October 28, 2007 (LPAC)--The U.S. auto sector, which is the primary remaining machine-tool capability in the United States economy, has lost a net 350,000 jobs since 2007, and is now about to lose more jobs and plants. After a Chrysler contract--just narrowly approved by a roughly 53% vote of United Auto Workers (UAW) members, which leaves unsecured the future operation of most of Chrysler's assembly and engine plants, Ford Motor Company will demand that the UAW agree to 10,000 more job cuts in its new contract, according to sources of the Detroit News. Ford has already eliminated 27,000 production jobs in just the past two and one half years, and has taken on so much new debt in that period that it clearly faces the threat of bankruptcy.

Nearly 100 auto assembly, production, and parts supply plants in North America have closed or been put on the chopping block since the beginning of 2005, when Lyndon LaRouche and LaRouche PAC mobilized to urge Congress to intervene and rescue this irreplaceable capacity by giving it the mission of building new national economic infrastructure. These plants, large and small, comprise over 80 million square feet of the best-tooled productive plant remaining in America's deindustrialized economy. Yet Congress has not lifted a finger to save it.

The continuing reports of falling auto sales during 2006 and 2007 show that the automakers' production cutbacks are futile--they cannot "sell their way out" of their debt crisis. Sales projections for October are in the range of 1.2 million cars and light trucks, according to Edmunds.com and other auto analysis firms. If this total is matched in November and December, which are low sales months, the auto industry will have sold less than 16 million cars in 2007 for the first time since 1995; and its sales will have dropped nearly 10% since 2000. With the mortgage-bubble debt collapse now hitting households hard, this drop is accelerating.