Bad news festering for decades
by Rense Johnson, Chairman
Citizens for Term Limits … for a fresh Congress!
November 18, 2008
Like most bad news that we learn about, public attention is only now being drawn to a situation that has been festering for decades.
I’m talking about the Big Three American automobile manufacturers, who insist that they must have cash from the taxpayers to survive.
Today’s Big Three management likely are not even the ones responsible for the sins of their predecessors. But the predecessors are.
For years — no, decades — in the fifties, sixties and seventies, when there was no foreign competition, the Big Three had the game to themselves. Oh yes, they competed among themselves for market share, but the overweening principle of each was to maintain growth of next year’s bottom line.
Nothing wrong with that, is there? There is when they each kept caving in to the United Automobile Workers union, which increased labor costs, which costs then went to next year’s bottom line, which raised the price of each company’s automobile.
The consumer was left holding the bag. But then it was “Who Cares?” In those days it was the only game(s) in town.
There was no foreign competition. The Big Three had the playground all to themselves.
It was the management of the Big Three in those days were the sinners. In what should then have been an adversarial relationship between management and labor was instead, a collaborative one.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am one who believes that without labor unions management would soon have its foot on the neck of the working man.
But it is the United States Congress over the years, which has stacked the deck against the consumer and for the labor unions.
Another reason why it is imperative that we impose constitutional term limits on members of Congress.
As for the Big Three, let ‘em go through bankruptcy and come out restructured streamlined and competitive with today’s foreign competition and useful to the U. S. economy.
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