President Obama's Weekly Address - October 13, 2012

One Million American Jobs Saved and a Stronger American Auto Industry

President Obama's Weekly Address - March 3, 2012

Taking Control of Our Energy Future

WWPRD? - What Would President Romney Do?

Had it been up to Mitt Romney, we would no longer have an American auto industry. Here's what he wrote in his New York Times op-ed back in November of 2008, two months before President Obama took office:

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed...

...A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs...

...In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.

Seal their fate with a "bailout check." "...it's demise will be virtually guaranteed." The Bain way, apparently. Maybe the only way Romney knows. Take over a company, bankrupt it and reap the profits.

So here we are, a little over three years later, and GM is back on top as the world's top auto manufacturer. So of course, you'd expect Mitt would think that perhaps even if the government didn't go about it the right way in his opinion, at least a million plus jobs were saved and Detroit is alive again. ...Nope. He doubled down.

The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business. The equally indisputable bad news is that all the defects in President Obama's management of the American economy are evident in what he did.

Instead of doing the right thing and standing up to union bosses, Obama rewarded them.

Blame the workers. Nice going, Mitt. Never mind that the UAW took significant cuts, in pay, benefits and pension to keep their jobs and keep the auto industry alive in this country.

Now, the US Treasury still owns about one-third of GM's stock and is holding off on selling it until it can at the very least, minimize losses. But what would Mitt Romney do?

The Obama administration needs to act now to divest itself of its ownership position in GM.

The shares need to be sold in a responsible fashion and the proceeds turned over to the nation's taxpayers.

Yes, if Mitt Romney were President, he would sell the shares of GM... at a massive loss.

Taxpayers have recovered roughly half of the government’s $49.5 billion investment in GM through stock sales and loan repayments.

To break even on the GM bailout, the Treasury Department would have to sell its remaining one-third stake in the company for roughly $53 a share. GM stock is trading at about half that amount, so the government would lose about $14 billion on the deal if those shares were sold today.

Something tells me that unless Ronmey is dealing in vulture capitalism, he really has no idea what he's doing.

GOP Criticizes Eastwood Pro-Detroit Ad

Why do Republicans hate America? How is it possible that right wing ideologues would criticize an ad which touts the comeback of the American auto industry and sees a path toward economic prosperity on the horizon?

"There is no spin in that ad. On this I am certain," [Clint] Eastwood said in a statement to Fox News. "I am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama. It was meant to be a message about job growth and the spirit of America. I think all politicians will agree with it. ... If Obama or any other politician wants to run with the spirit of that ad, go for it."

Exactly right, Clint. This is about an entire industry, and the people who work in it, scratching and clawing its way back from the dead.

Whether you are pro auto "bailout" or not (and I use the word 'bailout' loosely since it was actually a loan which has been mostly paid back despite the whining lies of Karl Rove), how do you criticize the fact, THE FACT, that the American auto industry was saved and is now back on top due to the loans to keep them afloat while they reorganized and restructured? Not to mention a minimum of one million jobs saved because of it.

For all the shouts and fist shaking of the GOP against President Obama and what they deem to be worse off than we were three years ago, despite proof to the contrary, it is amazing to me that anyone would claim to be pro-America, yet rail against a commercial touting the resurgence of the American auto industry and the resurrection of a major American city... all because they're rather scorch the earth than run against their preposterous narrative for the sake of winning back the White House. And these are the chest thumping America lovers?

Let's not forget that had it been left up to Mitt Romney, the US auto industry would no longer exist.

Clint Made My Day

POSTED BY JHW22

In all the discussions of the Clint Eastwood Chrysler "Halftime in America" ad, all the pundits keeps leaving out the fact that Clint is a big-time Republican. The fact that he did that ad, supporting Obama's policy on the auto bailout, and mimicking Obama's messaging from the State of the Union on "teamwork", says a lot. It says that some Republicans are ready to bring their party back from the fringes and work with the President for a better future. More of that sanity, please.

