Here is proof that the proposed “bailout” of General Motors
is just another shibboleth for using the American taxpayer to
finance his own economic disfranchisement:
GM will be given billions of taxpayer dollars, courtesy of
President Obama and his “car czar” — and encouraged to use this
money to build new plants (and create new jobs) not here in the
USA but in countries like China and Mexico.
GM’s “restructuring plan” — the details of which are just
beginning to leak out — projects an increase of almost 10
percent in overseas production (23.5 percent vs. the current 15.5
percent) over the next four years, with more to come later.
These cars (more than 730,000 of them annually by 2014) will be
American-brand cars in name only. They will be built entirely in
foreign companies using low-cost foreign labor.
Only the financing will be “made in the USA.”
Arguably, a Honda built in Ohio by U.S. workers is more
domestic than the legions of Chinese-built Buicks that
will soon be heading our way.
United Auto Workers Legislative Director Alan Reuther notes: “The
overall number of vehicles GM will be importing in 2014 [under
the terms of the restructuring plan] represents the production of
four assembly plants, the same number that GM plans to close in
the United States.”
The effrontery is startling.
It’s bad enough that whole swaths of our industrial manufacturing
infrastructure has already been dismantled and sent overseas in
order to leverage the absolute highest possible profit margin out
of finished goods — the true cost of which never
includes the vanished jobs and decreased buying power of American
workers. But it’s absolutely egregious that failed multinationals
like GM are now demanding handouts in order to force the
American worker to directly subsidize the process.
How, it might be asked, will Americans living on 35-hour
no-benefits service sector workweeks at $8 per hour be able to
afford the imported Buicks and Chevys whose assembly they’ll be
forced to help finance?
Ross Perot’s 1990s-era prediction about a “giant sucking sound”
— much derided at the time — has become an unmistakable
reality. Who has benefited from the past 20 years of labor
arbitrage — the proper name for “free trade”?
GM is broke because American consumers are broke. And they are
broke, to a great extent, because their incomes have been
downsized and outsourced on the bloody altar of free trade —
arguably the greatest con of the past 50 years.
There is in fact nothing “free” about “trade” with
unfree nations like China — authoritarian gulags where
workers are interchangeable drones, easily discarded and
desperately willing (and often forced) to pull 12 hour
shifts in return for a subsistence income. The profits earned
thereby may add another million to a CEO’s annual compensation
package but serves to further degrade the standard of living of
the average American.
This benefits no one — including, ultimately, even the
uber-rich.
Turning the American working and middle classes into economically
ruined peons forced to “compete” with the masses of China, India
and Mexico will not bring the quality of life of the average
Chinese, Indian or Mexican up to American standards. It will,
however, reduce the American standard of living.
This is what we want? This is what we are being forced
by the IRS and the federal government to bankroll?
If GM is not going to invest in America, why should America
invest in GM?
It’s a fair question — and one that deserves an answer from both
General Motors and President Obama.
