I saw a program on television hosted by Dan Rather which was bacially bash Ford and praise Toyota hour. According to this program the factories such as Wixom which were shut down and have had their operations moved to Mexico are paying workers only $2 - 4 an hour. Which in certain cases will be ten times less then what they were paying employees in Wixom to build their vehicles. Now if this is true, shouldn't Ford atleast beginning to see if not already had a turn around in the amount of money lost per year?

How is it that everyone will sit and say that they want to buy an American vehicle, bash Mexico for illegal immigration and refuse to purchase a Toyota, Honda or Nissan? You have cars such as the Fusion which are made in Mexico (not in America) by Mexicans and Honda Accord's that you can purchase that were made in Marysville, OH by Americans. We all know the answer that Ford, DM and GM will give us on this issue. They simply can not afford to pay for their retired workers pension and health care ontop of their current workers paychecks and health care costs. Now either one day Toyota, Honda and Nissan are going to fall on hard times in the next 40 to 50 years due to the same issue or the big 3 just do not know how to play their cards right.

I have seen some really stupid moves by the big 3 and just do not understand what they are thinking sometimes. For instance you have the F-150 plant located in Norfolk, VA which is being shut down and operations moved. In 2004 Ford dumped $375 million into the plant to begin production of the new style F-150. The Norfolk Assembly Plant has excellent access to not only the sea lanes through the 3rd buisiest port on the Eastern Seaboard but also fantastic connections to the railways. They are not even much more then 10 minutes away from Norfolk Southern who operates the rail lines between Norfolk, VA, Detroit, MI, and Claycomo, MO. So you take a company, Ford, who see their future as not just selling America but world wide. To improve their current and future financial standings they close down their plants near the sea lanes which in the future will hurt their cost of shipping the vehicles because petro is not getting any cheaper. By the way Ford just can not seem to leave this plant for good as they keep saying they are. Toyota had interest in building their own plant on the property and being able to hire workers from the area so what does Ford do? They say that they will wait to tear down the plant or sell the property because they may want to reopen the plant soon. Even though they announced a permanent end to the plant only weeks before. So Ford will not only give your job to someone in another country for 10x less an hour, they'll fight to prevent other companies from moving in to employ you in the future.

I'm sorry for just rambling on but this situation that Ford and the rest of the big 3 has put themselves in drives me crazy. Not only does what they did in the past drive me nuts but what they are doing to fix the problem makes them look like a bunch of no brains.