The States of Ohio and Indiana competed for the new Honda auto assembly plant. The phrase made in the USA has changed to built or assembled in the USA since the component parts come from many other places including most likely some sub contractor in Central America who pay only about 50 cents an hour to workers. Ohio had offered Honda $78 million dollars in incentives. Indiana offered about $56 million dollars to get Honda to come ot Indiana plus they will spend another $100 million or so to build roads etc to support the Honda facility. Depending on the way you look at it, this means, Indiana is spending over  $100,000 for each job. Indiana won the deal. This is much less than the State of Georgia paid KIA to come to their state. Georgia paid $400 million to get KIA . That adds up to about $200,000 for each job.

 

Indiana has recently lost about 20,000 jobs in the auto parts industry. Honda is hiring only 2,000 and so the numbers do not make any sense. On top of this   one city in Indiana  paid out $10 million dollars to entice Honda to come. This money comes from their share in gambling casinos. 

 

Only about 50% of Honda, Toyota and Nissan auto parts are made in the USA and it is most likely much less since all major automobile assemblers have farmed out the auto parts industry to contractors who in  turn use sub-contractors from abroad. Most of the pieces that are assembled like pistons and valves are made or machined abroad. 25% of transmissions are imported too. In India, Honda workers are protesting for the right to organize or just to protest for social justice in the workday.

 

In the USA, the minimum wage stays in place and the main question to ask is how can any employer live off the working poor in this country and the impoverished destitute workers outside the USA.

 

Once upon a time in places like Cleveland, Ohio there were major international corporations having their world wide corporate offices. Companies employing 5000 workers were considered small to medium size companies. The stock market rewarded companies that tried to increase their work force with added valuation for their stocks. More workers once meant more growth etc.

 

The first assault on American auto companies took out more than 400,000 auto workers. More than 700,000 workers lost their jobs related to the steel industry.  Now American auto makers are taking the final hit and the best thing they could do now is just turn their companie over to the Asian companies since the supply of wage slave labor can not be exhausted. The Chinese reportedly are comming with their wage slave car.  According to the Indianpolis Star Research Center for Automotive Research. Alabama paid Mercedes $250 million in incentives to locate there or about $168,000 for each job. They paid Honda $158 million to locate their plant there too or about $105,000 per job. South Carolina paid BMW $200 million for their facility or about $100,000 per job. Of course this is tax payers money and  so workers overall are paying out to have someone else take their jobs.

 

An untold story behind all this surrounds World War 1 and World War 2.  Japan went to war because they in a sense were blockaded from economic survival. The U.S. in about 1898 gave Japan the right to seek economic survival by moving to the main land. However, they recinded this agreement in the 1930s and told Japan they could not move from  their island nation. During this time, the U.S. sold their scrap metals to Japan and Japan used the scrap to make weapons. It seems the USA could have let the Japanese move their factories to the USA decades earlier than they did and avoid World War 2. Perhaps no one would have had to drop an atomic bomb.  A study of Germany after World War 1 tells a  similar story where war could have been averted there if we let Germany moved their production around the world too.  However this so called Free Trade is not working either. This is a sad commentary behind the mess today where politics, nations, big business, power and money are all tangled together in a new kind of colonialism where economies are chopped up into pieces and moved from one place to another based on the lowest wages possible. Wars and terrorism are following the money.   They ignore what Henry Ford said about workers needing  to afford to buy the things they make. Today we have a race to the bottom where workers can not afford to buy the things they make and they certainly have no money left over to buy anything the USA has left to sell.  In the end, globalization will find out that you can not do business with people who have no money. All you can do is make profits on a short term basis before time runs out. As water seeks its lowest level, globalization is doing the same. A new kind of imperialism under elite groupings instead of nations is the end result.