Asked of President Obama
"When do we expect the jobs that have been outsourced to other countries to come back and be made available to the unemployed workers here in the United States?"
The president responded that much of the outsourcing was of low-wage, low-skill labor.
"It's very hard to hang onto those jobs," he said, "because there's always a country out there that pays lower wages than the U.S. And so we've got to go after the high-skilled, high-wage jobs of the future...We've got to do is create new jobs that can't be outsourced."
The president cautioned ... that "we're going to have to be patient and persistent about job creation because I don't think that we've lost all the jobs we're going to lose in this recession. We're still going to be in a difficult time for much of this year."
A woman from Michigan whose family members who work for GM and Ford prompted President Obama to provide a sneak preview of an announcement about automakers to likely take place on Monday.
"What specific steps do you see your administration taking about the health of the auto industry?" he was asked . The president called it a "very topical question because I'm going to be making some announcements over the next several days about the auto industry. I don't want to make all the news here today, so I'm not going to be as specific as you'd like, but I guarantee in the next few days you will have a very extensive answer on what we need to do."
Mr. Obama said as a "general philosophical approach" he believes "we need to preserve a U.S. auto industry...but the price is that you've got to finally restructure to deal with these long-standing problems. And that means that everybody is going to have to give a little bit -- shareholders, workers, creditors, suppliers, dealers -- everybody is going to have to recognize that the current model, economic model, of the U.S. auto industry is unsustainable."
The president said his administration expects "the automakers are going to be working with us to restructure" -- but with the onus on automakers. "Can they come up with a viable plan? If they're not willing to make the changes and the restructurings that are necessary, then I'm not willing to have taxpayer money chase after bad money," he said.
"And so a lot of it's going to depend on their willingness to make some pretty drastic changes," he added. "And some of those are still going to be painful because I think you're not going to see a situation where the U.S. automakers are gaining the kind of share that they had back in the 1950s. I mean, we just didn't have any competition back then, Japan was in rubble, Europe was in rubble -- we were the only players around. And that's not going to be true. This is going to be a competitive global market. We have to make those adjustments."
Oh, I hope this doesn't mean the government is going to take over the car companies...
Nominee steps down
President Obama's nominee to be deputy Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Jon Cannon, withdrew his name from consideration today.
The Obama administration is not commenting on this story beyond the above.
HMMMMMM...
