Ah, gents....this falls squarely in the category of 'whose ox is being gored'. I'm quite certain that US beef producers and exporters would have a different point of view to express. If you get my drift...
Wow, too bad we didn't do this a long time ago. As in; TAX the hell out of everything thats imported to the USA! Well we use too but our comrades in office changed all that way back when. Now we got mexican made parts on our halfbreed cars. Thank You NAFTA, GATT. You even got Taiwanese parts on your Harley Davidsons. Yep if all us Americans had balls, and stood up for our selfs, would be riding 100% American Made Motorcycles! American factories everywhere making everything from buttwipe to watches, No more China Crap! Every American would be working, no more unempolyed,. Everyone Living the Dream! Now I need to wake from my dream and jump on one of my Husqvarna's and RIDE!
I say screw the beef industry if thaey can't grow beef without the hormones. Look at the feed yards, does that look healthy? Look at the cow burned eastern Oregon desert, at what the cattle ranchers do to the John Day river, at crap like hoof and mouth disease, you want to eat that? Why doesn't the guy down the road from me selling organic Buffalo use hormones? He sells about 50% of his meat to Europe, and it tastes really really good. What about all the messed up elk that are displaced by cattle ranches, why don't we eat them? They have minimal fat, grow with out hormones and use less recources. I am not sure if Tommie was being sarcastic, but we don't ride Harley's because they suck, we outsource parts because they are usually better, and cheaper elsewhere and taxing imported products in excess is not how to create American jobs. Most Americans don't really seem to want a repetitive job working in a hot, toxic, and noisy enviroment for minimum wage. We do need to stop buying low quallity imported crap (wallmart) and buy durable long lasting products. You can buy an American made, or Swiss, or Italian made watch rather than a chinees POS and hand it down to you grandkids some day, but it will cost you. So rather than inconvienence yourself by spending money, and having to go somewhere other than Wallmart, you continue to buy the POS from china. Thats the problem. Buy stuff to last, buy local, buy organic, buy handmade. Sorry, I had to rant. Turns out my Wallmart fish tank pump is a POS and now I have to go find a better one so Mr. Fish (AKA Casey Stoner) can have clean water.
And yet again there is a news article while interesting does not give important details such as how to send comments to the United States Trade Representative's office. With everyone's permission, if it's ok, think I'll periodically call them for updates and report back...
Left a message just now, wanted to wait until they had time to compile things. The website (link in post #1) appears to have 560+ comments, they seem to be putting them up in batches, with the latest batch being today 12/16/08. Spent some time reading the comments and while there are many many comments urging NO on motorcycle tariffs there are also many other comments regarding food products. If I don't get a call I'll become more persistent. I've previously indicated that information given to me would be disseminated to a large community of motorcycle enthusiasts that have a keen interest in this subject.
Update We talked on the phone. The highlights: They did indeed get many comments regarding European Motorcycles - many of those pointed out the loss of jobs in the USA if the motorcycles had a tariff. The comments are still being sorted through, reviewed, and are being organized. Their ambitious goal is to have a proposal for the higher up people to review before the Holidays, which may or may not happen. Their other ambitious goal is to have Annex I & Annex II lists updated before the change of personnel about the January 20th 2009 time frame. I'll call again early next week. If there is anyone reading this that would like to talk to me privately to better fight this tariff - that would be great. Anyone.
I talked to Ed, one of the owners or owner of the Aprilla forums based in Texas. I'm going to call on Monday/Tuesday to get an update from the USTR. I've thought a lot about this and am not sure in practical terms what else can be done by the general public at the moment. The Congress people may not see any letters sent to them until the USTR proposal is put together by the lower staff & committees for others to review/approve... and the comment period was closed on 12/8/08. I'll keep emphasizing the the loss of jobs in the USA and hope - for the moment.
Update I called... The proposal is not ready for anyone to approve yet and no firm time line is established. The distinct impression I have is things are moving, 1 or 2 weeks the proposal might be complete? As I expected they cannot comment on how the European motorcycles stand. They have hundreds of passionate pleas from motorcycle enthusiasts but probably not enough 'hard' data as to how many jobs in the USA will be lost if a 100% tariff is imposed on European motorcycles. If anyone reading this has hard data on job losses, especially the importers/manufacturers, it would be good to get that information to them as soon as possible. They have a physical location in DC where people can visit or at the very least call them. .
Well I posted some phone numbers to call 10 days ago here, ktm talk, aprilla forum, TT.... The only tangible effect may have been that they seemed to have severed communication with me. I'll try again next week. If they really don't want to talk to me, it really does not make a difference now anyway - but it would be nice to find out the time frame. I've deleted the contact numbers where I could, and have asked mods on those sites to remove the phone numbers.
We did it !! The bikes are off the Tariff list! They just called!!! At least for this round of modifications of the Annex I and Annex II lists.... NO TARIFFS He even thanked me!
Whew, that was close, thanks to Coffee for being his usual articulate self, and to everyone who took the time make their thoughts heard.
Wow, That is truly amazing. I was skeptical on how much effect civilians could have on policy. Congratulations to Coffee and all those who helped.
The news reports are starting to trickle in, I won't post them all but here is one of them someone posted on KTMtalk. http://www.racerxonline.com/article/european-motorcycle-tarriff-rejected.aspx
I'm stunned. I think that this is first time that I participated in something that actually made a difference. Thanks Coffee for pointing this out to us early in the game and for encouraging everyone to participate.
