Ron Gettlefinger, president of the UAW, nailed it in hearings before the banking committee. After pointing out lack of national healthcare, unfair trade practices, and subsidies to foreign makers, he asks, "How do we compete when we subsidize the competition?"
Appearing right now on MSNBC, Gettlefinger is finally bringing some reality to the hearings.
There's something we're missing here, quite frankly, unfair trade agreements, supporting our competition to come in, not doing anything about healthcare in this country, and I'll just use as an example South Korea. Here we're talking about a country that can ship in whatever that number of automobiles is, 669,000, and every manufacturer in this country can ship back less than 5,000. How do we compete with that? ...
How do we deal with currency intervention? Or, what do we do about not having an industrial policy? Those are the things I think we're missing in this picture. ...
Who are we competing against? And, how low do you go? We use the term "rac to the bottom."
That's it, exactly. As I've said, we either insist that our trading partners start producing to our minimum wages, workplace conditions and environmental standards or we will see a race to the bottom. Either they come up to our first-world standards or we descend to their third-world standard.
What's it going to be, Congress?