According to the Los Angeles Times story, Coda Automotive Inc. has applied for a federal loan through the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. But its application has been pending for nearly two years, and Coda went forward without any government funding.
Coda manufactures most of the vehicle’s battery system and body in China. The parts are then shipped to the San Francisco Bay Area port city of Benicia for final assembly. The company has 300 employees worldwide and about 25 at the plant in Benicia. The company has not said how many cars it plans to manufacture in 2012 but the numbers are expected to be low — around 5,000 units or fewer.
Here we have a situation in which an American company is manufacturing parts in China and shipping those parts to the U.S. for assemblage. In addition, the bulk of the employment opportunities went to Chinese workers. Coda also is benefiting from a tax-payer supported $7,500 federal tax credit on the purchase price of $37,250.
What should transpire is that the federal loan through the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program be conditioned on a first-position recoupment position. The employees should become part of the ownership structure of the company as part of the loan agreement. In other words, the government should require broadened ownership of the productive capital assets of Coda among its employees, who would pay back their acquisition of ownership in Coda out of the earnings of the investment.
For Coda to receive financial support from the government, the structure of the support should be to provide insured loan investment capital. Coda certainly qualifies as a promising company within a major industry with long-term productivity growth potential with the resulting benefit of promoting the diffusion of advanced automotive and robotic technology into civilian industries. The loan would be used to build new superautomated and computerized robotic assemblies. Where necessary the monies would be used for supplemental retraining of labor workers to qualify them for any new jobs created. Most important, the profits from the investments would be fully paid out to new capitalists owners––the corporate employees. This should be a condition to receive the capital investment loan. The goal would be to create new capitalist owners simultaneously with the growth of the economy financed with government loan support. The profits would represent wealth created by public capital loaned to Coda. The desired result would be to decrease, rather than increase, the existing concentration of productive capital ownership and thus economic power in the hands of a minority. The credit mechanisms supported by the government would not involve the expenditure of any tax money and would support profit-making operations for the primary purpose of earning dividends for Coda’s stockholders, including the newly created capitalist owners. Businesses supported by such credit mechanisms would have a profit motive and operate with the requirement for efficiency imposed by a market economy. The goal would be to broaden the ownership of private corporations so as to make the interests of private industry more synonymous with the public interest and vice versa––while broadening private enterprise capitalism to include everyone in the society. Such policies and programs aimed at broadening productive capital ownership would foster extensive utilization of the most modern and efficient technological innovations and result in the revitalization of American free-enterprise capitalism mirrored in a strong growth-projected economy.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-coda-20120312,0,4507891.story
