Toyota decided long ago during the push to force Japan to open the doors to imports from the US to balance Toyota exports to the US, that they would colonize the US by opening factories here. This allowed them to pocket all the profits while keeping the door open to selling 2-4 million cars every year in the US. This clever move paid off quite handsomely and now many Americans think Toyota is benign and not a major, major cause of the capital drain as well as job drain in the US.
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ΩΩI watched the PBS story about the Toyota hearings in Congress. Note the sponsor of the PBS News Hour:
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ΩΩThe Japanese knew many years ago, the road to domination of the US is to hire as many Americans as possible while keeping the profits and power firmly in Japanese hands. This path was paved by bribing even US Presidents to act on behalf of Japanese corporations even as the US is totally locked out of Japanese markets. This worked, in spades. Not that it made things perfect for Japan, far from it!
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ΩΩBut it did work for the Toyota corporation! The fatal weaknesses within the game plan pursued by the post-WWII Japanese elites has not been properly explored because people like absolutes rather than complex stories of various interactions having unforeseen consequences. The Japanese experiment with using robots and high technology coupled with aggressively closed markets to build a mercantile empire has backfired on the Japanese culture and people.
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ΩΩThe collapse trust with the foreign Toyota corporation has taken a severe toll. The hearings in Congress reveals not only problems with this alien organization but also has drawn some attention to how foreign entities weasel their way into our government at every level. As usual, I like to go a round about way in this story so we can be crystal clear, what is going on. This is life and death for Americans. If we don’t want to be a nation, we can continue on our present path. This would be very,very dangerous.
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ΩΩFirst, there is a Japanese American Manufacturer’s Association which has some web sites I frequently visit to garner small tidbits of information. Information every American should have hammered into their heads. First, the New Year message from our rulers in Asia:
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JAMA Chairman’s Comment: New Year’s Message
Addressing Safety and Environmental Protection in Road Transport . Japan’s automakers will continue to advance both active safety (collision avoidance) and passive safety (injury mitigation when accidents do occur) through the development and application of in-vehicle safety technologies, while further improvements in road infrastructural provisions (including traffic management systems, notably through the expanded implementation of ITS) will be the focus of cooperation between the public and private sectors. JAMA will also be promoting increased safety awareness among road users through its public information campaigns as well as its safe-driving and other educational programs, while lobbying for further measures to improve the road use environment.
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When this was written, already the Toyota scandal was brewing. Already, the attempt at fobbing off the computer problems on floor mats was failing. I once had a Japanese car that had a lousy computer chip in it and it drove worse and worse until it was nonfunctional. That is, the gas feed failed. The car had to be returned and repaired.
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This shouldn’t surprise anyone using computers. After all, computers are notorious for having problems!
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The foregoing efforts will thus address road safety in terms of both the “hardware” and “software” involved, and serve the government’s goal of making Japan’s roads the safest in the world.
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Japan’s roads are increasingly safe due to a decline in traffic. The Japanese are increasingly unable to afford to own a car. Japan imports all of its oil and this is a strain on trade profits so the ruling elites there are content to see fewer car users. The Toyota organization has factories all over the planet with the vast concentration of these in the US. For the US auto industry was Japan’s greatest competition in the world. So invading US markets and displacing US producers was the road to Banzai victory.
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. Because of their long-held conviction of the urgency of this issue, Japanese automakers have, over many years, implemented a broad range of measures to combat global warming. Advocating the integrated approach, involving all the stakeholders involved, to reducing CO2 emissions in road transport, the automakers will, for their part, continue to invest maximum efforts in the following areas: accelerating the development of technologies for increased fuel efficiency and next-generation vehicles; promoting the more widespread use of low-carbon models; advancing research on and proposals for road congestion mitigation measures; and encouraging the adoption of ecodriving by vehicle users.
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As I am so fond of saying, the entire CO2 thing is totally bogus. If Toyota wishes to stop it, all they have to do is kill off Toyota and all other auto industries. We should have no more autos and cease this craziness if we are destroying the ‘climate’ via CO2 pollution. No one is even slightly serious about this except for the exceptional amounts of hot air which is probably causing even more global warming than CO2 at this point.
