She is wrong on several points including the $55 an hour wage. Have at it friends.
http://www.sundaypaper.com/More/StaffBlog/tabid/138/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/3472/Default.aspxA lot can happen in 10 minutes, so let’s straighten a few things out:
1. I never said I wanted Detroit’s auto workers to compete against auto workers overseas who earn $5 an hour. I said I wanted them to bring their salaries in line with those earned by auto workers at foreign-owned manufacturers here in the U.S. That would mean a pay cut of about $10 per hour. Since the average United Auto Workers union member earns about $55 per hour (some newer workers earn less), that would mean a salary of about $45 per hour instead (New York Times, Dec. 12, 2008). It was the racist and paranoid Mr. Pat Buchanan who said that I wanted American auto workers to compete with Chinese factory workers who earn $2 per hour.
2. Some viewers said they were surprised to find themselves in agreement with the ultra-conservative Buchanan. That’s not surprising at all if you are a member of the UAW or a supporter of virtually any American trade union. Mr. Buchanan is a racist who wants to close our borders to non-whites. It was he who wrote “Only whites have the appropriate ‘genetic endowments’ to keep America from collapsing.” But, he also wants to close our borders to foreign trade, which would hold the American consumer market hostage to whatever price the unions want to put on products and services. We would be broke, our economy utterly devastated in less than a decade. If you think that what you are witnessing now is an economic meltdown, please understand that this is nothing compared to what the U.S. would look like under Buchanan’s economic plan. To get a clear view of what he thinks of the rest of the world, get a gander at his latest book, a paranoid screed of regret over the U.S. having gotten involved in WWII (“The Unnecessary War”). Never mind that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and were in league with Adolf Hitler, never mind that Hitler was murdering innocents by the millions. Buchanan would have preferred that America stay on its side of the pond, drawing a paycheck, comfortably numb, totally ignorant to the rest of the world—in other words, living like the UAW leadership who have insisted for four decades that they can continue to do things the way they have always done them despite the growing global market.
3. It was not the union laborers nor any particular American brilliance that helped America dominate the world market after World War II. It was our dedication to the principle of freedom—our willingness to get involved in WWII. As David Colander, an esteemed economist at MiddleburyCollege has explained, America prospered so remarkably because our economy was the last one standing after World War II. Clearly, it was because we waded into the war in Europe that we were able to keep the war from our own shores (I do not have to tell history buffs how close the Germans and the Japanese came to bombing the U.S.—they know). In doing so, we saved our factories and plants from destruction, a luxury that European manufacturers did not have. By 1946, the only substantial manufacturing base in the world was ours. We feasted on foreign orders for decades as Europe and Japan slowly and painfully extracted themselves from a condition that no American who wasn’t there can even imagine. We also benefitted from a generous and open immigration policy. Among the many refugees who came to the U.S. during the war in Europe and its aftermath were numerous skilled workers and brilliant thinkers. The name Einstein might ring a bell. Again, we benefitted enormously from the two things that Buchanan and his trade union protectionist followers oppose: foreign trade and workers who were not unionized. It was also during this period that some manufacturers in the U.S. moved South to escape union labor, which contributed hugely to the resurrection of the South.
4. It is time to stop blaming the recent international money crisis for a state of affairs that has been in place in Detroit since 1982—the year the first Honda rolled off an assembly line in the U.S.. Honda may have recently lost money, but that was the first time in the manufacturer’s history that it had done so; Detroit has been in a downward spiral for years and its interim answer to its crisis, to produce gas guzzling vehicles, was to the detriment of our nation.
That said, I do not want autoworkers’ families to suffer. I want them to be able to stay in their homes and be able to pay for their medical care. I want them to have a better future than they now have. They are not the cause of their industry’s catastrophe; their leadership, both union and corporate, and the deeply entrenched culture it supports is to blame.
FULL article at link.
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