Ford (d. 1947) has become an icon worshipped even by socialists, never mind chaps called conservatives in the US. One such socialist is Piers Morgan, who lost his editorship of The Daily Mirror because of a phone-hacking scandal and his American chat show because of poor ratings.
Having now repatriated to his native shores, he has published an article With One Crass Decision the Greedy Men Who Run Ford Have Betrayed Everything Henry Stood for.
The crass decision was proudly worded by Ford’s CEO Fields: “Over the next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small-car production to Mexico and out of the United States.”
“Isn’t that, with 93 million Americans currently unemployed, an astonishing thing for the boss of a major U.S. company to boast about?” exclaims Morgan (he exaggerated the figure, but what’s an order of magnitude among friends?).
What follows is a panegyric for Henry Ford’s undeniable business acumen only matched by his patriotism. That, according to Morgan, was all Ford stood for.
This displays ignorance staggering even by Mr Morgan’s standards. For Henry too had factories all over the world, and he stood for all sorts of things, most of them hideous.
For example, he was a rabid anti-Semite whom Hitler cited as his inspiration. Ford was the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf, an honour he merited for his literary rather than automotive output.
Henry published his personal newspaper The Dearborn Independent, putting to shame both the earlier pamphlet Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the later magazine Der Stürmer, whose editor Julius Streicher was rewarded with a Nuremberg noose.
For 91 straight issues in 1920 the paper ran front-page stories highlighting Jewish evils. The most strident pamphlets were later collected into a four-volume set called The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem.
The pamphlets crystallised Hitler’s thinking on the world’s foremost problem, not that he needed much help of that kind. He needed money though, and Ford had been financing Hitler’s movement since before the Putsch, which the New York Times reported in December, 1922.
Hitler gratefully decorated his study with a portrait of Ford and in 1938 awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest Nazi decoration for foreigners (which incidentally had been turned down by Francisco Franco, much reviled by the likes of Morgan).
Let’s not forget Ford’s day job either. Contrary to Morgan’s belief, he had factories all over Europe. They all profited under the Nazis, largely thanks to extensive use of free labour supplied by Auschwitz and similar job centres.
In 1928 Ford merged his German holdings with I.G. Farben. That chemical cartel also financed Hitler from the start, and its product range later included the Zyklon B gas serving the needs of Germany’s growth industry.
Ford’s greatest reward was profits generated on both sides of the war. His European plants assisted the Nazis as much as his Detroit factories helped the Allies.
There’s evidence that the US Air Force spared Ford’s factories in Europe. Either the RAF Bomber Command wasn’t party to that arrangement, or else Sir Arthur Harris got carried away, but in March, 1942, the RAF hit the Ford Poissy plant. However, the Vichy government paid Ford 38 million francs in compensation, with apologies for their lax anti-aircraft defences.
Ford didn’t play favourites. In 1929 he signed an assistance agreement with another champion of democracy, Stalin’s Russia. This agreement culminated in 1933 when Ford’s plant was completed in Gorky.
Ford lorries carried Germans into Russia and Russians into Germany (later also into Afghanistan). Most of those vehicles were made abroad. Ford jobs thus went to Europe much the same way as they’re now going to Mexico.
Today’s situation isn’t quite the same, but it’s a distinction without a difference. Morgan is of course as deaf to such niceties as he’s ignorant of Ford’s biography. Moreover, he doesn’t understand the nature of modern economics.
Modern business isn’t always apolitical, but it’s always amoral. That’s the nature of what I call ‘totalitarian economism’, treating the economy as the axis around which life revolves. From Smith to Marx to Friedman, this has been promoted by thinkers spanning the whole political spectrum.
From the strictly economic viewpoint, it makes sense to export labour to where labour is cheap. ‘Conservative’ economists will talk your ear off explaining how outsourcing ultimately benefits the economy by benefiting the consumer. Lower unit costs mean lower prices, with the funds thus freed channelled into more productive areas.
Yes, but what happens to all those workers, millions of them, who lose their jobs as an immediate result of outsourcing? They don’t all retrain as systems analysts, do they?
Most of them go on welfare, paid for by the same consumers who were supposed to be in clover. Suddenly we begin to realise that the consumer benefits aren’t as straightforward as economists claim – even on their own terms.
In broader terms, while the economy may gain in the short run, society will lose in the long run. Yet modern ethos won’t allow modern businessmen – modern people – to think along those lines.
This takes a thinker to understand, not your average hack. Especially one as ignorant as Piers Morgan.