Question: It’s hard to believe how blind many people are when it comes to the car industry. Many posters seem to have the attitude, “so what if GM suffers. They are run by a bunch of idiots.” GM may be run by a bunch of idiots, but their fate is our fate.
This mindless anti-business, “bring ‘em” down attitude is stupid. People rubbing their hands with glee while GM goes down the tubes don’t seem to realize that we are all going down the tubes with them. When the automobile industry suffers, so does the autoparts industry, the steel industry, tire industry, etc., etc.
There is also a lot of glib talk about cars being now being multitnational, so there really is no distinction between Japanese and American cars. If that’s so, where is the $30 billion trade deficit in autos coming from? That’s $30 billion transfered from us to them.
It’s also hard to believe all those people who so quickly dismiss Japanese racism so quickly when the same comments from Americans would be vehemently attacked. I guess politically correct thinking only applies in North America. There seems to be this “everything they do is good, everything we do is bad mentality” among a lot of people. America racisim of bad, Japanese racism is OK, or at least understandable. (People saying this probably never heard of the Ainu, Japanese aboriginals, or how horribly the Japanese treat them.) Our businesses are bad, their businessmen are good. This kind of thinking is going to do us all in. Wake up. It’s not GM against Toyota, it’s us against them.
None of this has anything to do with the quality of Japanese and American cars. The Japanese make good cars and I don’t feel any particular patriotic need to buy an American car and subsidize incompetant management and overpaid, illiterate assembly line workers.
So what’s the issue? Fairness. Many Japanese trade practices are detestable. Here’s just a few examples.
They close their markets to superior imported goods until their have developed their own. The Japanese auto industry exists only because they virtually closed their door to imported cars. They have recently used the same tactic with luxury cars and supercomputers among other products. I hear that they are about to the start the same tactic in the aircraft industry.
Why then, shouldn’t we do the same. Why not have a 50% tariff on VCRs until American companies can compete in VCRs? This would be no more absurd or unfair than what the Japanese do.
They make difficult for outsiders to trade in Japan and virturally impossible for outsides to buy Japanese businesses. They use everything from lapses of memory to local zoning codes to fend off foreign imports. They have virtually barred foreigners from bidding on large construction and telecommunication projects, which they freely bid on here. And foreign ownership of large Japanese business is largely unknown. Japanese own many of the largest banks in America. Foreigners don’t own any banks or other finiancial institutions in Japan.
In some areas, they simply do not permit foreign goods at all. They flood our market with VCRs and cars, but foreigners can’t sell a single grain of rice there. Japanese farmers recently ransacked a trade show where an American exhbitor displayed a product which contained a few grains of processed rice.
Japanese law does not forbid monopolies and vertical integration the way US anti-trust laws works. Large Japanese corporations are webs of vertical monopolies who crush anything in their path. They trade exclusively with each other and attempt to control or bankrupt outsiders. One of their favorite tricks, both in the US and Japan, is to find find some independent supplier and give him a huge order. Over time, the supplier becomes more dependent on the large corporation for its business. The supplier often expands and goes into debt to meet the increasing demands of the corporation. When the supplier is most vulnerable, then the corporation threatens to withdraw its business unless the suppler becomes a virtual slave, or it in many cases, purposely drives the supplier out of business and replaces it with a subsidiary of their own. People looking for busniessmen to hate ought to try Japan for a change.
The reason that the Japanese get away with this is simple – they hold 1/3 of the US debt. If the US gets a little too frisky, all they have to do is start demanding payment on those notes. Compare the US trade relations with Japanese with those of Europe, where legislation has limited penetration of the Japanese car industry to 8%
Answer: Interesting opinion, on what basis? How would this be any different from say a bank requesting immediate repayment in full on a personal loan… which they can at any time, if you read your contract closely.
I mean it is THEIR money, hence you borrow it on their terms. Right? Talk about sweeping a generalization!!! Based on your example, all you can honestly say is that your mother’s car had no drain plug in the radiator. I don’t see where you can come to a conclusion like the one above.
Your example is one Honda out of all the Hondas, Nissans, Toyota, Mazdas, Misubishis, etc in Japan.
Maybe it was an oversight at the factory? Who knows.
I really don’t have a personal stake in this. I just have to point out these ludicrous statements when I see them.
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