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Some Ron Paul Videos

Just an update on some recent Ron Paul videos. First up we have a couple from Jon Stewart, who has given a boost of cred to both Ron Paul and himself by highlighting the coporate media’s fear of everything Ron Paul. Stewart shows once again that he earned his place as the most trusted journalist in America. Sometimes all you need is an observant nature and an unwillingness to be bought.

 

Stewart had him on again more recently. Below is the third part of the interview. The first two parts are there too, but were of less substance. Ron Paul needs to get better at explaining his positions to liberals. It isn’t that he wants to destroy all social programs and safety nets, he is just trying to get them back to a more local level.

 

 

There was also this interview on FOX, where he talks about working with the Democrats, and how compromise in the modern political sense is where you give up half of your beliefs. He instead is willing wo choose his allies issue by issue, and find common ground rather than concessions.

Leo Gerard on the Toyota Republicans

Leo Gerard is the International President of the United Steelworkers Union, the largest union in North America. He holds bachelors degrees in politics and economics.

Gerard wend on Bill Moyers Journal to discuss the future of labor under the Obama administration. Leo Gerard on the Toyota Republicans:

BILL MOYERS:What does it say to you that Obama names Congresswoman Solis, a real advocate of labor, and then he appoints as his nominates for his trade representative the former mayor of Dallas, who was a lobbyist for many of the companies that benefit from NAFTA? Seems to me that he has put two contradictory personalities and philosophies next to each other.

LEO GERARD:To be a bit facetious, I think he made one good decision and one bad decision. But it I think it goes to what he’s always told us. He wants counter-views. He wants to be able to see people debate in front of him. Then he’ll make the choice.

We really don’t end up with a full spectrum of discussion between a NAFTA supporter and a labor advocate, but the point is well taken. This is a big departure from the yes men of the Bush administration. On the state of labor and manufacturing:

BILL MOYERS:But the irony to me is that in this period of time that we’re talking about, the globalization has occurred so that capital goes looking for the cheapest labor it can find. So even if you had the card system over these years, wouldn’t capital still have gone to where it can hire the lowest paid worker? Isn’t that an economic phenomenon, not a political consequence?

LEO GERARD:No, I think it’s a political phenomenon as well as an economic phenomenon. It’s a political environment that’s created in America the ability of jobs to move offshore. If you go to Germany and you want to move a job offshore, there’s a huge economic price.

Everything that you put in from the management or excuse me from the government, all the training assistance and all that infrastructure, you got to put back into the social pot. Here we encourage them. We give them a tax break here to go overseas. And I’m proud of Barack Obama to say he’s going to put an end to that. And these Toyota Republicans that we-

BILL MOYERS:Toyota Republicans?

LEO GERARD:The Toyota Republicans that were prepared to destroy the American auto industry the couple of weeks after they were blind and deaf and dumb to giving away $700 billion that never did what it was supposed to do. They just gave them taxpayer dollars. And you know what? It didn’t do a damn thing. Hasn’t helped one worker get back to work.

BILL MOYERS:But they then turned around, as you wrote recently, and opposed the bailout of the big three in Detroit.

LEO GERARD:Yeah, those Republicans were prepared to bail out the people that showered before they went to work. But they didn’t give a damn about the people who had to shower after work.

BILL MOYERS:Let me read you what one Republican senator said during the discussion of the auto industry bailout. This is Jim DeMint of South Carolina telling Fox News, quote, “The take-home pay [of auto workers] is essentially the same. But gold-plated benefits that the unions have negotiated over the years have essentially brought the big three to the brink of bankruptcy. And they will freely admit that the American auto companies that are producing overseas are very competitive because they don’t have to operate under the union agenda.”

LEO GERARD:I think that Senator DeMint is delusional or being deliberately dishonest.

BILL MOYERS:How so?

LEO GERARD: Or absolutely uninformed. The difference is very simple on that issue. Most of the transplants have been here less than 30 years. I think in total they might have 300 retirees.

BILL MOYERS: The transplants being?

LEO GERARD:The Hyundais and Toyotas and the-

BILL MOYERS:The foreign company.

LEO GERARD: The foreign car companies that came into America in the last 30 years.

BILL MOYERS:Mainly in the South, right? Alabama, South Carolina.

LEO GERARD:Mainly in the South. Mainly given huge, huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to get there, in the billions of taxpayer dollars.

BILL MOYERS:By the states giving them subsidies to come there, right?

LEO GERARD:By the states who gave them subsidies. And lots of those subsidies were the flow of federal dollars. Then you end up and you say, okay, the auto industry and the American auto industry, the big three, have over a million retirees that they provide healthcare to. A million. They have pension funds. No one, no one that retires from the auto industry gets rich. They have a decent pension so that they can keep their home, that they can have a bit of comfort in their sort of autumn days. And these Toyota Republicans would want to see that taken away. The fact of the matter is that if we had universal healthcare in America, like most of the rest of the industrialized world, most of the rest of the world, that would not be the burden that’s put on the auto industry. People miss the huge burden on North American manufacturing in the way we provide healthcare in America. It’s a huge competitive disadvantage. I don’t blame General Motors for being decent enough to work with the union to provide healthcare to those retirees. If you ever worked on an assembly line for 25, 30, 40, 45 years or in a steel mill you’re tired when you’re at 60 years of age and 65 years of age. And when you retire, you ought to have some healthcare.

On universal health care:

BILL MOYERS:Is that why you are an advocate of universal healthcare, to take the burden off of companies?