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We have to either take this seriously or give it up. I don’t care which. This is obviously flim flam to impress the people who are elites and control world opinion.
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Promoting Greater International Cooperation and Understanding in Support of Free Trade
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NO Japanese manufacturer or business believes in free trade. They believe in ONE WAY trade with high levels of protectionism for Japan while all rival markets are open doors to Japanese domination. More about that from the Japanese American Manufacturers Association.
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The global scale of its operations underscores for the Japanese automobile industry the importance to further progress of free trade promotion and the forging of a fair international business environment.
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Reaching consensus in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations and establishing economic partnership agreements between countries and regions are therefore seen as key elements in supporting the growth of the global economy. Particularly in view of the current severe economic conditions, JAMA believes that progress in these areas will effectively underpin business recovery and stability.
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Japan demanded and got the lion’s share of the stupid and wasteful US clunker deal. Japan hopes to crawl back out, again, from its own self-imposed depression via exploiting the US and now, Chinese auto markets.
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Globalization has brought to the forefront such issues as double taxation, which has underlined the need for international harmonization to reduce the heavy financial burdens enterprises are otherwise forced to carry in this regard. The violation of intellectual property rights is another issue that urgently requires action. IPR infringements impede fair business activity and feed the diffusion of counterfeit products on a global basis, thereby causing economic losses and potentially jeopardizing the health and safety of consumers.
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HAHAHA—this is all about China. The US is prostrate before Japanese domination but China is twisting the Japanese tail in this regard, just as they twist US and EU tails into knots. The Japanese are kings at figuring out tricky ways to prevent competition selling within Japan. And the Chinese study them and imitate this whenever the rulers of China decide to do this.
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Just recently in the news, the Hummer deal with the Chinese was squashed by the rulers there who didn’t want gas guzzlers screwing up China’s oil trade overhead costs.
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JAMA will continue to address these issues from a standpoint that emphasizes close cooperation with governments and industry partners worldwide and, at the same time, reinforces the positions and policies of the Japanese government.
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ΩΩToyota owns a huge hunk of our Congress and has as many strings attached to ALL our Presidents since Reagan was a Japanese puppet. They would far rather not have us notice their spiderweb of influence and dearly love having Americans hate our own unions rather than wake up to who is really destroying our sovereign wealth.
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ΩΩBelow is a graph I made from two other graphs at the JAMA website. I wish to illustrate how the Japanese killed our auto industry via one way trade:
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Motor Vehicle Imports by Year Industry Statistics. JAMA
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ΩΩLook at this!!!! Japan exports mostly to the US, over 1.5 million cars. This chart is ALL their exports but more than half of these were aimed straight at the US. Meanwhile, the US in 1970 exported to Japan about 12,000 cars, the rest being European, mostly German cars.
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ΩΩAs the years passed, exports to Japan tripled by 1975 but Japanese exports were at nearly 3 million, and this was 60 times bigger than imports into Japan!!! Amazing, isn’t it?
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ΩΩBy 1996, foreign imports, now mostly from the EU and only about 20% American, reached an apex of 439,000. Set against exports from Japan of 4.7 million! This was merely 10 times bigger which means the ratio improved…but ONLY because Japan was aggressively moving its production inside of countries it intended to dominate!
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ΩΩIn 2008, sales were still around 4.5 million while imports into Japan fell by 50% to around 200,000 which is about 22 times smaller than Japanese exports. That is, twice as bad as in 1996 and heading rapidly towards the 60 times greater in 1970 era!
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ΩΩToyota and other Japanese automakers sell millions of cars within Japan while everyone else on earth can barely sell a few dozen each and only Japan has this sort of lopsided market. It is a major cause in many other nation’s trade deficits. Especially in the US.
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FOXNews.com – U.S. Officials Cite Jobs in Defending Toyota Against Onslaught
Enough with the Toyota bashing — that’s what some state officials, worried about the impact the company recalls could have on the United States’ fragile economy, are saying in the face of the growing confidence crisis.
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Ah, the Deep South! So patriotic! Waving flags and yelling about how all-American they all are… while licking foreign boots and bowing to the ground, banging the head on the ground groveling to foreign entities! HAHAHA.
