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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

I quess I was a bit quick my positivity and in hoping that BO might show some 
real leadership concerning these economic turmoils. This article is slanting  
the news in as much favor of BO as possible -- the NYT are one of his fully 
mini-skirted cheerleaders.  Expect a long , long four years .......bobford

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Obama Asks Bush to Help Automakers 
 
The New York Times

President-elect Barack Obama and President Bush talked policy in the Oval 
Office while their wives toured the residence. More Photos > 



 
By JACKIE CALMES

Published: November 10, 2008 

WASHINGTON — The struggling auto industry was thrust into the middle of a 
political standoff between the White House and Democrats on Monday as 
President-elect Barack Obama urged President Bush in a meeting at the White 
House to support immediate emergency aid.

Mr. Bush indicated at the meeting that he might support some aid and a 
broader economic stimulus package if Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats 
dropped their opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia, a measure 
for which Mr. Bush has long fought, people familiar with the discussion said.

The Bush administration, which has presided over a major intervention in the 
financial industry, has balked at allowing the automakers to tap into the 
$700 billion bailout fund, despite warnings last week that General Motors 
might not survive the year.

Mr. Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders say the bailout law authorizes 
the administration to extend assistance. 

Mr. Obama went into his post-election meeting with Mr. Bush on Monday primed 
to urge him to support emergency aid to the auto industry, advisers to Mr. 
Obama said. But Democrats also indicate that neither Mr. Obama nor 
Congressional leaders are inclined to concede the Colombia pact to Mr. Bush, 
and may decide to wait until Mr. Obama assumes power on Jan. 20.

Separate from his differences with Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has signaled to the 
automakers and the unions that his support for short-term aid now, and 
long-term assistance once he takes office, is contingent on their willingness 
to agree to transform their industry to make cleaner, more energy-efficient 
vehicles. 

A week after Mr. Obama’s election, and more than two months before he takes 
office, the steadily weakening economy and the prospect of many more job 
losses are testing his effort to remain aloof from the nation’s business on 
the argument that “we only have one president at a time.” 

As the auto industry reels, rarely has an issue so quickly illustrated the 
differences from one White House occupant to the next. How Mr. Obama responds 
to the industry’s dire straits will indicate how much government intervention 
in the private sector he is willing to tolerate. It will also offer hints of 
how he will approach his job under pressure, testing the limits of his 
conciliation toward the opposition party and his willingness to stand up to 
the interest groups in his own. 

G.M.’s shares tumbled on Monday to 1946 prices, closing down 23 percent to 
$3.36, as analysts downgraded the stock on worries it would soon run out of 
cash and shareholders would be wiped out by any federal bailout.

Mr. Obama has been far more receptive than Mr. Bush to having the government 
intervene to rescue another major sector of the economy. He called automakers 
“the backbone of American manufacturing” in his first post-election press 
conference last Friday, and many thousands of their employees belong to 
unions that are part of the Democratic Party’s base.

But Mr. Obama’s stance raises the question, with the country in a worsening 
economic situation, where would the Democrat draw the line as president?

Mr. Bush has drawn his line at the automakers’ doors, having already been 
forced to shelve the free-market principles of his Republican Party to bail 
out the financial industry over the past two months. But Republicans say he 
would acquiesce in aid to automakers in return for Congress’s ratification of 
the Colombia pact and pending trade agreements with Panama and South Korea.

The outgoing and incoming presidents met at the White House in private, 
without staff. 

The Democratic leaders in Congress, the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, 
and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, have declined to call a lame-duck 
session for next week, as they had hoped, without assurance that Mr. Bush 
would support a stimulus package.

Mr. Obama has called on the Bush administration to accelerate $25 billion in 
federal loans provided by a recent law specifically to help automakers 
retool. Late in his campaign, Mr. Obama proposed doubling that to $50 
billion. But industry supporters say the automakers, squeezed both by the 
unavailability of credit and depressed sales, need unrestricted cash now, 
simply to meet payroll and other expenses.

On Friday, Mr. Obama said he would instruct his economic team, once he 
chooses it, to devise a long-range plan for helping the auto industry recover 
in a way that is part of an energy and environmental policy to reduce 
reliance on foreign oil and address climate change.

While Mr. Obama campaigned on a promise of bipartisan conciliation, his 
choice for his White House chief of staff, Representative Rahm Emanuel, 
indicated on Sunday that no such deal linking auto-industry aid and a 
stimulus package with trade pacts was in the cards. “You don’t link those 
essential needs to some other trade deal,” Mr. Emanuel said on ABC’s “This 
Week.” 

Democrats close to both Mr. Obama’s transition team and to Congressional 
leaders seemed willing to call Mr. Bush’s bluff, calculating that he would 
not want to gamble that G.M. — an iconic, century-old American corporation 
with business tentacles in every state — would fail on his watch and add to 
the negative notes of his legacy. Also, economists as conservative as Martin 
Feldstein, an adviser to a long line of Republican presidents and candidates, 
have called more broadly for stimulus spending of up to $300 billion.

The major automakers — G.M., Ford and Chrysler — are each using up their cash 
at unsustainable rates. The Center for Automotive Research, which is based in 
Michigan and supported by the industry, released on Election Day an economic 
analysis of the impact of one or all of them failing. If the Big Three were 
to collapse, it said, that would cost at least three million jobs, counting 
autoworkers, suppliers and other businesses dependent on the companies, down 
to the hot-dog vendors and bartenders next door to their plants.

The center also concluded that the cost to local, state and federal 
governments would reach to as much as $156.4 billion over three years in lost 
taxes and higher outlays for things like unemployment and health care 
assistance. Separately, some economists say the demise of even one of the 
automakers could tip the current recession toward a depression.

For Mr. Bush, however, the hard-line approach is his only leverage to make 
the trade agreements part of his legacy. The Colombia deal, especially, is 
strongly opposed by organized labor groups, which are a major force in the 
Democratic Party, and by human-rights activists.

In the Senate and during his nomination race against Senator Hillary Rodham 
Clinton, Democrat of New York, Mr. Obama opposed the pacts and especially the 
Colombia agreement, given that country’s reported human rights abuses against 
unionists. He insists he favors free trade, but only if trading partners 
agree to protections for their workers and the environment — reflecting the 
standard Democratic Party line since President Bill Clinton’s administration.

On his campaign Web site, Mr. Obama said he would oppose the Colombia pact 
“if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence 
against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections 
that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”

Organized labor is not the only interest group with influence in the 
Democratic Party that is weighing in as Mr. Obama plans his transition. 
Environmentalists are adamant that any aid be conditioned on the auto 
industry’s dropping of its opposition to higher fuel-efficiency standards and 
investing more in new technology. That puts them at odds with unions, who 
oppose any strings, leaving it to Mr. Obama to mediate.

Both as a candidate and now as president-elect, Mr. Obama has been in contact 
with former Vice President Al Gore, who last year won the Nobel Peace Prize 
for his work on climate change. In a column published in Sunday’s New York 
Times, Mr. Gore wrote that “we should help America’s automobile industry (not 
only the Big Three but the innovative new start-up companies as well) to 
convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity 
that will be available.”

Mr. Obama has said that he wants to meet with the Big Three auto executives, 
but advisers say no meeting is scheduled. Among his advisers who have 
communicated with the industry chiefs and their representatives are Jason 
Furman, the Obama campaign’s economic policy director; John D. Podesta, the 
head of Mr. Obama’s transition; and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. 
Summers, an Obama adviser who is under consideration to be Treasury secretary 
again. 




http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/us/politics/11auto.html?hp