President Obama's Weekly Address - June 4, 2011

Growing Manufacturing with the Auto Industry Turnaround

President Obama's Weekly Address - May 28, 2011

Brought to you by Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden on the American Auto Comeback

T-Paw's Running

Here's his awesome announcement video. Wake me when it's over.

Zzzzzzz... huh, what? Oh, right. Tim Pawlenty is throwing his hat into the ring.

And it looks like he's running on the "Insult Obama" platform with doozies like, "President Obama doesn't have the courage to face our problems" (0:50 mark) and "We're gonna have to do more than give fancy speeches. We've had three years of that and it's not working." (1:40 mark). 

I suppose T-Paw has fallen asleep to the sound of his own voice and missed the saving of about a million plus jobs with the auto loan that saved the American auto industry, which by the way, now has GM in the black. Or the turn around in job creation after President Obama took office. It's so easy to criticize when you're an armchair quarterback who said nothing during the ten years it took to get into this mess, but expect to he pulled out of it in two and a half years.

And hey, no need to thank President Obama for the $4 billion Minnesota received in stimulus funds, right T-Paw? That didn't help your state economy at all, did it? Oh wait, it did. But you go ahead and join the list of non-contenders this year. We'll be watching.

About Last Night...

Before last night's election, all the polls showed that Republican members of Congress had a lower approval rating than Democratic members. Polls showed that more people trusted President Obama to handle the economy better than Republicans. But due to the frustratingly stagnant economy and desperate people with no jobs, when asked who they were leaning towards on Election Day, they would inevitably say the Republicans. That's called cognitive dissonance. But voting against your best interests is nothing new.

And I'm not going to try to sugarcoat the election by saying it wasn't huge for the GOP, even though some of my colleagues may disagree. Before last night the Democrats controlled 255 House seats, the GOP 178. Starting January 20th, currently the Republicans are at 239 seats to 185 for the Democrats and counting. Losing seats is a dent. Losing the majority by 5-10 seats hurts. Losing by 56 and counting is big.

Now, do I believe the current spin that the results last night are due to President Obama's policies? Absolutely not. This is about Americans being fickle bitches and expecting an economic freefall to stop on a dime. This is about not having the patience or not having the comprehension to understand what it takes to turn the tide. After eight years of mismanagement, some say even 30 years of Reaganomics, how is it even fathomable to think it can all be changed in 21 months?  So of course, the political party of the president in power is going to pay in the midterm elections. It's happened before (FDR, Truman, Reagan, Clinton) and it'll happen again.

So should've priorities shifted to economic growth and job creation? Perhaps, although a bigger stimulus was rejected by the GOP and weakened by the insistence of including tax cuts. But because we haven't completely crawled out of the biggest recession since the Great Depression, that's not to say that health care reform, credit card reform, financial reform, fair pay acts, the stimulus (a third of which were tax cuts) and a myriad of other policies enacted by the Obama administration hasn't helped American citizens.

As the President said today, you have to separate the policies that were enacted from the emergency spending that was necessary to stop economic collapse. Had they not bailed out the auto industry another million jobs could have been lost.  Had they not continued the TARP policies of the Bush administration (and tweaked them to make the banks accountable while returning a profit) the bank collapse could have led to a global financial meltdown. Had they not passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it's possible we'd be another couple of million jobs in the hole.

So while it was a tough loss yesterday, let's keep things in perspective. Democrats still run The White House and the Senate, and with everything needing 60 votes to proceed in that chamber, we're basically in the same shape we were before. Chances are that just like the Senate is sitting on 400 pieces of legislation because of the Republican filibuster gridlock these last two years, things will now slow down in the House as well.

So okay, Republicans. Show us what you've got. You can't be the Party of No anymore and hide in the shadows. You're out in front now. And here comes the hard part. You're going to have to work now instead of sitting back with arms folded and holding your breath because it wasn't advantageous to your party. Time to work. Alas, time to actually read some bills instead of tossing them around as stage props. Boy, so many pages!

