Sen. Carl Levin: Mitt Romney's explanation insults U.S. autoworkers
Op-ed published in the Detroit Free Press
02-21-2012
Mitt Romney's recent comments on the auto industry are just the latest attempt by a candidate who says he has cars "in my bones" to explain his inexplicable opposition to the rescue of America's auto industry.
Romney has criticized President Barack Obama for not arranging a "managed bankruptcy" for General Motors and Chrysler, which he called his preferred option. Of course, managed bankruptcy is precisely what happened to both companies. Romney has claimed that his real problem is the government's financing of the automakers' bankruptcies. Of course, private financing was impossible in the midst of the worst financial crisis in generations. Government refusal to provide financing would have been the death knell for both companies.
Having lost those two arguments, Romney is trying out two new ones. They appear to boil down to this: Bond speculators should have been protected at the expense of workers, and taxpayers should dump our investment in GM now, even if it means we take a bath.
Romney seems most upset that Chrysler bondholders took a haircut during bankruptcy proceedings, and that autoworkers received financing to set up an employee-operated health plan.
But at the critical moment when the government had to make a decision, a huge amount of Chrysler's bonds were held by speculators who already had scooped them up at bargain prices in hopes that they could pressure the government to give them a big payoff. Romney's position is that these speculators should have been protected while workers were left holding the bag.
I think the 330,000 auto jobs lost during the auto crisis and the huge wage and benefit concessions that workers contributed to the restructuring were sacrifice enough from American autoworkers. The idea that workers should have suffered even greater pain so that bond speculators could make more money is offensive to me, and I believe it is offensive to most Michiganders.
Romney's second point seems to be that the government should sell its remaining stake in GM immediately. This is an odd argument coming from a guy who claims his fortune came from savvy investing.
Recklessly dumping these GM shares, rather than managing them prudently, could cost taxpayers billions. Treasury officials have carefully stayed outside the GM boardroom and have sought to balance the need to divest the government's stake in GM with the need to maximize the return on the taxpayers' investment. That is the right approach. Yet Romney says he wants to force a fire sale in the effort to make a partisan point. The very notion of the taxpayer stake in GM is offensive to him, and in order to eliminate that offense, he would make taxpayers suffer.
As is the case with many issues, we can't really be sure where Romney stands on the auto rescue.
This is, after all, a self-professed "lifelong Red Sox fan" waxing poetic about watching Tigers games at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. He wants to look like a fan cheering the rebound of the domestic carmakers -- a rebound that is leading a resurgence in American manufacturing -- while criticizing the government policies that made it all possible.
In Romney's latest attempts to explain his position, we can see clearly that his preferred solution would have sacrificed the interest of workers in order to enrich bond speculators, and would risk losing billions of taxpayer dollars in a panic sale of the Treasury's GM stake. That's wrong for America's workers, wrong for our auto industry, wrong for Michigan and wrong for the country.
Carl Levin, a Democrat from Detroit, is Michigan's senior U.S. Senator.