supermoto

I never said Toyota is evil, yet others think Exxon and Wal-Mart are for doing the same thing. There are plenty of Wal-Marts near me and none of them aquired their land by having a local government condemn land to sell to them. If someone has proof of that, please enlighten me. Wal-Mart also hasn't had any stores built with corporate welfare like Toyota has had plants built that way. No government has paid for infrastructure changes to entice Wal-Mart to come to town. Harley being unionized or not has little to do with the fact that Harley outperforms Toyota as a business, but isn't praised by the media for their better performance. I recently read that Camrys are being built in China for that market and engines for those vehicles are built there and also exported to Japan and the US. GM only builds engines in China for the Equinox and Torrent and the rest stay in China. Where's the difference? Just because holders of T-Bills are from Japan doesn't mean they own our country. T-Bills are guaranteed by the faith and financial ability to repay backed by the US government. We will never have to ask them for permission to do anything. If the value of the dollar drops dramatically, they lose money. It seems they better be just as nice to us. If some believe that cars like the Camry are mostly sourced from the US, they are the ignorant ones. Having a few token engineers to help plan a new product that is more fitting to the US market doesn't mean all the engineers and designers are in the US. DCX has far more engineers and designers here than Toyota and sell around the same number of vehicles. DCX has far more employees in the US assembling those vehicles as well. Two thirds of Toyotas cars are assembled here with 3/4 of those engines having final assembly here. Less than half of the transmissions are built here. GM builds the Duramax in Ohio with a number of parts from Japan and the original design made there. If that were Toyota it would be called 100% by the blind faithfull. Same situation with transmissions and a lot of other componenets. To build a car takes tooling. Any guesses where Toyota's tooling is made? You'd have to guess because Toyota won't admit to where it comes from. I have a vehicle designed and built in America with mostly American components. There is not a Japanese product that can meet my needs as well as it does. I don't have a German designed and built Saturn and I don't see where Saturn does either. The Japanese are adding a lot of jobs and investment in the US, but calling them just as American is very premature. GM and Ford are using a lot of their global investments for new product here, I just don't have one yet.

Let's see if I understand the situation. Liberals think unions are great and protect the employees from evil management. GM and Ford have union contracts and pay better and have more benefits for skilled and semi-skilled workers than the non-union Toyota, but they are fools for doing that. Wal-mart pays wages no different than many of those mom and pop businesses and frequently more with some benefits. What other large national retailers pay better and have more US goods in their stores? Wal-Mart is evil when they make a large profit. Exxon is evil when they make a large profit, even though, just like Toyota, people can choose to buy elsewhere. Toyota is called great for making a huge profit. It seems that on the coasts, which are mostly liberal, people buy a lot more Toyotas. Would seem a little two faced to me. On a side note Toyota had revenues 30 times what Harley Davidson had, but only had profits of 15 times as much. I guess that is why Toyota's market capitalization is only 15 times Harley's. Looks like there is an American company better run than Toyota.