I might just be making this up, but don’t we need American auto manufacturers to remain open to that they can be converted into military factories should the need arise, ala WWII? I know that the WWII style of warfare is thought to be a thing of the past, but one might think that it still behooves us to have the option.
No, not really. The Big Three are not too important to industrial readiness. The Detroit Tank Arsenal is owned (by some government agency) and is operated by contractors. The wheeled vehicles come Oshkosh, if my memory serves.
In any case, rest easy, there are people who worry about this sort of thing full-time.
Yar. We didn’t have the military industrial complex that we have today.
What, if any major industrial rediness would we still possess if we were to lose some of the capacity of the Big Three? The US steel industry is all but a memory, and I don’t think that the Japanese would take too kindly to us militarizing a Honda plant or their US based steel plants (Such as the former LTV in Cleveland) if the need were to arise.
Look, if things are bad enough that Japan and China cut off imports, we’ve got a whole lot more to worry about than a few manufacturing centers being shut down. Its a downright ludicrous argument to be making at this point. We shouldn’t be worrying about using existing manufacturing for potential future wars. Moreover, using that as a reason to prop up a failing business is just plain absurdity. It takes like 12 'what if’s and jumps to conclusions to even arrive there.
It’s not about imports, I’m talking about domestically located yet foreign owned industrial manufacturing centers. In the event that we would need to drastically step up military vehicle production to a point that would exceed what the military industrial contractors are able to provide, we would again need to nationalize our own production assets. Without the Big Three, we would have a drastic reduction in that capacity. Since the market doesn’t seem to be enough to keep these companies afloat on their own, I have to think that part of the governments willingness to keep bailing them out stems from such a need.
No, they can’t just set up a dummy company just to avoid their committments. That’s called “fraud” and they’d get their asses handed to them.
Also, debt has nothing to do with profitability. Two totally different concepts.
Do you foresee that situation as actually, plausibly, arising?
Of course not, but once infrastructure is gone, it’s really gone. I do hesitate so hasten and dismantling until a point where that situation is totally ruled out.
Let’s try that again:
Of course not, but once infrastructure is gone, it’s really gone. I do hesitate **to ** hasten **any ** dismantling until we’re at a point where that situation is totally ruled out. :smack:
And we need the Japanese to help us run a former LTV plant in Cleveland why?
We’ve got tons of domestic talent that could run those plants if need be.
If we’re pressed militarily, I suspect the Japanese would be fine with us buying steel from that plant at market prices.
Because they bought it from LTV, which at one point was Republic Steel. They bought the mill 5 or 6 years ago.
It wouldn’t be dismantling. It’d be letting it die. Your language infers a certain amount of public causation in the failure of the company when its corporate mismanagement thats responsible for the collapse. You’re advocating that we, US tax payers should fork over our hard earned money to support a business thats being run inefficiently, that will continue to lose money on the off chance that there’s another world war that our current military contractors couldn’t keep up with to supply. I am sorry, but I just cannot follow that logic. Can you demonstrate that in some way this is even a remote possibility? You brought up World War II before, but that’s been dismissed as not comperable due to vast explosion of our military and the military industrial complex that has sprouted since.
Why not, we do it for the airlines? Besides, I started out with a supposition. If it’s totally incorrect and we don’t need domestic auto production, then so be it.
That’s basically what I was saying, although I didn’t come out and say it as clearly as you did. The government has shown itself willing to take fairly extraordinary steps to make sure companies that are seen as very important to the economy do not fail.
The auto manufacturers have already found a significant way around this, via the car rental companies.
The large car rental companies are largely owned by the auto manufacturers (Avis/Budget & National are GM, Hertz is Ford, Thrifty is Chrysler), they offer cars from that manufacturer, and are often heavily stocked with surplus cars – ones that aren’t selling as well as expected.
And these car rental companies all offer their cars for sale to the public, often after as little as 6 months to a year of use.
So this functions as a significant path for selling cars to consumers without going thru a dealer. Though not quite direct factory-to-customer sales, which is forbidden by their contracts with dealers.
When I retired from the Army, I spent a year selling cars.
Our Ford dealership ‘sold’ acres of cars to Hertz. We dod some paperwork and made some profit. Of course that might have changed in the last ten years.
And what, exactly, would the Japanese be able to do about it if we did nationalize their plants? Bomb Pearl Harbor? I don’t think so.
What most people don’t know is that if it weren’t for the Korean War, Toyota wouldn’t exist today. The US carmakers didn’t have the capacity to turn out military vehicles and meet the pent-up demand for cars in the wake of WWII, so to solve the problem, the government awarded the contracts to a nearly bankrupt Japanese corporation, Toyota.
(Emphasis mine.)
http://chevysurplus.com/privacy.php#UserAgreement
GM dealers have nothing to worry about.
GM’s bond rating moved to junk.
It certainly does look like the end is near.