Winning Progressive

Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum and Mitt “Dog on Car” Romney spent Tuesday battling in the Michigan GOP Presidential primary election, which Romney ended up narrowly winning.  At the same time, President Obama spent his day reminding the American people how he saved more than 1 million jobs by rescuing the U.S. auto industry.  Few issues make clearer the distinction between President Obama and the Republican Presidential wannabees.

When President Obama took office in January 2009, the U.S. auto industry (along with most of the rest of our economy) was in free fall.  More than 400,000 auto industry jobs had been lost in the previous year and at least two of the Big 3 – GM and Chrysler – were on the brink of running out of money.  In October 2008, President W. Bush agreed, after initial opposition, directed $17.4 billion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to bridge loans for GM and Chrysler.  But far more action was needed and soon after taking office, President Obama offered the two auto companies substantial additional loans in exchange for agreeing to fundamentally restructure their businesses.  Through such restructuring, all of the relevant stakeholders – workers, creditors, shareholders, and executives – made significant sacrifices.

But both companies have emerged from the process and are now thriving again. More than 1 million jobs were saved due to the rescue, and the auto industry has added 200,000 jobs since June 2009.  All of the Big 3 were profitable in 2011 for the first time in seven years, and GM and Chrysler’s sales increased  14 and 26 percent, respectively, last year.  As the companies have recovered, the United Auto Workers have negotiated bonuses, improved profit sharing, and preservation of health care and pension benefits for auto industry workers.  And a strong argument can be made that if GM and Chrysler has been allowed to fail, their suppliers would have also failed, thereby undermining the third US automaker, Ford.

The GOP, of course, vehemently opposed the auto industry rescue.  At the time, Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed in the New York Times opposing the rescue, and since then he has provided a contradictory morass of excuses for why he opposed President Obama’s auto industry rescue.  Romney’s latest excuse is, essentially, that the rescue treated the industry’s unionized workers too well, which is simply false as the workers agreed to concessions on pay, health benefits, vacations, job security, and work rules.  Romney’s primary competitor, Rick Santorum, similarly opposed the auto industry rescue.

While Santorum and Romney were struggling to get Michigan Republicans (and, in Santorum’s case, Michigan Democrats also) out to the polls, President Obama was reminding everyone how successful the auto industry rescue had been.  Below is the video of President Obama’s stemwinder of a speech to the United Auto Workers’ Annual Conference.  It is well worth your time to watch the entire thing, but here is an excerpt that well-illustrates the competing visions that are at stake in the November 2012 elections.

Let me tell you, I keep on hearing these same folks talk about values all the time.  You want to talk about values?  Hard work — that’s a value.  Looking out for one another — that’s a value.  The idea that we’re all in it together, and I’m my brother’s keeper and sister’s keeper — that’s a value.

They’re out there talking about you like you’re some special interest that needs to be beaten down.  Since when are hardworking men and women who are putting in a hard day’s work every day — since when are they special interests?  Since when is the idea that we look out for one another a bad thing?

I remember my old friend, Ted Kennedy — he used to say, what is it about working men and women they find so offensive? This notion that we should have let the auto industry die, that we should pursue anti-worker policies in the hopes that unions like yours will buckle and unravel -– that’s part of that same old “you are on your own” philosophy that says we should just leave everybody to fend for themselves; let the most powerful do whatever they please.  They think the best way to boost the economy is to roll back the reforms we put into place to prevent another crisis, to let Wall Street write the rules again.

They think the best way to help families afford health care is to roll back the reforms we passed that’s already lowering costs for millions of Americans. They want to go back to the days when insurance companies could deny your coverage or jack up your rates whenever and however they pleased. They think we should keep cutting taxes for those at the very top, for people like me, even though we don’t need it, just so they can keep paying lower tax rates than their secretaries.

Well, let me tell you something.  Not to put too fine a point on it — they’re wrong.  They are wrong.  That’s the philosophy that got us into this mess.  We can’t afford to go back to it.  Not now.

. . . . .

We’re fighting for an economy where everybody gets a fair shot, where everybody does their fair share, where everybody plays by the same set of rules.  We’re not going to go back to an economy that’s all about outsourcing and bad debt and phony profits.  We’re fighting for an economy that’s built to last, that’s built on things like education and energy and manufacturing.  Making things, not just buying things — making things that the rest of the world wants to buy.  And restoring the values that made this country great:  hard work and fair play, the chance to make it if you really try, the responsibility to reach back and help somebody else make it, too — not just you.  That’s who we are.  That’s what we believe in.

. . . . .

America is not just looking out for yourself.  It’s not just about greed.  It’s not just about trying to climb to the very top and keep everybody else down.  When our assembly lines grind to a halt, we work together and we get them going again.  When somebody else falters, we try to give them a hand up, because we know we’re all in it together.

I got my start standing with working folks who’d lost their jobs, folks who had lost their hope because the steel plants had closed down.  I didn’t like the idea that they didn’t have anybody fighting for them.  The same reason I got into this business is the same reason I’m here today.  I’m driven by that same belief that everybody — everybody — should deserve a chance

So I promise you this:  As long as you’ve got an ounce of fight left in you, I’ll have a ton of fight left in me.  We’re going to keep on fighting to make our economy stronger; to put our friends and neighbors back to work faster; to give our children even more opportunity; to make sure that the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth.

Tags: auto industry rescue, Big 3, Chrysler, GM, Michigan, Mitt Romney, Obama Administration, President Obama, Rick Santorum, United Auto Workers

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at 12:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.