[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 18]
[Senate]
[Pages 24286-24287]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           AUTOMAKER BAILOUT

  Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, it is a pleasure to be back here this 
week. I hope the Presiding Officer and his family have a wonderful 
holiday season when we leave tomorrow. I rise today to talk about the 
proposed automaker bailout. I have tremendous empathy for all of the 
people involved. I spent most of my life in business. I am sure these 
CEOs and others leading these companies are going through tumultuous 
times. I empathize with them.
  In my beginning period, I was a card-carrying union member. I know 
there are a lot of workers who are very concerned about their future. I 
have tremendous empathy for them and their families. This is actually a 
very serious time in our history. Regardless of where you are, people 
are concerned about the future. I was in other parts of the world last 
week. All around the world, people are concerned about the future.
  I do want to speak to the speech of the Senator from Maryland 
regarding the financial component. Many of the car dealers who have 
called into our office actually are far less concerned about the Big 
Three. What they are more concerned about is having financing for 
consumers who are coming into their dealerships. Like her, I want to 
see people throughout our country be able to operate their businesses. 
I am certainly not here to defend any of the Secretaries or anybody 
else. I will say that I did have a conversation yesterday with 
Secretary Paulson and with Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke. They are 
putting in place a facility to deal with consumer finance that 
hopefully will be in place by year end to help deal with some of the 
financing components that are stressing the automakers.
  I wish to specifically address the request by the automakers. I was 
privileged to be part of a hearing the other day in banking where the 
three CEOs and the leader of the United Auto Workers testified. I was 
struck by the lack of coherence, the fact that we had three leaders in 
corporate America

[[Page 24287]]

whom I actually have a degree of respect for. I was in some ways 
embarrassed for some of them. They evidently had no plan. They felt in 
the Senate and in the House today the time was good for receiving 
moneys from taxpayers. It was sort of a ``get here while the getting is 
good,'' if you will. It was embarrassing to hear their testimony and 
the lack of thought that had been put into place as it related to the 
request. They had come up with a number of $25 billion. They were 
actually hesitant to tell us how, as a pact, the three of them had 
decided to divide this money. After a lot of probing, we were able to 
get them to say that they have decided to divide the money based on 
their proportional share of the auto market.
  I pressed them to find out if we did, in fact, agree to loan them 
this $25 billion, would that be it? It was evident that, no, this was a 
downpayment and that they had done nothing whatsoever to think about 
what might happen after the taxpayers invested in them.
  One of the questions I wish to ask is: Why would we address these 
three automakers as some homogeneous group? They are three different 
companies. They are in three different circumstances. It is interesting 
to me that the head of the United Auto Workers knows that they are in 
three different circumstances. What he said was that Ford was actually 
in good shape. They had made some tough decisions and done some things 
back in the year 2006 that have put them in place to actually survive. 
They have about $23 billion of cash right now. He said he had been in 
to look at the books and Chrysler was actually in second place. I would 
have thought that Chrysler actually would have been the weakest of the 
three. Their books are not public because they are a private company. 
He laid out the fact that actually Chrysler was in a stronger position 
but that GM was a company that was in more disarray. So as we look at 
this, I find it so irresponsible that we would actually even talk about 
a rescue package, looking at these companies as a group. They are three 
very different companies that have addressed their issues in three very 
different ways. I find it incredibly irresponsible to even consider 
looking at them as a group.
  I wonder, in a market with 10 million cars being sold, why we need 
three domestic automakers. I wonder whether we would be better off if 
possibly we had two or we had one that was strong. Again, that is 
something that the market can decide.
  One of the greatest disservices we could actually do to these 
automakers and to the many people who depend upon them for employment, 
whether they be direct employees or tier 1 or 2 suppliers, is to grant 
them this money. That would be a major mistake. These companies have 
all kinds of legacy issues they have not been able to deal with. Let me 
point out one. General Motors has 7,000 dealers. They probably need 
about 1,500 dealers. What the dealers did years ago is, they went 
around and got States to pass laws that said that GM could not do away 
with their dealerships. We have had the strong dealers actually calling 
our office and telling us they actually have hurt themselves by putting 
these State laws in place, because there are so many dealers that each 
of them is having trouble making a profit. It would be a tremendous 
disservice for us to grant money to these companies without causing 
them to reorganize.
  There is something we have in this country called bankruptcy 
protection. There is something that allows companies to go in and 
reorganize, to put their strengths in order, do away with their 
weaknesses and actually carry on. I do hope as we debate this--I 
realize nothing is going to happen this week; this was kind of a 
preapplication; that we will probably be dealing with this in January--
but I do hope we will look at this in a mature way and realize that 
these companies have not done the things they should have done, maybe 
that they could have done, and that possibly we can be of service to 
them by making them do the things they need to do.
  Another example: Chrysler Company has a situation where when they 
idle a plant, they actually, in some cases, are obligated to pay the 
workers of those plants for up to 4 years beyond the time the plant is 
idle. I don't know of any business in the world that can survive in a 
healthy fashion with those types of obligations.
  I have tremendous empathy for the people involved. One of these 
companies has a plant in our State. But I say to my colleagues, the 
worst thing we could possibly do in this situation is to acquiesce to 
this request that lacked coherence, lacked thoughtfulness, lacked a 
plan as to how these companies would be successful in the future, and 
let them go about their business in the way that they have been going 
about it. They will be back, if this money is granted. I hope we will 
stand firm, that we will be responsible with taxpayer moneys, and that 
even though I am opposed to this, even if the money ends up being 
granted in some form or fashion, we will cause them to make the 
decisions that need to be made for them to actually be successful in 
the future.
  I thank the Chair and yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Rhode Island.

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