Again from that one discussion board whereby the writer rightly says this crisis is inextricably tied to the credit meltdown:
Nobody's buying Hondas or Toyotas these days, either.
Yes, our automakers have some culpability for their current plight. But not totally, and PARTICULARLY not GM. GM tried to move the American auto industry into the 21st century back in the early '60s with some really innovative automobiles, led by the Corvair but also including the Nova and the Pontiac Tempest. Ralph Nader made his name killing off the most innovative of the bunch, the Corvair, a truly fine car, the best subcompact in the world at that time and one of the finest handling off-the-shelf cars ever available in the United States until just recently, and his efforts set back American compact car technology thirty years and allowed Japan to eat our automotive lunch.
A friend of mine had a Corvair and an early Toyota Corona. The Corvair, although five years older, was superior in every way except oil consumption, and when we had a choice we took the Corvair because it was so much more fun and more pleasant to drive. We didn't yet have the hang of aluminum block engines at that time, a problem that also doomed the Vega, an car that was inferior to the Corvair in many ways. The Corona, a '68, was absolutely HORRIBLE, particularly its handling, a problem Toyota didn't solve until 1974.
We also legislatively mandated emissions reduction before the technology existed to accomplish the goals set in the legislation. I do not argue that such legislation was not badly needed at the time, nor do I maintain that American automaker resistance to improvements was a factor in this, but anybody who bought a 1974 American car was left with a great reluctance ever to buy any similar car again. The onset of catalytic converters then made things right, but the public relations damage had been done. And still American technology lagged behind Japan's when it came to smaller cars.
But we also mandated a lot of very weird safety regulations, particularly impacting the design of automotive interiors and adversely affecting comfort. This chased a lot of automakers, particularly those from France and Italy, out of America, and made American cars a lot more dorky compared to their German and Japanese counterparts. Remember, Japanese cars have at their bases the reverse-engineering of German designs, just like Nikons were initially reverse-engineered Leicas. Honda aped BMW, even down to some design specifics like the dashboards. Mazda got its start with the German firm NSU. Toyotas began to negotiate curves when they copied Mercedes suspension designs.
But the rise of SUVs is a relatively recent phenomenon and has resulted largely from marketing. This marketing was augmented in recent years by particularly strange Bush administration policies offering HUGE tax breaks to the purchasers of the biggest and most inefficient SUVs, breaks that, unlike the credits for hybrid cars, are not capped and terminated after the sale of a certain number of units (which Honda and Toyota have already exceeded). It isn't that long ago that "jeeps," which is what we used to call SUVs similarly to the way we call all facial tissues "kleenex" no matter who actually made them, were uncommon and were generally bought only by people who had need for off-road capabilities. Nowadays I doubt that more than 10% of SUVs have ever even been on DIRT roads, much less off-road.
But again, as far as I know, the only automaker actually doing well right now is the AMG subsidiary of Mercedes Benz, because one thing about Great Depressions is that the rich not only still have theirs, they've got yours, too.
But foreign governments ARE rescuing their auto industries, and providing other ongoing advantages to their carmakers as well, most notably their national health care systems that take away from their manufacturers that huge burden that our own industries are expected to bear. Health care alone adds an estimated $1,200 to the price of each American car.
You may have noticed that the chief players obstructing the bailout are from Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina, all home to recently opened assembly plants owned by foreign car companies including Mercedes Benz, Hyundai, BMW, Toyota, Honda and others, whose home countries are heavily subsidizing their carmakers and bailing them out of their current woes with huge infusions of cash. This, my friends, is the very essence of anti-competitive practice, and to have lawmakers from those states carrying out a vendetta against the UAW at the expense of literally MILLIONS of American jobs angers and sickens me.
They bandy about this "$74.00/hr." figure implying that it represents compensation to auto workers. Bullshit! That wildly-inflated figure includes retirement costs for CURRENT retirees no longer working, health care for current workers and retirees, and every other benefit negotiated between the carmakers and the unions. They compare this with a claim of "21.00/hr." average hourly rate for workers at foreign car assembly plants, conveniently ignoring the fact that the retiree population for a plant that only opened in the last decade is far smaller than for the century-old American automakers, and that the plants are largely involved in the mere assembly of foreign-manufactured parts, with far fewer of the higher-paid design and high-tech machine work required to initially make those parts. There are VERY few workers in the UAW earning $148K/yr., even when all their benefits are added into their wages. Furthermore, I doubt that most workers at the MB plant in Alabama are making less than $42K, even in salary alone. The compensation comparison made by Shelby, Corker and others is totally BOGUS.
If it were only car quality at issue, then Honda and Toyota would still be doing well. It is not. New automobile sales depend on the availability of credit, and that availability has largely been curtailed in recent months. American automakers were also hurt badly by $4.20/gal. gasoline last summer, but GM in particular is already deep into the process of retooling for greater fuel efficiency, led by the Volt (which will have an EPA rating over 100 mpg) but including many other models, including the world-class Chevy Malibu. They have also greatly improved their quality, now matching the best from Germany and Japan. It is unfair to blame current management for their plight, a plight shared by every automaker throughout the world.
Foreign carmakers, alas, do not have to deal with obstructionist Republican senators. It will be such a shame if we let these few small-minded, evil-intentioned men destroy the very industry that has played the greatest role to make America a world power. We must not send our automakers into bankruptcy, and we must not allow these rightwing jerks to destroy the UAW.
People should be protesting in the streets over these bastards' actions.
Do you think we are going to get anything passed with these bastards being able to filibuster? No, but they sure are going to make noise about "corruption in Illinois," the latest of which actually began as a Republican plot.
I thought I'd never live to see the day Bush would do something right as trying to save the American auto industry. And no doubt many of his advisers believe as Pat Buchanan does that if the GOP ruins the car industry in this country, their party is FINISHED.
Note asshole Corker is from Tennessee, which has foreign-owned auto plants. There is no doubt these bastards are after the unions.
These legislators' careers should be over.
The ongoing debate over the auto bailout has demonstrated the conspiracy of the automakers, the two big business parties and the UAW against the autoworkers. All insist that workers must pay for a crisis that they did not cause, in order to restore the auto companies to profitability so they can once again be a lucrative source of income for corporate executives and big investors who are responsible for the financial catastrophe.
Workers must reject this whole reactionary framework. The alternative to bankruptcy is not never-ending wage and benefit cuts, which do nothing to preserve jobs in any case. Rather, autoworkers must mobilize their independent strength based on an entirely new strategy. The auto companies and the banking system must be taken out of the hands of the wealthy and placed under the democratic control of working people themselves. This requires the building of a mass political party of the working class, based on a socialist and internationalist program, in order to fight for a workers’ government and genuine democratic control over all economic decisions.
American workers being what they are, and the economy being in such horrid shape, won't riot, but if there was ever a justification, this is it.
The UAW needs to nail these southern senators to the wall.The senators are all on the take from foreign automakers, and they are acting like assholes.
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