Pat Buchanan-no friend to union labor-makes a great point:
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.
Ouch!
Read the whole article here-pretty interesting read.
Buchanan as usual is an idiot and I don’t understand why you waste time reading him, let alone quoting him. I’m sure even he doesn’t believe that there is even a single person now working at Mitsubishi or who owns stock in Mitsubishi who took part in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We dropped two atomic bombs on them and firebombed the rest of the country, as you well know. If Buchanan is so worried about this sort of thing, let him call to account IBM and other U.S. companies that aided and abetted the Nazis during WWII.
If you don’t bail out the banking system, then the banks collapse and there is no U.S. economy. Full stop.
If you don’t bail out the auto industry, there will be hard times for millions – who will eventually recover as the other car companies pick up the slack. The big three have been in trouble for years and continue to go down the same road as if nothing is wrong. Why does GM have 80 models of cars, many of which are essentially the same but with different name plates? Why didn’t GM go global? Why don’t they build better cars that people actually want to buy? Why give them billions of dollars when the obvious result is that they will still go bankrupt a few years after the bailout. Let them go bankrupt. They won’t go out of business. They’ll reorganize. Maybe they’ll get smarter about how they do business. Maybe they’ll be competitive for once.
First he complains that foreign auto companies have plants in the US and then he complains that they have plants abroad. The US plants are profitable or they wouldn’t still be open, tax subsidies or not.
Uh, Pearl Harbor was over 65 years ago, Pat, I think forgiveness is the conventional wisdom.
His point was that there was a reason that plants located in the South and it had nothing to do with a love of southern food. They had no choice-if they did not build in the US the Reagan Administration was going to slap killer tarriffs on them. Go back and read the whole article.
Plus-its not just the Auto companies failing-its the size of the herd they drag down with them, and the economic impact to an already weak economy. We spend billions to wage two counter-productive wars overseas, yet we can’t be bothered to support our own workers.
In ordinary times- I might be inclined to agree with you. These are not ordinary times.
Lt Nixon..
As one who lost a family member who survived the sinking of the Houston, only to
be killed in a Jap prison camp..
I don’t think so..maybe you can convince the next generation..
You know I like this article (‘course I have skin in this game)…
For all you naysayers, if we have been screwing up for so long, why is the F-series the best selling vehicle in the US…again?