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Toyota studied the US and carefully located factories in former slave states that are anti union. Now, Americans will crawl on glass to qualify for even the lowliest Japanese auto manufacturing job. And fight for the right to have the Japanese dominate us even more. This desire to kow tow is very powerful and totally destructive but we think we can be the bosses of the world and respected in Asia while working as janitors for the Japanese. HAHAHA. Again.
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All of Asia looks down on us even as we puff ourselves up. We have to accept this fact. We can’t boss anyone around when we are bossed around mercilessly at home by foreigners.
. Toyota isn’t just a Japanese company. It maintains a huge operation in the United States, with plants in seven states and 1,400 dealerships all across the country employing hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers.
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ΩΩTotally ensnared, aren’t we? The people selling Japanese cars here are loyal to Japanese owners, not anyone in the US. They say, so what if all the profits flow to Japan! I have a nifty job with a pathetic pay check! Well, guess what? The minute we all can’t afford Japanese cars due to being poorer and poorer, the Japanese will dump us. This is true of all our foreign dominators! They are here to MILK us. Mooo!
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How Toyota Can Restore Its All-American Image | BNET Auto Blog | BNET
On Wednesday, Toyota’s former top man in the U.S., Jim Press, sent a remarkable e-mail to Automotive News in which he said that his former employer had been hijacked by “anti-family, financially-oriented pirates.” Press spent more than 30 years at Toyota, and is certainly qualified to comment on its culture.
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HAHAHA…. the Japanese workers know very well that Toyota is very cruel. The organization has been sued for literally working Japanese peasants to death. Yes, they are PEASANTS and so are US workers: peasants to be exploited and then let die.
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The pretense of being a ‘family’ was dropped long ago. That was temporary to ease the transition from a craftsmanship organization to a mostly robot world with workers scurrying around the robots, tending to them or doing basically janitorial labor to keep the place operational for the machines displacing the humans.
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As robot ruled the roost, the social standing of the humans declined in Japan and are declining in the US. It makes economic sense to displace and crush human workers: they have annoying habits like needing to eat or sleep or have families. Robots simply must be maintained and cleaned.
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As the first non-Japanese to serve on the Toyota Motor Corp.’s board, Press’ words—made public because, he said, “I can’t stand it any more”—carry considerable weight. And they go a long way toward explaining why Toyota has undermined its decades-long effort to establish itself as an American-based company putting Americans to work.
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“I believe that Toyota has always worked for the benefit of the United States,” said embattled President Akio Toyoda. “I tried to convey that message from the heart, but whether it was broadly understood or not, I don’t know.”
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HAHAHA. All executives love to lie. Universally. Toyota has NEVER worked for the benefit of the US. They work day and night within the government of Japan to destroy US industrial power and control and transfer this into Japanese hands! Hiring a few Americans to do low level work for Japanese overlords is NOT benefiting our nation even slightly.
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For a time, Toyota’s effort to blend into the heartland seemed to work. It was less than two years ago, for example, that Fortune magazine had a cover story about Toyota headlined: “America’s Best Car Company.” The photo featured the stars-and-stripes, a Toyota pick-up and a positively giddy group of American workers.
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But the recall crisis has changed all that. The image of a company tightly controlled from Japan, keeping its U.S. managers in the dark, is becoming cemented in the minds of both legislators and the public.
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ΩΩToyota kept Americans in the dark because we are SERVANTS. We are peasants. Why would the rulers living in distant lands bother enlightening slaves, servants and underlings? DUH. Someday Americans might figure this fact out…this is, after all, how we treat anyone we control or own! We set the rules, ignore complaints and unilaterally dictate what will happen next. Well, the Japanese do this too! DUH.
List of Toyota manufacturing facilities – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
United States
- Toyota Motor Manufacturing Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama – V6 and V8 Engines.
- TABC, Inc., Long Beach, California – Catalytic Converters, Sheet Metal Stampings, Front End Assemblies.
- Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, Georgetown, Kentucky – Camry, Avalon, Solara convertible, and Venza as well as the AR and GRengines.
- Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana, Princeton, Indiana – Sequoia, Sienna, and Highlander
- Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas, San Antonio, Texas – Tundra
- Toyota Motor Manufacturing West Virginia, Buffalo, West Virginia – ZZ, MZ, and GR engines; automatic transaxles
- Toyota Motor Manufacturing Mississippi, Tupelo, Mississippi – Prius Hybrid This facility is being built production starts 2010/2011. The facility or company is named “Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Mississippi, Inc.”[3]
- NUMMI (joint venture with GM), Fremont, California – Corolla and Tacoma
- Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc. (contract facility, starting in Spring 2007), Lafayette, Indiana – Camry
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ΩΩIf you go down the list of all nations in this link, it becomes painfully obvious that the bulk of these facilities are in the US for we were the very first nation the Japanese set out to conquer! And if we think they forgot about WWII, that is demented. No one ever forgets anything about WWII. For obvious reasons.
Culture of Life News 
“Toyota isn’t just a Japanese company. It maintains a huge operation in the United States, with plants in seven states and 1,400 dealerships all across the country employing hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers. ”
Should read; “Toyota is a Japanese Global Squid Corporation. It maintain a huge INFILTRATION operation in the USA….employing hundreds of thousands of endoctrinated sheep/ US workers who engage in the decimation and disintegration of their own country.”
Elaine, it’s always good to remind the USA citizenry about who rebuilt Japan after WWII and paid the bill for technology and manufacturing, and industry. A war torn, demoralized, and subjugated culture never forgets nor forgives the invaders. Financial and industrial infiltration was brillant on the Japanese part. “Vengenance shall be mine….” rings a bell…..
Elaine,
Whether my money ends up in Japanese or American stockholders hands is secondary (unless I’m the stockholder). I care about keeping my money in my own hands. I’ve driven Toyotas since I first learned to drive in the mid 70’s. I’ve driven other cars too, but kept coming back to Toyotas. My choices were and are based on affordability, reliability, safety, good customer service, low maintenance costs, minimal fuel use, and functional longevity of the car. For me Toyota has always offered the best bang for the buck.
I remember the laughter when Japanese cars were first introduced into the American market. In the 70’s American automakers competed with Toyota, Honda, Mazda, and Datsun (now Nissan) by putting crap out on the market. Remember Vega? Pacer? Gremlin? Pinto with exploding gas tanks in rear ends? And too many others to remember? Few of those remained drivable for any length of time, not to mention after warranty expiration. I wish it were not so, but it is fact. There were few exceptions. And unions were not the cause of cheap design and material decisions.
I would love to see an American automaker give Toyota real competition. (I believe Ford can do that.) In the early 90’s GM produced the EV1. It was marketed in California and was a great solution for our urban commuting needs. It was all electric and very popular with waiting lists to buy. What happened? And where is GM today? (Toyota even offered to drop prices a few years ago to give GM more cost competitiveness!)
As you suggest, this also is a fight about union and non-union car makers. Attacks on unions keep growing louder, even as union numbers have dwindled. Toyota’s American manufacturing plants, for the most part, are not union and are in “right to work” states. If Toyota must pay union scale their cars will be more costly. Sacrificing middle-class Americans’ well-being by destroying our own unions is not a solution.
And of course, health care reform (that doesn’t throw Americans under the bus, so to speak) will help American automakers compete cost-wise.
It seems to me that you are villainizing Toyota for the way nearly all corporations have come to function globally for Wall Street and shareholder profits. In the end it’s still only a car and the choice to purchase is mine (assuming I still have income!).
Most nations on this tiny little planet do not subscribe to “globalization” for their own nations’ economies. They are protective of their cultures and sovereignty, and still operate under the concept of international trade. They have simply taken advantage of US open door “free trade” policies while we demonized the concept of protectionism. Toyota did not create this scenario, but has excelled at using it to its’ own advantage. Isn’t that the much revered “competition”?
I’d love to see American automakers excel once again with a middle-class that can afford the best home-grown products. But we need to drop the banksters’ “global economy” nonsense (with their off-shore accounts – maybe even in Japan) and return to protectionist international trade policies. What are the chances of that?