LEO GERARD:I’m an advocate of universal healthcare for a number of reasons. Taking the burden off of employee employers and taking it out of the collective bargaining system is one. But also I think it’s the right thing to do as a human being. It’s the right thing to do as a civil society. It’s the right thing to do as a society that wants to I forget who said the comment. But we ought to be judged by what we do for the weakest among us.

BILL MOYERS:I know that you would like to see the Obama administration start to rebuild our manufacturing base. But what gives you hope that we can resurrect the manufacturing base in this country?

LEO GERARD:I think that we have to go back to a dialogue. And I met with some CEOs yesterday to talk to them about whether they want to get in that fight. We’d have to go back to a dialogue in America that understands that the way you really create wealth in America is by making things that people want to buy, not by creating asset bubbles and credit crunches and that kind of stuff, which has been our experience for the last 40 years.

BILL MOYERS:What do you think America can manufacture now that consumers want and that the world wants?

LEO GERARD:I think we can manufacture cars. And I think that if we had the right focus and we took the healthcare burden off not just the auto industry, all industry in America, the way the rest of the world does, that would increase our global competitiveness. I think if we enforced our trade laws so that, and by the way, when we compete with China, most the time we’re competing against the government, not against the country. So we need to enforce our trade laws. And we need to look at green jobs. We need to look at solar energy. We need to look at fixing our energy grid. We need to retrofit our public buildings. We’ve got kids that are going into buildings that are using air handling systems from the ’40s and ’30s. We need to retrofit our courthouses and our city halls. We need to fix the glass in our buildings so that they’re energy efficient. And we need to do that using American workers and American products.

An Interesting take on things. Gerard obviously is on the job and towing the union line. I’ve got no hope that we can unionize our way out of our manufacturing crisis, quite the opposite, but the concept of government health care as neo-protectionism is an interesting one. One of my problems with tariffs as protectionism, is that over time, as the companies get complacent, tariffs become subsidies, and eventually bailouts by another name. The potential benefit of health care as a competitive advantage, is that it can’t grow. Once the workers are healthy, giving them more health care doesn’t make them more competitive. I’m still on the fence about which system we should be using in this country for our health care. This isn’t my favorite, but it is better than HillaryCare. The full transcript is here.

Toyota Republicans

 

Recently on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan coined a new term for a faction of the Republican party: Toyota Republicans. The phrase is an odd one because it is far more subtle and complicated than it seems. Under the watch of the Bush administration we saw outsourcing become the norm. We didn’t slowly lose a difficult battle to China, we eagerly gave them the plans and asked them to take over our manufacturing. The Alabama foreign car manufacturers Pat referred to are an interesting case. When we can’t even lead in our own industry in our own country selling to our own people, we have failed. It isn’t about patriotism and buying American. I’ll buy American when faced with a tough choice, but in the end I’m going with the better product, as should we all. We don’t need to bail out the failures, we need to create successes. These foreign plants on U.S. soil aren’t entirely a bad thing, although they are still sending our money overseas.

An interesting point has been made about who pays the cost of medical care. If the American auto makers are saddled with responsibility for the health care of their workers, and the foreign competitors aren’t, because the government takes care of that, then we didn’t fire the first shot in the coming Cold War Race to Socialism, they did.

As Pat puts it: “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.“

How should we respond? Pat wants us to “produce ourselves the guns and ships to defend the republic and the necessities of our national life so we could stand alone against the world.“ He suggests we do this by putting tariffs on imports in order to level the playing field. This isn’t a wise step forward in the new global economy; it leads to foreign retaliation, reducing our exports.  When you are only selling things to yourself, you don’t earn any money. It would work well here in the U.S. Until the industries got lazy and corrupt. We already can see the results of such tactics in the corn industry. The reason everything we eat is packed with corn syrup is that we tax the import of sugar and subsidize the growing of corn. What we need is to be lighter on our feet. We need small specialized manufacturers.

Pat Buchanan puts the blame on neocons for removing tariffs imposed by 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.“

Alabama is now home to several automotive plants:

  • Mercedes-Benz: Headquarted in Germany
  • Honda: Headquartered in Japan
  • Hyundai: Headquartered in South Korea
  • Toyota: headquartered in Japan

These U.S. plants make a total of more than 700,000 vehicles a year and employ over 11,000 workers.  This would all be a good thing if these vehicles were being shipped out, but they are built here to be sold here. To follow the money: You buy a Toyota. Part of that money goes to the workers in the Toyota plants in Alabama and elsewhere in the US; another part goes to Japan. To some extent it is nice to have foreign industry in our country; it gives them incentive to be nice to us so they can retain their factory. On the other hand, if we are making the product in our country with our labor and selling it to our people, we could do without sending the profits to Japan.

Pat is afraid that if we don’t do whatever it takes to keep the big three in business, that these foreign owned manufacturers will take over their market share.

Agreements like NAFTA aren’t really free trade, they are managed trade. In the end, under NAFTA, manufactuuring and agriculture find advantage in moving to Mexico. This includes companies like Toyota. The question is, are these Toyota republicans opposing the bailout on strong free trade principles, or are southern politicians trying to remove the competing U.S. manufacturers in Detroit to better their own foreign owned manufacturing?

From here on I will be using the term ‘Toyota Republican’ to describe the NAFTA loving portion of the party that is partially responsible for outsourcing and the exodus of  industry.

 

Update: Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers Union, went on Bill Moyers Joural with his take on the auto bailout and the Toyota Republicans.