Getting It Right- Bail Out or Pay Back

Is congress trying to save the U.S. Automotive industry or the United Auto Workers Union?

By Sid Riley

This column presents a rights preserving, fiscally conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions. Now, on to the subject of the week:

The Democratic Party is deep in dept to the hundreds of Unions which make up the American Federation of Labor (AFOL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). These organizations have been donating heavily for many, many years to hundreds of Democratic candidates as they campaigned for elected positions in our government. Among the largest and most significant of these unions was the United Auto Workers (UAW).

At present the U.S. Auto makers are traveling at a good pace on the road to bankruptcy. For instance, General Motors is currently losing over $160 million dollars per work day. Now, let’s do the math on what is really motivating Congress to bail out this failed industry.

A conservative number for the total number of union members that would lose their jobs if the Big Three auto makers went bankrupt, including all of the union controlled sub-contractors allied with the industry is 2,000,000 (two million) jobs. Now, let’s assume that each of these loyal union members (and voters) pays union dues each month of $150.00 as a payment to the union for getting them their $40 per hour job, complete with fantastic benefits. This means that these jobs are adding $300,000,000 to the union’s mafia controlled income. Additionally, for each auto produced the companies are paying approximately $1600 per auto into the UAW Pension Fund and Health Benefits Plan. With annual sales of 16,000,000 autos, this equates to another $25.6 Billion dollars per year, or over $2.1 Billion per month. Thus we see that the U.S. Auto industry is a huge "Cash Cow" for the union movement. They can not afford for this cash cow to die, even though they have caused its serious health problems by over-milking for years.

Through the 1970’s, 1980’s, and into the 1990’s the U.S. auto industry’s companies and unions made shoddy products, promoted and allowed wages and benefits which satisfied an insatiable greed, passed the costs onward to the U.S. consumers since few foreign competitors existed, and thus engaged in decades of decadent excesses. Then came the global economy, free trade, and foreign competition.

In this environment the cost profile which was developed from these years of excesses is not competitive. They are thus doomed to eventual failure. Do we prolong that death by feeding that greed for a few more months or years…or should they now pay for their mistakes? Better them than us. This should include the excessive retirement benefits of those auto union workers who participated in creating this situation and are now feasting on those benefits.

In my opinion, this current move to "bail out" the auto industry by our current congress is more of an effort to save billions for the unions than it is a move to help the dying industry. They want to use the tax dollars paid by millions of uninsured tax payers to pay the health benefits for these union workers who have demonstrated nothing but greed for decades. Congress is only responding as the Unions are calling in a "payback chip" from all of those campaign donations.
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A friend sent this to me from the internet this week. It is one of the most eloquent, best written descriptions of our national plight I have encountered. I am enclosing it for your reading.
How Long
Do We Have?
About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government."
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."
"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
"The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years"
"During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy;
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage"
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the Presidential election:
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare..." Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal’s and they are given the right to vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE, ONLY BECAUSE OF THE SACRAFICES MADE BY THE BRAVE MEN WHO LIVED BEFORE US.

Our nation needs patriots now more than any time since World War II. Our nation is about to evolve into a Socialistic Democracy from a Capitalistic Democracy. If you will help resist this change…you will be ‘Getting It Right".

Note: The opinions stated in this column are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Hatcher Publications.