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	Name:	Talullahhound -
	Subject:	Glimmer of Hope for Autos
	Date:	2/17/2009 2:54:42 PM

You make a good point. I was watching 60 Minutes the other night. One of the stories was about the steel industry getting a "buy American" clause put into the stimulus bill. The steel manufacturer obviously thought it was a great thing. Not so the Catapillar CEO. He was afraid that the "buy American" clause would be seen as protectionist and would hurt his business overseas.

The Unions served an excellent purpose before there were laws to protect workers. But, it doesn't make sense to me to protect the workers at the expense of the industry. And the Japanese companies, in particular, have demonstrated that you can run a manufacturing industry without the labor unions.

In another life, I used to work with US Defense industry on international competitions. One of their goals was to get the US government to lobby the acquiring government for the "US" product. But that gets sticky when some of the other competitors are actually joint ventures between a US company and a foreign company, or when the foreign product has high US content.
Hardly anything in Defense is purely a US product anymore. And I suspect that other industries are the same.