FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DEARBORN — As GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney arrives in Detroit this week for a series of secretive fundraisers across the Metro-Detroit area, Congressman Dingell said he “hopes Governor Romney has answers for Michigan’s working families he abandoned two years ago when the American auto industry was in its worst crisis ever.”

In 2008, as Congress debated the decision to offer loans and aid to General Motors and Chrysler, Mitt Romney penned an Op-Ed in the New York Times arguing against the loan packages that saved hundreds of thousands of American jobs and led to the recovery in the domestic auto industry we see today. Said Governor Romney:

‘If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.’ (Let Detroit Go Bankrupt: 11/19/2008)

“When Michigan families and communities needed his support, he threw them under the bus. Now it’s their turn to let Romney go bankrupt,” said Congressman John Dingell. “Mitt Romney saw the debate over the rescue of the domestic auto industry and its workers as an opportune moment to earn some conservative credentials and abandoned those that needed, more than anything, sensible solutions to the crisis that the entire country faced. What’s clear now is that if Mitt Romney had his way, Michigan families would be left out in the cold with no jobs, no income, and no industry. And Michigan voters won’t forget it.”

The dire circumstance of General Motors and Chrysler two years ago is contrasted by a dramatically brighter outlook today. All three American automakers are operating at a profit for the first time since 1994 and they are hiring again. GM recently announced 2,500 new jobs in Hamtramck and Chrysler will add another 1,200 at Jefferson North Assembly in Detroit.

Meanwhile, Romney continues to flip-flop on health care reform. The same concept that he touted as a great plan and he signed into law in Massachusetts, he is now calling to be repealed at the federal level. He wanted better, more affordable care for his people out east (and he still says government should play a strong role in health care reform) but yet he wants to dismantle the very reform that has brought so many similar benefits to Michiganders.

Said Dingell, “Michiganders can see right through the flip-flopping. It’s clear that Romney’s more concerned with winning political points than with good policy for American families, but it’s also clear that he’s uncomfortable as a frog in a skillet trying to denounce the health care reforms he championed in 2006.”