Levin hopeful of White House help for Big Three

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) on Sunday said he believes that
the Bush administration will come to the rescue of the auto industry after
Congress failed to move legislation providing loans to domestic carmakers.

“I think it’s very likely the White House will do what it
said it’s going to do, not allow the auto industry to collapse,” Levin said
during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

{mosads}The Bush administration has indicated that the economy is
too weak to allow any of the Big Three to collapse. Reversing course, the White
House is now saying it is considering the use of funds from the $700 billion
Troubled Assets Relief Program to help the carmakers.

Levin and fellow Michiganders Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D)
and Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) took to the Sunday morning talk circuit to
continue to make the case for a bailout for Detroit’s troubled Big Three.
However, Republicans reiterated their opposition to a plan lacking significant
concessions by labor groups.

“I think we didn’t do a good enough job explaining to
citizens across the country what a failure of the automobile industry would
mean for America,” Granholm said, while taking aim at Republicans, whom she
accused of trying to seize the negotiations as an opportunity to target labor
unions.

“While they were negotiating and actually coming to an
agreement, leadership staff, Republican staff, were already circulating a story
that the unions had killed the deal,” Stabenow argued on “Fox News Sunday.”

“They did not want an agreement,” she added. “That is a
political agenda of the leadership at a time when the economy is teetering on
the edge.”

Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.), who led negotiations on a
Republican alternative bill focused on wage concessions by the United Auto
Workers (UAW) union, suggested that the GOP bill would have been a more
responsible plan.

“We put forth a plan that actually has shared sacrifice,
that causes the debt-holders to reduce their debt by two-thirds so the
companies are actually viable to do some things,” Corker said on Fox. “If we do
this under the terms that Deb Stabenow is asking, this is the beginning of
probably hundreds of billions of dollars, because we’re piling on taxpayer
money on top of $62 billion liability that they cannot pay back.”

“I am glad to see that the proposal that was made by the
chief executives of the Big Three didn’t get accepted,” former Massachusetts
Gov. Mitt Romney (R) said on “Meet the Press.” Romney is a Michigan native,
whose father was governor of the state and head of a now-defunct auto company.

“Right now, those companies suffer about a $2,000 per
automobile cost disadvantage,” Romney said, arguing in favor of the
Republicans’ package that would require cuts in benefits to UAW workers within
the next year. “As long as that $2,000 disadvantage is on their back, they
can’t be competitive.”