President Obama's Weekly Address - July 31, 2010

Good News on Autos, Obstruction on Small Business

President Obama's Weekly Address - April 24, 2010

Good News from the Auto Industry

Institutional Memory

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

The proprietor -- Mr. The Broadway Carl -- and I had the following exchange in the comments to my previous post:

Broadway Carl said...

Hey Joe,

I'm not exactly sure why you're riled up about this considering that bailout based on a feasable restructuring plan was always on the table.

"...the UAW needs to swap equity in the companies for 50 percent of the companies' cash contributions into a union-run trust fund for retiree health care. GM owes roughly $20 billion to its trust, while Chrysler owes $10.6 billion."

I get the fact that this sounds like a raw deal, but if I'm reading this corectly, 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

March 30, 2009 7:09:00 PM EDT


Armadillo Hussein Joe said...

I understand that all of these things have been on the table from the beginning, and frankly, apart from seeing my union brothers and sisters taken care of in a way that strengthens the labor movement -- not vice versa -- my love for trains and a rail transportation network over cars makes me hope Obama forces them to invest their vast resources into a new passenger and freight rail system.

I guess it has more to do with the perceived double standard. I file this one under the "Punch a DFH in the Face" strategy for street cred with The Villagers. He should be going for the "Pitchforks & Torches" strategy, but The Villagers don't trust anyone who wants to punch a banker in the face.

I think Obama may be going for his "Sister Souljah" moment, which was ugly and despicable when Clinton did it and its ugly and despicable now.

March 30, 2009 9:46:00 PM EDT


Broadway Carl said...

Well, I'm wondering what the response would have been had the government handed yet another truck full of money to GM or Chrysler without adhering to the stipulations set forth a few months ago, or just let them go bankrupt.

I'm guessing it's more a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't moment.

March 30, 2009 11:13:00 PM EDT

I bring this exchange out into the open to highlight the fact that I wasn't terribly clear in writing the "Protected Class" post in what I meant in raising objections to the different treatment of the automakers versus Wall Street.

So let me be clear now.

Whole regions of our vast nation, and not insignificant chunks of our overall economy besides, all depend on automobile manufacturing. Some of it is unionized, U.S.-based and predominantly located in the so-called Rust Belt (the great-great-grandparents of whom remained collectively loyal to the United States) and some of it is non-union, Germany & Japan-based and located mostly in Dixie (the great-great-grandparents of whom committed treason against the United States in defense of human chattel slavery). We fought a couple of wars in the 1940's and the 1860's and the good guys supposedly won on both occasions, though it is curious to me that the losers of both conflicts collude now to undermine one of the pillars of strength that girded the American Experiment in the 20th Century: a healthy, unionized Middle Class.

Now, when we talk about manufacturing in the United States, we don't really do much of it anymore. In fact, as a nation, we don't make much of anything anymore except movies and otherwise just dream up new technology for people in other countries to go and build and sell back to us. But our large, complicated world requires technology to run and we have been steadily losing the ability to stay ahead of the curve not at the leading edge, where all the coffee-house-dwelling super-creative types dream up iPods and printable solar cells, but down in the boring, gut-level nuts-and-bolts where engineers with horn-rimmed glasses and pocket-protectors along with a skilled workforce with calloused hands really do the scut work of making things. It's boring and brain-deadening and at the end of the day not nearly as fun as sitting around in a Starbucks with your laptop riffing with friends about what kind of rendering to use in generating the texture-mapping for the skin on the monsters in the next level of your video game you hope to sell. Unfortunately, we can't become a nation of aspiring video-game programmers serving each other coffee and hamburgers in the meantime. This is the unsustainable tail end of the magical thinking embedded in the silly service economy we heard so much about in the 1990's: a strong economy must have some underlying manufacturing base, period.

