[BRIGADE] PJB: The Toyota Republicans
Published: Tue, 12/16/08
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For the Cause - Linda
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The Toyota Republicans
By Patrick J. Buchanan
December 16, 2008
"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."
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/12/pjb-the-toyota-republicans/