Opinion
Saving UAA requires national protectionist policy
By Ian Overton
It was President Franklin Roosevelt’s collaboration with Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes that was absolutely crucial in turning around the Great Depression, putting the United States back to work, and launching the most intensive period of infrastructure development in human history. Their intervention to restore the bankrupt private and public sectors saved our country from disaster. There is nothing in what Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Ickes did, in 1933, that can’t be replicated today.
Today, the situation globally is far, far worse than it was then. What Roosevelt inherited was a national infrastructure capacity that had been reduced by half under the austerity policies promoted by Hoover and Andrew Mellon. Today, we face steel production that is a fraction of what it used to be. Our energy plants are aging and many need upgrades. Transportation systems are eroding and inefficient. Universities and colleges are facing years of budget shortfalls and tuition hikes. Petroleum and minerals are at record high prices. These are symptoms of an overall systemic problem: When the U.S. cannot produce the basic commodities it needs to provide real opportunities for its citizens to upkeep and advance their lives, but instead depends on over $6 billion worth of imports per day to avert a total national breakdown, it is a first world country that is asphyxiating itself. The abandonment of FDR’s “fair trade” producer society programs for Wall Street’s “free trade” services society policies has brought this onrushing breakdown to the doorstep of Alaska’s future.
Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Nov. 22, Ford Motor Co. chairman and CEO Bill Ford urged the U.S. Congress to provide tax credits for the conversion of auto factories, and the retraining of the auto workforce. He urged “a collaboration between government and business.” This was what FDR did to produce enough logistics to bring us out of the depression and win the war. It is what the U.S. must do again to avert bigger disasters lurking beneath the consumer mentality.
Ford’s proposal would head the auto sector in a different direction than that offered by General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, who announced Nov. 21 that he would close all or part of 12 GM factories in the U.S. and Canada, and fire 30,000 workers--slashing GM’s production workforce by 30%. A week earlier, the CEO of GM spinoff Delphi (the nation’s largest auto-parts maker), Wall Street thug Steve Miller, has declared that he would lay off 24,000 of Delphi’s 34,750 production workers in the U.S. and Canada--71% of the workforce.
On Nov. 23, economist Lyndon LaRouche wrote a letter on the matter of reorganizing the U.S. auto industry to Bill Ford, in which LaRouche expressed agreement with Ford’s statement, and reiterated emergency measures for the auto sector LaRouche had publicly warned Congress about last spring. He emphasized the need to develop the scientifically advanced machine-tool-design capability embedded in the auto industry, which is capable of producing almost anything needed to reconstruct the U.S. economy.
LaRouche proposed an Act of Congress to create the authority for such a reorganization of the auto industry. On Nov. 24, LaRouche issued a policy memorandum that focused the reorganization of the auto sector from the advanced standpoint of launching a world economic revival and an emergency reform of the bankrupt international monetary system.
Without implementing these measures nationally, any bailout of the UA statewide system would merely be prolonging the inevitable, even with a gas pipeline. Our state cannot provide its young adults their rightful opportunities to provide for Alaska’s future without a national protectionist policy.
Concerned Alaskans should watch LPAC’s Janurary 11, 2006 webcast: 9am at http://www.larouchepac.com
Contact Ian Overton at