Because, over time, the accumulating value of institutional memory is the most vaulable asset any collection of people have, whether a small company, a whole industry or an entire nation. Indeed, it is the thing that makes us human, the passing on of knowledge, and -- relatively speaking -- we have been getting stupider as a country for quite a long time. I point to the continued existence of the GOP as my Exhibit A. The reasons for this turn of events are complicated and not entirely the result of the natural evolution of people and institutions; I'd argue that it has been somewhat by design, though that is another blog post for another time. For now, I point to another industry where we've been getting collectively stupider and it will come back to bite us on the ass in next few decades: farming.

One of the many disastrous consequences of our petroleum-intensive energy regimen these last sixty years has been the rise of industrial farming. Write all the glowing paens to the alleviation of hunger you want about the vast yields of industrialized farming, the net result has been that fewer and fewer people in this country actually know how to farm anything. This is not necessarily a problem when you have fleets of fossil fuel-burning trucks whizzing back and forth across the continent delivering food into our sprawling metropolitan areas, but as petroleum gets more expensive and our food-delivery network grinds to a halt, eating locally will become less a boutique lifestyle choice and will instead be forced upon us by outside events. Who will grow our food? Who, apart from a few farmers in the Upper Midwest and perhaps in Pennsylvania, actually know how to grow food on the small and sustainable scale that will be demanded by a world struggling with more expensive fossil fuels?

Which brings me back around to Obama's treatment of the auto manufacturers. In a world where more expensive fossil fuels discourage a Happy Motoring lifestyle, cars will be less in demand. However, the mechanical and engineering know-how to manipulate metal and rubber and glass into functioning machines, and the bureaucratic integration required to keep it all together and running smoothly, takes years to pull together and make whole and it doesn't take very long for it all to dissipate once pulled apart, for the institutional know-how to simply evaporate. It is much easier to make an existing enterprise change course (GM-built tanks & Ford-built airplanes in World War 2 come to mind) than to try to resurrect them or start from scratch.

What I am advocating here is not the survival of General Motors and Chrysler as car makers, but as machine-making entities that can become the kernel of a new industrial concern in the United States -- trains: light & heavy, passenger & freight, street-level omnibus & inter-regional bullet train. Thus far, Obama's rhetoric and the proposed policies of his administration seem to treat them and their Wall Street counterparts as co-equal intitutions, simply as widget-making financial entities that employ some people who do things, which is fine for an economic theory-class in business school but is disastrous as a basis for erecting public policy. Because the folks employed by one are collectively less politically connected, they get all the tough-love rhetoric and the other, more-connected group gets the kid-glove wrist-slap. It is a double-standard, but worse than that it signals to everyone from the highest-flying investor in lower Manhattan to the lowliest bolt-sorter on an assembly line in Michigan where the government's priorties lie.

My problem with all of it is that the rhetoric coming from the Obama Administration signals that the money of the already wealthy is more important and more worthy of protection than the livelihood of a whole sector of the nation's economy, one that I believe is indespenible in the coming years as we try to fix what is fundmentally broken in our economy.

I hope that makes it clearer. Thoughts?

Protected Class

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

So, I'm just a bitter, dim-witted populist who don't much cotton to all that high-finance tomfoolery too good, but it seems to me that Obama's push to squeeze the automakers (who are keeping blue-collar union jobs and manufacturing of actual tangible goods alive in these United States) and NOT the Wall Street Masters of the Universe (who spin money castles in the air and drive up real estate prices for the rest of us) is a move to once more protect the interests of the wealthy ruling elite at the expense of the rest of us. Obama seems to be choosing sides in the on-going class war in this country, and it isn't the one a majority of Americans voted for when they pulled a lever for Barack Obama.

A direct quote from our president today:

"If they're not willing to make the changes and the restructurings that are necessary, then I'm not willing to have taxpayer money chase after bad money."

