If Clint Eastwood narrated “The Cat in the Hat,” the words of Dr. Seuss would instantly take on a menacing authority. He could read the latest worthless United Nations condemnation of Syria and make Bashar Assad tremble.
So if you’re Chrysler and want to air a propagandistic advertisement implicitly touting your government bailout as what’s best about America, Eastwood is a natural frontman. The movie tough-guy and former Republican mayor of Carmel, Calif., will make everyone take notice. He will dare you not to believe him. He will invest a sugarcoated narrative of Detroit’s comeback with every bit of his gravelly voiced credibility.
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Eastwood’s two-minute ad during halftime was one of the most memorable of the Super Bowl (putting aside all the Doritos spots, of course). Eastwood walks toward the camera in a dark tunnel and says, in his slightly threatening near-whisper, “It’s halftime.” Lest you think that’s a cue to get up and reload on nachos and beer, he intones, “It’s halftime in America, too.”
What follows is a half-baked tale about the revival of the automotive industry wrapped in economic nationalism: Dirty Harry does chest-thumping corporatism. Eastwood says that Americans are hurting and that “the people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now, Motor City is fighting again.”
We all pulled together? As euphemism, this is clever; as history, it is false. Congress never approved the bailouts. Given the option to do so explicitly, it declined. The Bush and Obama administrations acted on their own, diverting TARP funds to Detroit regardless of the letter of the law. In Eastwood’s telling, a legally dubious act of executive highhandedness qualifies as patriotic collective action.
By this standard, any initiative of government must be a stirring exercise in people’s power. Remember when we all pulled together to back the solar-panel maker Solyndra to the tune of $500 million? Right now, we are all pulling together to try to force Catholic institutions to pay for contraceptives and morning-after abortifacients for their employees. See? There’s nothing we can’t do — together.
What Chrysler and GM desperately needed in their extremity was to go through Chapter 11 reorganization to pare down wages and benefits, shed uneconomical dealerships, and ditch unnecessary brands. When the government got its hooks in them, it politicized this process and threw some $80 billion at the companies. Since we’ll never get an estimated $23 billion back, we all must be “pulling together” behind Detroit still.
Amid all the patriotic piety, Eastwood neglects to mention that Chrysler is now 58.5 percent owned by Fiat, an Italian company. The heart-tugging images of Turin, Italy, apparently were left on the cutting-room floor.
Walking near the end of his tunnel, Eastwood assures us of our hoped-for national comeback: “Detroit’s showing us it can be done. And what’s true about them is true about all of us.” Yet if Detroit is the model for our future, we should prepare for national collapse. Yes, it is getting a boost from resurgent auto sales. Otherwise, it remains a byword for urban apocalypse. More than anything, the city is a standing warning of the perils of social disorder and unaffordable, dysfunctional government.
The entire tone of the Eastwood ad is martial. We must resist “discord” and “come together,” we have to take a “punch” and “win.” Understandably, Obama politicos David Axelrod and Dan Pfeiffer immediately tweeted their approval. The ad echoes President Barack Obama’s rhetoric of military-like national unity from his State of the Union address. This message is profoundly at odds with the messy competition and self-interested individual effort necessarily attendant to a true free-market economy.
It is good that Chrysler and GM are now off life-support, but they took a lot of money we’ll never recover. A simple apology would be nice. Surely, Clint Eastwood could be hired to deliver an impressively sincere-sounding one.
It served this country well for nearly two centuries.
I don't get you Free Traders, (or would traitors be more accurate?)
You attack any notion that America should stand up for it's people and their rapidly disappearing job base. That is not conservatism! There is nothing conservative about it!
See: (Hamilton, Alexander) if you want to know what the conservative way of managing an economy is.
I agree that government bailouts are bad, but if those Wall Street firms and Bank of America got one than I am glad that Chrysler and GM did too.
We could use a whole lot less Bank of America's and a lot more manufacturing businesses about now.
I saw nothing wrong with Eastwood's ad...but then again I don't celebrate the red Chinese building our military equipment or our children's toys.
There is something very peculiar and un-American about you "Free Traders."
That many of you embrace "Open Borders" and illegal immigration only adds to your rapidly diminishing reputations.
I'm an American and I'm a nationalist: I'll accept fair trade but don't give me that free trade crap. if we don't have the same access to their home markets that they do to ours than we're fools, Adam Smith it aint...
If America stood up for Americans, we'd all fall off. A sounder approach would be to have Americans stand up for America. Now, there are some 330,000,000 of us so getting us to stand simultaneously will require force or persuasion. The New Deal Übermenschen fancied the hammer of Economic Nationalism; Eastwood favors poetry. What’s German for laureate?
Your form of National Socialism may benefit a few labor unions, but it hurts the rest of us who have to earn what we are worth without the crutch of government subsidies, bailouts or protectionism.
If you can compete, then compete. If you can't, not my problem. You want to be free, then be responsible for making a living the same way the rest of us do, by working hard, adapting to changing market conditions and changing zip codes (even changing careers).
Why can't you suck it up like a man and live off your own back without expecting my tax dollars to subsidize your inefficiency.
You sound like a Palin fan...all hot air and no substance.
Capitalism and free markets do not mean no government involvement. And government involvement does not equal socialism.
The fact is saving Chrysler was a huge economic plus for America. Hundreds of thousands of jobs saved, for Chrysler, and for the hundreds of companies who feed off of Chrysler.
And for the U.S. economy, which at that time was looking like it might drop into a 1930's like depression, saving Chysler, and others, was a needed boost. With respect to both confidence as well as the economic impact of jobs saved vs. unemployed who would have needed to be supported by national, state and local governement.
