Detroit - Why the domestic Auto Industry 'collapsed'
I want to make plain why Detroit's number one business, cars, went into the toilet, taking jobs and the good times with it.
How the Press Helped Destroy the Auto Industry
Detroit's Collapse: the Untold Story
By EAMONN FINGLETON
CounterPunch, July 3-5, 2009
For decades East Asian competition has played a controversial role in the decline of the American car industry. Both Japan and Korea have long been accused of unfair trade and closed markets. For their part Japanese and Korean officials have argued that their markets are open and that an incompetent and heedless Detroit doesn't make the sort of cars their consumers want.
In all the charges and countercharges, little of the remarkable truth of Detroit's trade problems has come out. To see how well -- or rather how badly -- you understand the background, try this quiz:
1. What was the Detroit companies' share of the Japanese market in 1930? (a) About 90 per cent. (b) About 20 per cent. (c) Less than 4 per cent.
2. How many models do the Detroit corporations currently make with the steering wheel on the right (the standard configuration for Japan)? (a) More than 40. (b) 12. (c) 3.
3. What was the combined share of all foreign makers – American, European, and Japanese – in the Korean car market in the last decade? (a) Less than 2 per cent. (b) Around 15 per cent. (c) More than 70 per cent.
The correct answer in each case is (a).
If you flunked, don't feel bad. Just cancel your newspaper subscription.
For decades American press coverage of global car industry competition has been abysmal. Reporters and commentators have almost never dug below the surface and their idea of fact checking has too often consisted merely of "accurately" recycling previous observers' errors. Worse many commentators have displayed an almost venomously elitist bias against Detroit. In short, readers of the American press have been fed a diet of falsehoods, while key facts that give the lie to the foreign trade lobby’s special pleading have been swept under the carpet.
Much of the most egregious press coverage moreover has emanated from writers and editors at some of the most “respected” media organizations, not least the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Reuters and Associated Press have not been far behind and even the automobile trade press has often unforgiveably spun the story to Detroit's great disadvantage.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/fingleton07032009.html
What was missing from the news coverage? That Uncle Sam doesn't protect its own automotive industries, while Japan does.
What's Japan's Guiltiest Secret?: (Hint) It's Not The Comfort Women
by Eamonn Fingleton
Forbes, 4/20/2014
EXCERPT...
Top of the list is something that – at least for those of us who know Japan – is hidden in plain sight: the Japanese auto market. Fifty years after the Tokyo authorities ostensibly began opening to free trade, the Japanese auto market remains one of the world’s most closed. I don’t mean just that Detroit-made cars don’t get a look in. These are, with few exceptions, unsuitable for Japanese roads. But the Detroit Big Three’s subsidiaries in Europe, particularly subsidiaries of Ford and General Motors, make plenty of cars that – in a fair world – should do well in Japan. After all such cars compete, and in many cases compete strongly, against Japanese competition across Europe. They don’t have a prayer against Japan’s non-tariff barriers.
SNIP...
Of course, umpteen times over the years the problem of Japan’s closed market has been declared solved. Nobuhiko Ushiba, who served as Japan’s ambassador to Washington in the early 1970s, once told reporters: “There is no example in recent history of a nation liberalizing trade policy as fast as Japan.” Meanwhile in 1982, Japanese foreign minister Yoshio Sakurauchi assured a meeting of the GATT that Japan “is one of the most open markets in the world.”
A particularly impressive-sounding assurance came from President Bill Clinton in 1995. Speaking in the White House Briefing Room, with Japanese Trade Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto looking on impassively, Clinton announced that Japan had agreed “to truly open its auto and auto parts markets to American companies.”
He added: “This agreement is specific. It is measurable. It will achieve real, concrete results … we finally have an agreement that will move cars and parts both ways between the United States and Japan. This breakthrough is a major step toward free trade throughout the world.”
It was all empty rhetoric, of course, as Clinton surely knew. The interesting thing is that the American press has never revisited the record, not even the reliably anti-Clinton Wall Street Journal. Anyone who knows the Tokyo news business knows why. The Japanese authorities keep the foreign press on a remarkably tight leash and, with virtually no exceptions, foreign correspondents are induced to censor themselves. As a practical matter, Tokyo wields a panoply of carrots and sticks in controlling what Japan-based foreigners say to the outside world and most long-term foreign residents are overt or covert agents for Japan’s public relations agenda. Foreign correspondents are no exception.
