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A new Mitt Romney campaign ad seeks to undercut President Obama’s claim to be a champion of the auto industry by suggesting a Detroit automaker that received government bailout money plans to ship American jobs to China.

But the car company, Chrysler, says it is merely considering an expansion of Jeep production to China and has no plan to reduce its US workforce. In fact, the company has announced its intent to hire 1,100 additional workers in Detroit.

“Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China,” a narrator states in the ad. “Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.”

The ad ran over the weekend in Ohio, a crucial swing state where Chrysler employs about 2,000 people. The Romney campaign did not announce the spot in a press release, as is its custom.

Campaigning in Defiance, Ohio last week, Romney launched the auto-oriented attack: “One of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.”

The charge appeared to be a misinterpretation of a Bloomberg News story, which reported last Monday that Fiat, the Turin-based majority owner of Chrysler, “plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in that country.” The story referred to the company’s desire to manufacture vehicles locally in its expanding Chinese market, but the phrasing of the report’s first sentence caused some confusion among other news outlets.

“Despite clear and accurate reporting, the take has given birth to a number of stories making readers believe that Chrysler plans to shift all Jeep production to China from North America and therefore idle assembly lines and US workforce,” Chrysler spokesman Gualberto Ranieri wrote on the automaker’s website. “It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.”

The ad does not state explicitly, as Romney did on the campaign trail, that Chrysler is “moving all production to China.” But it connects Jeep’s manufacturing in China to Romney’s fighting for American jobs -- enough to rile the Obama campaign.

“Mitt Romney’s new ad is a sure sign that he knows he’s in trouble in Ohio,” said Lis Smith, an Obama campaign spokeswoman. “When the American auto industry and a million workers’ jobs were on the line, Mitt Romney turned his back. Now he’s pretending it never happened and is trying to scare Ohioans by repeating a blatant falsehood that Chrysler is moving its Jeep operations to China.”

The Obama campaign has often criticized Romney for a 2008 op-ed he authored in the New York Times, in which he argued against government bailouts for Detroit automakers, warning that “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye” if the car companies receive such assistance.

But Romney did not recommend abandoning the US auto industry altogether. He argued for quintupled federal spending on energy research that would aid the auto industry, managed bankruptcies for troubled car makers and wrote that “the federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.”

Chrysler and General Motors did go through bankruptcies as part of their government aid packages.

Mitt Romney had advocated against government help for troubled automakers, saying the private sector should pay for the process, but automobile executives slammed the plan. Dan Akerson, CEO and chairman of General Motors since September 2010, was asked in 2010 what would have happened had Mitt Romney’s plan been followed. Akerson said that GM “would have been in bankruptcy for years and I think you could have written off this company, this industry and this country.”
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/379200/mitt-ro ... G1VZ2rA.99

Bob Loblaw wrote:The difference, from what I can see, is that Romney favored government loan guarantees and a structured bankruptcy, while Obama's plan was far more interventionist, with the government actually dictating the terms of the bankruptcy. Predictably, what emerged protected union pensions and provided little incentive for the companies to restructure and become more efficient. Meanwhile, investors in GM got screwed, as did the pensions of subcontractors that didn't have the same clout as the UAW.

It seems to me that the big topic of discussion is whether any private money would have accepted the government-guaranteed loans back in 2009. That's debatable, but I think it would have been preferable to see if there were investors before doing what they did. Just my two cents.

If there’s one man in America who can credibly destroy Mitt Romney’s last-minute transmutation on the auto bailout, it’s Harry Wilson. In fact, the 2010 Republican candidate for New York state comptroller already has—but nobody noticed.

In addition to being one of New York’s top Republicans, Wilson was senior adviser to President Obama’s Task Force on the Auto Industry. An expert witness in a recent unrelated bankruptcy case, Wilson said that his “specific role” on Obama’s task force was “to lead the restructuring of General Motors, which remains the largest successful industrial restructuring ever completed.” Wilson is not only backing Romney for president, he is the finance chair for Republican Matt Doheny in one of the state’s hottest congressional races. Wilson was recruited to run for the US Senate this year by party leaders and is poised to run for comptroller again in 2014.

