July 24, 2008 (LPAC)--Ford Motor Company's second-quarter losses were so huge--$8.7 billion--that they stacked up against the $8.85 billion second-quarter collapse of Wachovia, one of the biggest U.S. banks. But while the Federal Reserve and Treasury stand at the ready--with Congress' easy approval, so far--to bail out the worthless securities of any investment bank or money-center bank, they have refused to lift a finger to save the economically essential machine-tool capacities of the automakers and auto components companies. Ford has already shut plants and eliminated more than 50,000 production workers in just over two years, and now has under 50,000 remaining in the United States.
The company has $26 billion in cash left, down by $10.6 billion in the year since Ford "hocked everything" including its brand logos, designs, etc. to borrow $24 billion from a bank consortium in early 2007. A few more quarters like this, and the company will be unable to continue operations--bankruptcy would intervene before that.
Ford should try to get contracts building vanes and turbines for windmills, says Al Gore's friend, Texas oilman and oil speculator T. Boone Pickens, who testified to the Senate July 22 about his slim “Pickens Plan." This is a scheme--if Pickens means it seriously--to get Congress to give oil companies tax production credits to build windmills, and to get Texas to subsidize electric transmission lines all the way across the state to its southwest corner where Pickens intends to develop a "wind farm." For the auto companies, his proposal would push them back from building a 20th-Century technology, automobiles and trucks, to a 13th-Century technology, windmills. Sen. Joe Lieberman seemed to love the "Pickens Plan." But wind power could never approximate the energy density of coal power, let alone fission and fusion power, which modern industry and transport require.
The sane policy for saving the auto/machine-tool sector, is Lyndon LaRouche's Economic Recovery Act, presented to Congress for the past three years by the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) and by thousands of auto union local officials and members. It would use Federal credits to put auto facilities to work on a new 21st Century economic infrastructure, featuring high-speed rail corridors, flood control, water management and navigation facilities, and third- and fourth-generation nuclear power/desalination plants, not windmills.
BACKGROUND:
May 18, 2006 - The U.S. Economic Recovery Act Of 2006
August 8, 2007 - A Table Of Organization For U.S. Economic Recovery
March 23, 2005 - Recreate Our Economy!
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