CONTINUED...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/04/20/whats-japans-guiltiest-secret-hint-its-not-the-comfort-women/
All this info on national trade policy and its impact on Detroit -- from where unions and the great American middle class emerged (let alone the Arsenal of Democracy) sprang -- is missing from the news. A very similar situation is arising today with the lack of coverage of TPP.
= new reply since forum marked as read
He made the mistake of (intentionally or accidentally) insulting his hosts by including an image of Lenin, as well as a member of the patron's family holding a cocktail. The mural was destroyed before completion. Rivera's career never really recovered in the U.S. Here's a version of what the work looked like, a mural he later created in Mexico City:
http://www.diegorivera.org/man-at-the-crossroads.jsp
Diego Rivera: Glorious Victory!
Mark Vallens
Art for Change
Friday, October 05, 2007
EXCERPT…
Painted in 1954, the mockingly titled Glorious Victory has as its subject the infamous CIA coup of the same year that overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected government. At the center of the mural, CIA Director John Foster Dulles can be seen shaking hands with the leader of the coup d'état, Colonel Castillo Armas. Sitting at their feet is an anthropomorphized bomb bearing the smiling face of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower - who gave orders to launch the military coup. In the background, a priest can be seen officiating over the massacre of workers, many of which can be seen lying slaughtered in the painting’s foreground.
The head of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the coup, Allen Dulles, and the U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala during the coup, John Peurify, are depicted handing out money to various Guatemalan military commanders and fascist junta officials, as Mexican Indian workers slave away at loading bananas onto a United Fruit Company ship. I might add that Allen Dulles was on the board of directors of the United Fruit Company when the U.S. overthrew the government of Guatemala.
CONTINUED…
http://art-for-a-change.com/blog/2007/10/diego-rivera-glorious-victory.html
"Allen was delighted with the way Glorious Victory portrayed him and proudly handed out small-format copies." -- Stephen Kinzer, "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War"
https://books.google.com/books?id=LVb4-1l1gF4C&pg=PT393&lpg=PT393&dq=kinzer+the+brothers+dulles+diego+rivera&source=bl&ots=oAzpiYDehY&sig=f_qxzSRtbNna7xjgv6CoOpAMfMs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=duIJVbzFG_WCsQSY3IKABA&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=kinzer%20the%20brothers%20dulles%20diego%20rivera&f=false
Response to Octafish (Original post)
I should have made it clear that we need more information about the TPP -- especially before it becomes law.
I'd written about TPP before, including this piece:
Obama calls critics of TPP secrecy 'Conspiracy Theorists'
Seeing how well NAFTA turned out, count me a critic.
Obama Blasted for Lumping Critics of Trade Deal Secrecy with 'Conspiracy Theorists'
'If the president is concerned that people don't know what's going on in the negotiations then the president should release the text and remove it from being a state secret.'
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Published on Friday, May 2, 2014 by Common Dreams
Critics of the highly-secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations responded with outrage after U.S. President Barack Obama charged they have a "lack of knowledge of what is going on in the negotiations" and dismissed their concerns as "conspiracy theories."
The president made the comments this week during a press conference in Malaysia—one of the stops on his Asia-Pacific tour, aimed at advancing the TPP and the U.S. military "pivot" to the region. His tour has been met with region-wide protests against the economic and military agenda of the U.S.
SNIP...
Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson of BAYAN-USA—an alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S., told Common Dreams, "President Obama lacks knowledge of how so-called 'free trade agreements' impact people on the ground. The push-back he has gotten over the TPP comes from people who have long-suffered from these impacts."
"He should go back and talk with the parent-less children in the region, whose parents had no choice but to look for work overseas because they couldn't find work in their own country due to these so-called 'free trade' agreements," she added. "He should go back and talk to the indigenous children whose parents were killed by paramilitary groups because greater foreign investment stipulations in these agreements have led to forced evacuations and militarization of their land for the purpose of large scale foreign mining."
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/05/02-5
Cass Sunstein must be right: The United States government is incapable of lying or doing anything criminal.
The people in it, OTOH...
First, an overview of the setting:
North side:
South side:
A detail:
Diego in action:
I know these murals since my childhood. I cannot count the time that I spent in this place just staring at them. Having grown up in the city, I know them very well, as well as the destruction of Detroit's auto industry.
That room is jaw-dropping because of those murals.
From the Arsenal of Democracy to bankrupt in my lifetime.
It is very sad.
longship
Cooley High School graduate, 1966.
R&K