Yeah, he's talking about GM and Chrysler, not AIG and Citigroup. Thanks for the tough love, Big O, but that ship has already sailed. A few billion to help hundreds of thousands of financially struggling working class Americans involved in the last large-scale manufacturing concern in the United States versus hundreds of billions to keep a few hundred already wealthy, sociopathic, self-styled cowboys rolling in it (not all of them U.S. citizens, BTW) is an insult to the people who put you in office.

We know who really runs this country, and it sure ain't the people who voted for Obama. He reveals himself to be fully at the mercy of the monied class -- societal changes will only go as far as they allow and they are already getting nervous -- however much we may not want him to be or wish he wasn't. A revolution is coming and the ruling class is doing everything exactly wrong in trying to prevent it.

Like I said a couple of days ago, our ruling class should be more afraid of us. The overlords are so insulated in their gated communities and have been for such a long time that they see this kind of treatment as their birthright. They really do think this country, all of it -- this country's government, its Treasury, its natural resources, its people -- all belongs to them.

They should be more afraid of us.

(H/T Susie Madrak, C&L)

The GOP Obstructionism Continues

You can talk about Rod Blagojevich all you want. You can bring up Tony Rezko and the corrupt Chicago political system until Mrs. O'Leary's cow comes home. But after last night, the Republicans in the US Senate have proved once again that they are the armpit, or should I say the asshole, of American politics.

After the House voted to compromise their bill in an attempt to help out the auto industry with a $14 billion bridge loan with White House backing, the bill failed to come to a vote in the Senate 52-35, eight votes short.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader and Incredible Mr. Limpet of the Republican party said, “The administration negotiated in good faith with the Democratic majority a proposal that was simply unacceptable to the vast majority of our side because we thought it frankly wouldn’t work.” You got that? The Democrats and the White House were on board, but most Senate Republicans didn't think it would work. Now all of a sudden, they're economic experts.

And it's all because they think that the workers who actually make the product are making too much money.

The group came close to agreement, but it stalled over the UAW's refusal to agree to wage cuts before their current contract expires in 2011. Republicans, in turn, balked at giving the automakers federal aid.

The double standard is astonishing. A $700 BILLION bailout for financial institutions that caused the mess we're in was a no brainer, but a $14 billion bridge loan (2% of the TARP bailout that the Treasury Department has been frittering away with no discernable plan) for the continued survival of 3 million blue collar jobs? Well that is just too much.

How many of those douchebags in the Senate complained about the salaries of the bankers and the stock brokers and the CEO's when they forked over 700 billion taxpayer dollars? No one batted an eye. But those factory workers? Fuck them, they're the reason the auto industry is in this debacle, right? They make the decisions on which cars to manufacture, what the designs should be. They are the ones who said, "Fuck fuel economy, I want a Dodge Ram HEMI!"

The white collar/blue collar discrimination in this country just amazes me. There's a special place in hell for the obstructionist fuckwads in the Senate. And I hope they get there sooner than later.

UPDATE (8:05pm):

NY TIMES: President Bush and the Treasury Department signaled on Friday that they would consider dipping into the $700 billion bailout program for financial institutions to aid the Big Three car companies, after Republican senators refused to support a compromise proposal to rescue the automakers.
“Under normal economic conditions we would prefer that markets determine the ultimate fate of private firms,” Dana Perino, Mr. Bush’s spokeswoman, said in a carefully nuanced statement released minutes before the financial markets opened in New York. “However, given the current weakened state of the U.S. economy, we will consider other options if necessary — including use of the TARP program — to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers.”

Also, MSNBC's Countdown just reported that talking points for Republicans in the Senate were issued to use the auto bailout as a union busting opportunity. The internal GOP memo, called "Action Alert," states: "...Senators Ensign, Shelby, Coburn and DeMint... The message they want us to deliver is: This is the Demnocrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election... Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor... If we can hold the Republicans, we can beat this."

So basically, as I said before, fuck the American economy, fuck 3 million jobs and double digit unemployment. We have the opportunity to bust the United Auto Workers Union, so why not?