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  • From: bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Obama asking for suto bail-out from Bush
  • Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:31:08 -0800 (PST)

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






  • [Homestead] Obama asking for suto bail-out from Bush, bob ford, 11/11/2008

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