WASHINGTON – President Obama’s blueprint for GM is a potential disaster for the Fort Wayne truck plant, Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, said Monday, saying the plan is “unbelievably bad news for Fort Wayne.”
Obama wants to downsize GM and direct the industry to switch to smaller vehicles, Souder said, and “that means fewer pickups, fewer SUVs, fewer station wagons – things we build in America, particularly things we build in Indiana.”
“Not only is it our GM pickup plant, but our parts people. They don’t make parts for smaller cars. Those are mostly made overseas or in non-union states where people don’t get health care, don’t get pensions and get less pay,” Souder said.
Souder said GM’s recovery plan, which included buyouts for employees and government loans, would have led to the company’s stabilization when the overall economy recovered.
He said the market should have been allowed to work, which may have led to GM’s bankruptcy or a prebankruptcy agreement instead of “a government takeover.”
“These guys,” he said of the Obama administration, “are going to make it so they won’t recover. … If you do something destructive, it’s worse than just standing there.”
Souder said a better approach is to focus on improving the economy, loosening credit and taking steps to spur car and truck sales.
He also criticized Obama’s move to ask GM’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, to step down.
Souder said Wagoner made mistakes, but he has a Harvard Business School degree and worked for decades in the industry.
By contrast, he said, the people Obama chose to oversee the changes are “a journalist and a college professor.”
“They think these guys with no experience in the auto industry are somehow going to save the jobs of my friends and neighbors and people from my church. It is unbelievable. I can’t tell you how upset I am,” Souder said in a telephone interview.
Souder was referring to Steve Rattner, a senior member of Obama’s auto industry task force, and to Edward Montgomery, who Obama announced would oversee aid to hard-hit auto plant communities and laid-off workers.
Rattner was a reporter for the New York Times more than 20 years ago and since then has spent two decades as a Wall Street financier. Montgomery, who has a doctorate from Harvard, was a top official in the Labor Department in the Clinton administration and now is a dean at the University of Maryland.
Souder said he thinks Montgomery will be involved in deciding what happens to GM and has a bias against trucks because he was part of the negotiating team for the Kyoto global-warming treaty of the 1990s.