Item 1: it is only your opinion that the bailouts were a benefit to the economy. Last I looked, we still have over 8 million Americans out of work, regardless of the arbitrary unemployment statistics.
Item 2: It was the socialist policies of Herbert Hoover and FDR that gave us the Great Depression. Had the government not "helped", the economy would have recovered long before 1942.
At 23 billion unpaid the expenditure per Chrysler employee is about $ 420,000 apeice. Thats an expensive "half-time in America". If you work for a small company and it goes belly-up you might get a modest severance package maybe equal to a couple months pay. What a sop to the Democratic constituencies ie. - unions. Too bad the company isn't even US owned.
So Alexander Hamilton and George Washington were National Socialists?
And, according to you so was Abraham Lincoln?
You are as misinformed about this country's history as the woman you are such a fan of.
FACT: Most American presidents have supported tariffs to protect American goods and companies.
The "Free Trade" anti-tariff mantra was started by the PROGRESSIVES and Woodrow Wilson, whom if you're familiar with NRO's very own Jonah Goldbeg's writings were actual fascists.
So, it is you Palin Fan who is celebrating and clinging to National Socialism not someone like me who wants to go back to the actual American System.
You really expect me to buy your comparison of Barack Obama with Washington and Lincoln? Who exactly is uninformed?
You may be able to get away with this sort of simplistic nonsense on the Huffington Post, but not here.
Progressive, Fascists, Communists, Socialists, Liberal: its all a variation on the same theme of central planning and protecting inefficient and lazy people.
Stop stealing my money through taxes to bailout your union buddies and get a real job.
Obama/Romney, what's the difference? They're both liberals who believe that the government should force people to purchase health insurance or pay a fine.
I mean, really, what is the difference between a liberal governor from Massachusetts and a liberal Senator from Illinois?
Interesting points RYANT. That said, two wrongs don't make a right. The union labor has helped make GM insolvent. Forget fairness - it was in all our best interests long term to let the companies fail and reorganize.
Are you glad Chrysler's secured creditors were illegally subordinated to the union workers?
Are you glad your legislative representatives had explicitly rejected what the executive branch did anyways, with no authority?
And your calls for a renewal of economic nationalism ring hollow in the context of an Italian car company's pleas for us all to pull together.
PS -- the Japanese would never buy an American car, regardless of whatever access our companies had to their consumers. They wouldn't even fit on the roads, even if the Japanese would be caught dead with an ugly, inferior product.
Bailing out losing companies isn't standing up for Americans. It's keeping a few Americans afloat at a greater cost than the cost to reallocate the capital and labor into more productive enterprises. That's stupid, and America shouldn't be about stupidity.
Bailing out union labor is even worse. It's support for organized thuggery, and extortion from workers and the public. That's morally wrong and often criminal, and America shouldn't be about those things, either.
And underlying all the anti-free-trade comments is fear--fear that we aren't smart enough to out-compete others even for our domestic purchases. America shouldn't be about fear, ever.
Had Bush and Obama not given Chrysler and GM billions, what would have happened? They would have filed bankruptcy, but they would not have decayed to nothing. Investors would have bought the companies. They would have been restructured. Waste would have been slashed. Union contracts would have been abrogated and renegotiated. GM and Chrysler would have survived - and would now be on firmer footings.
Instead, Obama cheated bondholders and gave their ownership to the UAW and Italy's Fiat, and cost the taxpayers billions.
That's exactly right. Too many folks don't realize that bankruptcy could have been just what the doctor ordered - it didn't have to mean utter destruction of those car companies. It could have been done in a way that fixed the biggest structural problems (like beating back the unions) without ending the car business for them. But I guess unions are too juicy for politicians to neglect.
And Ford Motor would be a stronger auto company than it is today. It would have been able to take on some of those GM and Chrysler workers. It would have greater market share in its domestic market, therefore making it a stronger competitor globally. This is the classic Broken Window fallacy that statists always make. Shame that old Clint fell for it.
Obama did an end around on the best bankruptcy laws in the world, so that he could protect his union paymasters. Obama is a union stooge.
Since NAFTA was passed in 1993, everything the Free (Traitors) Traders have promised us has been proven to be a lie.
NAFTA benefited Mexico it did nothing but kill jobs in the United States. And, truth be told it only really benefited the Mexican elite.
We're on the 3rd recession since NAFTA passed. Far from being an economic boon to Americans it has decimated the American trucking industry and the American construction industry.
Real unemployment is higher than at any time since the Great Depression, something the Free Traders assured us would be nigh near impossible, what with Free Trade there to prevent another Smoot-Hawley Tariff, (which in the fairy tales the Free Traders tell themselves was the cause of the Great Depression).
Free Trade has crippled this nation and decimated millions of jobs that the American working class once relied upon to feed their families.
And, what has been the benefit? Cheap Chinese junk!
Speaking of China, I remember the Free Traders claiming that Free Trade would bring "liberty and freedom" to the Chinese people....What a load of bunk that was!
And, btw: do we even have true "Free Trade" with China? Is it possible for a first world country to have a true "free trade" with a third world country?
I mean what good our "open markets" if 99% of the population can't afford to buy our goods? ...(China actually restricts much of the market for American goods anyways).
The only people afraid of free trade are those who aren't willing to get paid what they're worth. Instead they want the government to help them at the expense of the consumer. Why should a working man be forced to pay high prices just to subsidize some union worker in Detroit?
Bottom line: Detroit can't cut it. Chrysler is on its second bailout. How long until the next one.
I immediately recognized all the bunko descriptions of what happened in the "first half" all right but I worried whether this wasn't the initial signal are more taxpayer funds planned for the auto unions at Chrysler and are already in the works for the "second half."
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