Betras, Green Recall Romney's Call to Inaction

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

LORDSTOWN, Ohio -- David Betras, the Mahoning County Democratic Party chair, and David Green, president of Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers, want to remind Mahoning Valley voters that Mitt Romney opposed the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler that breathed new life into the local auto industry.

“A centerpiece of our economics is that Lordstown plant. If Mitt Romney were president when that Lordstown plant was on its knees, it wouldn’t be there,” Betras said Monday from the United Auto Workers Local 1714 hall.

Green said the bailout gave GM the ability to successfully reorganize the company, and save tens of thousands of jobs. He offered to debate Romney "tany time right here at the union hall."

Romney stated his opposition to the bailout in a New York Times opinion piece published Nov. 18, 2008, the day after the three automakers requested federal assistance, warning it would be the end of the American automotive industry.

“It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed,” Romney wrote in the piece.

“That was wrong because [the bailout] worked,” Betras said Monday.

Three years later, GM and Chrysler have added 12,000 jobs in Ohio and the auto industry employs 840,000 workers in the state. The Lordstown GM plant benefitted from 1,200 of those jobs when it added a third shift in early 2010.

Romney remains steadfast in his disagreement with the bailout as he campaigns for the GOP nomination to run against Obama for president this year.

At a campaign rally inside Youngstown’s Taylor-Winfield plant yesterday, hours before Betras’ press conference in Lordstown, Romney suggested GM and Chrysler should have restructured under a managed bankruptcy instead of receiving a federal bailout.

Romney is not alone in his opposition to the bailout; all four of the GOP’s presidential candidates – Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul – all say they would not have given the automakers a bailout.