered in other nations.

These companies demonstrate that it is possible to build cars in America and make money. Putting them at a competitive disadvantage with handouts for the U.S.-headquartered companies would be highly unjust.

This is standard conservative logic. Ship the money oversees. Companies with union workers are bad. It's not really just the company, it's the workers and their pesky worker rights. Free market!

Wonder how that has worked out?

Take the time to find out how many cars BMW & Nissan builds in America. Then find out how many cars GM & Ford manufacture. Find out if Nissan was to go under, how many American workers would actually be affected in comparison to GM & Ford. It's a straw man argument and he fucking knows it. He doesn't care who makes it or where. He just wants cheaper. So what if Americans can't build it as cheap. We need MORE tax breaks for the wealthy so they can buy MORE BMWs. Tax benefits for buying American? Forget it!

Thankfully, we have sane leadership starting Jan 20 2009.