AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

Bush To Tour Kansas City Area Auto Plants
Hybrid Fords & Saturns are the highlights

Sometime today, President Bush is scheduled to tour the GM Fairfax assembly plant in Kansas City, Kansas, and the Ford Claycomo facility in Kansas City, Missouri. The GM plant builds the Saturn Aura Hybrid (which makes its debut very shortly), and the Ford plant makes the Ford Escape Hybrid.

Bush is likely to give a speech about how new made in America hybrids are competing in a crowded marketplace and saving millions of gallons of gasoline. Because he'll be in the farm belt, he'll likely pontificate on ethanol.

This is, however, the same president who rejected a proposal to spend $500 million on advanced battery technology for hybrids. Coincidentally, $500 million is 1/10 of 1 percent of the amount that we have spent fighting a war for oil in Iraq. Bush is also the president that rejected assistance to the automakers for healthcare expenses, even though the automakers are keeping thousands of Americans off of the government healthcare tab. He's the president who's for a strong national defense, but he works the National Guard and its equipment to a nub in Iraq, shortchanges veteran healthcare, and still finds time to watch as the factories that make up the arsenal of democracy close one by one. He pays lip service to the problem of global warming while his policy people still spew nonsense about the climate studies being inconclusive.

What the President Should Be Doing

What he should do is work out a plan that pays American companies for maintaining their facilities as contingent defense plants. There should be programs to enhance the ability of our industrial base to respond to military production needs on short notice, so our troops don't need to wait two years to get armor for their Humvees. Sixty years ago, we had the capability to transform our industrial base from civilian to military needs in less than a year. We may have gone to war in 1941 with the Army we had, but Mr. Rumsfeld, by 1943, we had an entirely new army, air force and navy. That's one reason why World War II was shorter than the war in Iraq.

Bush should strong-arm Toyota into leasing a vacant auto plant as a second source for Priuses (Priuii?), to be sold to the United States government for general government use administered by the GSA.

Bush should have a program for converting idle manufacturing facilities into sources for energy efficiency products to be used on government buildings. You could put a plant to work making solar panels on a large scale, for example.

There are many other constructive solutions that Bush could advocate without spending lots of money. Idle electricians and pipe-fitters with skills could be put to work renovating the schools where children are constantly being left behind in part due to have and have-not school systems. Bush could ask for tax-relief relating to the one-time buy-out payments that are now taxed as single-year income. Lots of auto workers are rotting in the job bank, when they could be doing good deeds at home or abroad through the Peace Corps.

Politicians everywhere wring their hands over sprawl and vacant factories. Still, there is precious little incentive for the transplant automakers to take over an unused factory rather than plowing up farmland to start a new one. That needs to change.

In short, there are plenty of options for a president to show leadership in the changing global industrial environment without abandoning free-market principles. It takes courage to confront the real problems that we face rather than creating new problems half a world away.