Fiat to build cars in Mexico instead of America

A true indication as to how badly America has fallen from being the world’s most powerful economy is analyzing the recent purchase of Chrysler, America’s third largest automotive company, by the Italian automotive company Fiat SpA. Although several factors contributed to this decline such as the international macro economic variable of the decline of the US dollar and the internal macro economic variable of the business strategy of Chrysler pursuing the high profit SUV vehicle market, the ability of an Italian company purchasing an American company demonstrates how degraded the American dollar and value of some iconic American brand names in America have become. If the foreign ownership of an iconic American company was not bad enough the subsequent business decision of the new Italian managers to build the Fiat 500 subcompact car in Mexico is like rubbing salt in the proverbial wound. These actions by Fiat give further credence for more Americans to demand that US military bases be closed in Italy and other foreign countries and that money reinvested in America in order to offer more jobs to hard working Americans. With friends like Italy, American tax payers should demand that their money be spent in America for Americans.

With America trying to recover from its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the country needs all the direct foreign investment it can get to help its economy create manufacturing jobs. While other foreign car manufactures like Honda, Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, and Nissan have all built factories in the United States offering American workers a chance for employment, Fiat on the other hand is only concerned about gaining market share and increasing their profit. In addition to Fiat building cars in Mexican assembly plants, the management at Fiat has also taken a tough stance towards the union workforce in America and demanded concessions it would never dare to make in Italy. Knowing the work ethic and mentality of the Italian worker, the same demands made to the Chrysler workers in America would have sparked a national strike in Italy and dramatized a segment of the Italian population into being forced to work harder.

With the mafia clans of the Camorra, Nyhgretta, and Cosa Nostra controlling almost the entire Mezzogiorno area in Italy, there is practically zero foreign investment is this area. Even northern Italian companies like Fiat avoid the southern part of Italy due to the extra costs the mafia would enact on a company doing business in its territory. This is why the popular Fiat 500, is built in a plant in Poland, hundreds of miles away from the high labor cost area of northern Italy, and the mafia controlled southern part of their own country.

Just like the other countries that were defeated in the Second World War, Italy owes a great deal of its economic prosperity and ability to recover from the war, because of the American tax payer. Beginning with the well-known Marshall Plan, billions of dollars were pumped into the Italian economy directly after the war. After the Marshall Plan, the United States has continued pumping hundreds of billions of American taxpayer money into Italy over the last 60 years. A large percentage of the hundreds of billions of dollars went towards funding a constellation of military bases spanning the entire country along with several embassies, consulates, and United Nations agencies. The massive amount of resources invested in Italy by the American government vastly outnumbers the amount of money the Italian government has invested in America, making the decision to build cars in Mexico which otherwise could have been built in idle factories in America more disturbing.

The silence of American political leaders from the Midwestern states where there is a large concentration of automotive manufacturing is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Fiat ownership decision to build the Fiat 500 in Mexico. However, due to the influence of the military industrial complex on congressional leaders, do not expect to hear any calls from these political leaders to shut down some of the 45 military bases the United States has in Italy.