PUBLIC humiliation of corporate executives is Washington’s favorite sport, but this week’s forced road trip of Detroit Three CEOs across the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes to grovel for money in DC was over the top. Perhaps that’s the price they pay for begging for public dollars.
No such humility was on display from the politicians they faced, however – even as the same hearings exposed the anti-auto agenda pursued by this Congress.
The Big Three and the United Auto Workers have certainly made plenty of mistakes. But Detroit’s troubles have been compounded by a hostile Democratic Party allied with blue-collar union bosses and green-collar environmental extremists. At a hearing Thursday, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) warned, “The cost of doing nothing is great – not only to Detroit, but to the entire US economy.” He cited “the testimony today of economists, the automakers and representatives for the workers, [that] there is a very compelling case for quick action.”
Funny: Just last summer, Casey ignored the testimony of those same experts when he joined his colleagues in burdening the industry with $85 billion in new fuel mandates – hiking fuel-mileage (so-called CAFE) standards by 40 percent.
“The energy bill passed by the Senate takes an important step forward to increase our energy, economic, and environmental security,” said the senator then. “And the CAFE-standard increase contained in the bill is long overdue.”
Such mandates are a real problem for Detroit, thanks to its uncompetitive union labor costs – 30 percent higher than non-union workers in Japanese-operated US plants – which have made it unprofitable for the Big Three to make small cars.
Yet last fall, when GM sought to negotiate a contract addressing those costs, Sen. Barack Obama joined UAW workers on a Kansas City picket line in protest of the deal. “I stand with the 73,000 United Automobile Workers who are striking General Motors,” Obama thundered. “The demands the union is fighting for – job security, the health benefits they were promised – are things that all workers should expect and that UAW members deserve.”
Now, with automakers demanding a bridge loan so they can survive until the new labor agreement takes effect in 2010, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) points to the companies’ sins of “paying their executives and their workers too much” (emphasis added).
Levin has crafted Detroit’s best chance for a federal rescue: a bipartisan plan to speed the immediate release of $25 billion in already-approved loans available from the Department of Energy.
But powerful members of his own party – green zealots like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Diane Feinstein, both Californians – stand in the way of his bill.
These blue-state politicians despise Detroit automakers as manufacturing “dinosaurs” and demand that some of the bailout money go to start-up companies like Tesla Motors in Silicon Valley that want to make electric cars. (West Cost carmakers are struggling in the same credit environment that has brought Detroit low.)
Pelosi reportedly scuttled a Levin-type deal in the House last month. Over Thanksgiving, Feinstein warned, “I do not support disadvantaging the next generation of American automobile companies in an effort to save the first generation.”
No loans for California automakers, no deal.
If Washington wants to see what ails Detroit, it’s looking at it in the mirror.
Henry Payne is a writer and editorial cartoonist for The Detroit News.
hpayne@detnews.com