Need more proof that the refusal to loan money (as opposed to giving it to Wall Street) is steeped in union busting and that the “they don’t make good cars” line is all rhetoric? Well, all you have to do is look at November’s auto sales numbers, where you see that U.S. auto sales sink to worst level since 1982.
Every major automaker reported a year-over-year sales decline of more than 30 percent when they released their results Tuesday. The Detroit carmakers were among the worst hit, with GM’s U.S. sales falling 41 percent and Chrysler LLC’s dropping 47 percent.
Their overseas rivals posted abysmal results as well. Toyota’s sales tumbled 34 percent, while Nissan’s dropped 42 percent and Honda’s fell 32 percent.
OK, so are they all making bad cars and do they all have bad business practices now? I mean the Toyota Prius has mentioned as the “gold standard” that every auto dealer is supposed to be held to now (besides being union free), and yet their sales are down 34%.
Yet the dissection of the automakers continues on, even though they are asking for lines of credit and not a flat out bailout, and while the automakers have already offered strings and conditions not even considered for the Wall Street Bail out,
Mulally and Wagoner both said they’d work for $1 a year — something Chrysler’s plan said Nardelli already does — if their firms took any government loan money. Ford offered to cancel management bonuses and salaried employees’ merit raises next year, and GM said it would slash top executives’ pay.
No, that is still not enough for Congressional leaders, who are still fixated (as many common people are as well) in somehow thinking this is relegated to only a Detroit problem. I mean, I guess they forget that GM is the leading automaker in the world when you hear,
Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said the automakers still need to prove they can survive and be profitable. “If these companies are asking for taxpayer dollars, they must convince Congress that they are going to shape up and change their ways,” Dodd said in a statement.
So, what, we don’t want GM to be the largest auto manufacturer in the world? I know much has been said about the Big Three making too many big cars, but stop a second and look around. How many SUVs do you see on the road? Let us be honest for a second, shall we? The SUV became the station wagon of the 21st century. They were big and roomy enough for status seekers who needed room for both their briefcase and racquetball and gym bags in the back, they stored enough for the mom and dads that didn’t want the “stigma” of driving a mini-van, they became the most popular class of car in this country. That is what people where buying, so that is what they were making. Look around. How come we don’t see the Hyundai Excel any longer? Do you remember how many Chevettes or Pontiac T-1000′s were on the road? Dodge Omni? How about the catastrophic failures of the Yugo? Why did Hyundai stop making the small, efficient Excel? Was anybody knocking down the door to buy the super highly gas efficient,”practical car” Geo Metro? Going back, how about the Renault LeCar? How about Romney’s highly touted AMC cars, the Pacer and the Gremlin?
You can bash automakers all you want for their lobbying efforts to not have fuel efficiency standards raised, and you won’t hear a peep out of me. They are a major failure in this area (but that doesn’t stick with Detroit, as the foreign car execs are in on this as well). You can question the logic that GM has behind killing the original electric car (but again, sales were not there for that either, but debating their logic on that is not the point), and I will fully agree with those issues. You can talk about how they tried to make disposable cars that only lasted 3 – 5 years. But that was more than 30 years ago, and they paid dearly for that mistake already, learned their lesson, and moved on, how long can we continue to beat that dead horse? You can blame them for a lot of things, but the reality is that you can’t say, is that they are in these dire straits right now, based only on their current business practices.
On top of all of this (and a point the GOP talking heads like Romney like to skip over) is if the US automakers are “saddled” with anything that the others are not, it is the fact that all of the other automakers (at least in their home countries) don’t have to provide healthcare for their workers since they receive national healthcare are a right of citizenship. Oh, but there is that pesky social medicine issue there, so it is much easier to blame the unions rather than admit that by the fact that we have a broken healthcare system in this country that this might be a problem issue, because they don’t want to open that pandora’s box.
It is time the lawmakers stopped playing games and helped the auto industry back on its feet. As they fiddle around and screw around playing political games, Toyota is poised to take over the number 1 from GM, so maybe they will get their wish and the automakers will have to change how they do business, because the landscape will have changed while the lawmakers were too busy looking to bust up the UAW. I think Rachel Maddow has the best anology of the situation when she says, “those that take a shower before work get bailed out, while those that need to take a shower after a long, hard day at work, get blamed.”
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Filed under: Congress, Failures