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“…what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”” The accurate 1953 quote by GM’s CEO Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson
Dare I say the obvious, CROCODILE TEARS because they failed to eat up all the market?
All corporations have the aim of gaining market share, ultimately winning it all. Greed has no limits.
WalMart is another one. Maybe they should get together and sell WalMart branded cars.
American Cars are Superior, always have been… the whole fad of exotic reliability is just a function of publicity and ignorance and does not exist
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Best sports cars, work trucks, power plants, transmissions, SUVs, luxury autos are all American made period…. imean thats real
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American style is overkill for many a narrow mind
toyota makes a good product at a competitive price.
whereis the conspiracy? The fact they had two major recalls and their three largest parts suppliers were raided by the fbi indicates some type of takedown action.
sheesh. like toyota is this countries big problem. The total retail value of these cars is only 25% of the bank bailout total. the usg gave away 4 times more money to the banks that created the bogus swaps and credit instruments.
at least with toyota you get a product. american bankers were selling crap all over the planet with no intrinsic value whatsoever.
thx for the big picture, jim. i agree it’s yet another distraction in between elections… creating more scapegoats. hello palin, muslims, healthcare, “recession is over” etc.
http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/
I suppose people will be either amused at what they see as my ignorance or annoyed at what they believe is my arrogance, but I firmly believe that the Japanese automakers have never, ever understood automotive manufacturing and technology.
What the Japanese understand is mass production of a single, uniform, bland item, whether it’s an auto, a lawn mower, a radio, an iPod, a whatever.
The Japanese shamelessly but cleverly stole every single bit of American automotive knowledge from the Detroit Big 3 back in the late 50’s and early 60’s (or perhaps I should say that Detroit was too full of ego to be minding the shop and handed it over). Since then, the Japanese have yet to produce a single vehicle that wasn’t a cheap imitation of something that had already been designed and built in America, Germany, Italy, or Britain. (That’s the reason, by the way, why the Japanese have never once produced a car that’s globally regarded and collected as an automotive “classic”–would you rather have a ’65 Shelby Cobra or a ’65 Datsun?)
The Japanese also understand how to enter and succeed in the American market through (1) manipulating our government officials and (2) playing on consumers that don’t know a piston ring from a piss.
Most Americans are notoriously ignorant about automotive technology. They care about color, styling, comfort options such as “climate control,” sound systems, butt warmers, automatic windshield wipers, and so on. But pop the hood and most American drivers will be baffled. It’s even worse now that most engines are overstuffed with electronic and computerized gizmos.
In addition, most reports of automotive “quality” are based on consumer-reported complaints, the worst possible measure of an auto’s quality. To make matters worse, ask almost anyone you know about car quality, and they will immediately start talking about their own experience with a brand, not the larger picture: “I drove one of those. They’re great.” So what? Every carmaker produces both good units and lemons. That’s the nature of high-tech manufacturing, so a single experience isn’t the best metric for quality.
The automotive press is also an unreliable measure of quality. Do you really trust a car review that’s followed by a full-page million-dollar ad for the same car?
This is the source of Toyota’s undeserved reputation for quality: ignorant consumers coupled with Madison Ave. emphasis on image rather than substance.
I’m not suggesting that the Japanese haven’t built some quality automobiles (Subaru comes to mind–although they imitated the Germans, not the Americans.) But Elaine is absolutely correct in looking at this issue in terms of economic considerations, not automotive quality. This is an issue of a nation’s economic health and its broad-based manufacturing infrastructure, not the fact that the gas pedal on Grandma’s grocery-getter got stuck and landed her in the living room.
Ronald Reagan a Japanese puppet? Oh c’mon Elaine. Just because Reagan was paid 2 million dollars for two twenty minute speeches in Japan right after leaving the White House, you call him a puppet? You just have a negative bias against that lying fraudster Ronald Reagan. And don’t forget: the taxpayer played a BIG role in building most of those Toyota USA plants through tax breaks and subsidies of other kinds. Toyota building plants in the USA was a win-win for the elites. They attacked the unions, especially the UAW and Toyota plants helped drive wages and benefits in general down.
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