Wilson appeared on October 23 on Bloomberg News’s In the Loop and was asked by host Betty Liu about Romney’s claims in the last debate that he’d supported a form of federal assistance to GM and Chrysler, namely “post bankruptcy” government guarantees to private lenders. Liu tried to soften the case against Romney in her question to Wilson, asserting that both Romney and Obama “were essentially right” in their bailout comments, but Wilson would have none of it.

“I’m, as you know, a Republican who supports the governor. But I think on this issue, I think he’s really mishandled it,” said Wilson.

A startled Liu: “Romney has mishandled it?”

“Yes,” continued Wilson. “He came out both in 2008 and earlier in 2012, in a piece in one of the Detroit newspapers, and said he wouldn’t have supported any government capital because private capital was available. That’s simply not true. The president said that last night.”

Liu interjected that the unavailability of private money was backed up by a Congressional Budget Office report.

“Absolutely,” added Wilson. “We tried everything we could to find private money. I personally would have dramatically preferred private money. It just wasn’t available because of the crisis we were in. And the greatest thing about this point is that it is the easiest thing in the world to prove or disprove. All you need is one person to come forward and say, ‘Oh, I would have provided private capital, and here’s an example of where I said that in 2009.’ And no one has said that in three years, cause it’s just not true.”

Bob Loblaw wrote:The difference, from what I can see, is that Romney favored government loan guarantees and a structured bankruptcy, while Obama's plan was far more interventionist, with the government actually dictating the terms of the bankruptcy. Predictably, what emerged protected union pensions and provided little incentive for the companies to restructure and become more efficient. Meanwhile, investors in GM got screwed, as did the pensions of subcontractors that didn't have the same clout as the UAW.

It seems to me that the big topic of discussion is whether any private money would have accepted the government-guaranteed loans back in 2009. That's debatable, but I think it would have been preferable to see if there were investors before doing what they did. Just my two cents.

Obama talks about the auto bailout frequently, because it’s one of the few things in his record that gets positive responses in the polls. But he’s probably wise to avoid probing questions, since the GM bailout is not at all the success he claims.

GM has been selling cars in the U.S. at deep discount, and while it’s making money in China — and is outsourcing operations there and elsewhere — it’s bleeding losses in Europe. It’s spending billions to ditch its Opel brand there in favor of Chevrolet, including $559 million to put the Chevy logo on Manchester United soccer-team uniforms — and it just fired the marketing exec who cut that deal.

It botched the launch of its new Chevrolet Malibu by starting with the green-friendly Eco version, which pleased its government shareholders even though the car got lousy reviews. And it’s selling only about 10,000 electric-powered Chevy Volts a year, a puny contribution toward Obama’s goal of one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

“GM is going from bad to worse,” reads the headline on the analysis of Automotive News’s editor in chief, Keith Crain. That’s certainly true of its stock price.

The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is around $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells.

That’s in addition to the revenue lost when the Obama administration permitted GM to continue to deduct previous losses from current profits, even though such deductions are ordinarily wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters — and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner.

Rattner himself admitted late last year, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club: “We should have asked the UAW [United Auto Workers union] to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay.” Non-union employees of GM spin-off Delphi lost their pensions. UAW members didn’t.

“The game isn’t over until it’s over”, but if President Obama wins reelection, he should probably start giving some serious thought to how he is going to justify bailing out GM, and its unionized UAW workforce, yet again. And, during the current campaign, Obama might want to be a little more modest about what he actually achieved by bailing out GM the first time.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhi ... ain/print/

beastie wrote:Cinepro -

Aside from whether or not you agree with Romney's "let Detroit go bankrupt" proposition, do you think that the Romney ad was fair and honest?