ratner appeared before our committee in a closed door meeting and he said it would cost more to retool the chrysler engine plant in kenosha, wisconsin, and he felt that in light of that, they're better off just moving those jobs to mexico. with all the taxpayer money that chrysler has received, i don't understand in spite of his statement why we would move these jobs to mexico. doesn't it make better sense to utilize the retooling fund that is available for something just such as this, to retool that factory in keshnosha so we can keep those jobs here in the united states? >> let me try to respond to that, senator. first, i want to deal with a process point. i think clearly, the company did a poor job of communicating with local elected officials and community folks about the kenosha decision and i believe the ceo has apologized for that. it was not proper and i hope we won't have a repeat of that in terms of the communication. in terms of the substance of the decision, again, what i hope mr. ratner said because i believe these are the facts, is that chrysler made a decision a couple y

ratner said, 'cause i believe these are the facts, is that chrysler made a decision a couple of years ago to build two new engine plants, one in the u.s. and one in mexico. and by the time of this matter coming before us, hundreds of millions of dollars had already been spent on the plant in mexico. and also hundreds of millions of dollars in a plant in the u.s. so for us to go in and overturn that, number one, it would violated the principle that the president has insisted upon that we not interfere in the day-to-day management decisions and number two, just as a business matter, it would -- it would require walking away from hundreds of millions of dollars of invested capital. so i think the reality is for reasons of both principle and practical business, this simply isn't a decision that can be revisited. that is certainly a terrible event for the folks in kenosha and there's no way to make it a good event. the only thing i can say is i think in fairness, the alternative was a liquidation of chrysler that would have been far worse for everybody concerned but certainly we appreciate

they were left with no doubt that stephen ratner was calling the shots. the chrysler executives still hoped to avoid bankruptcy. the uaw had ratified a second round of concessions. all but a handful of lenders had signed off on the u.s. treasuries offer of $2 billion to write off $6.9 billion in chrysler loans. reluctantly, however, leaders recognized the harsh decision made rate -- made weeks earlier, chrysler was filing for chapter 11 no matter what." part of that plan was to sell chrysler to fiat. we will be accepting your tweets from twitter as well. the sale was approved on friday. investors are given until monday afternoon to get the supreme court to intervene. chrysler llc wants to sell the bulk of its assets to fiat. we will take your calls in just a moment. "newsweek" has a piece about detroit and what pittsburg can teach the city of detroit. "before going to europe, president obama took care of another piece of international diplomatic business. he announced the city in which we will host the next g 20. his choice drew laughter. pittsburg. -- pi

he's been all over the place -- ratner, he's been all over the place. economic czar, the executive pay czar, that's one of my favorites right there. the executive pay czar is kenneth feinburg and then the cyber security czar, position to be announced, but they're going to have one. now, right off i wondered about the cyber security czar because we've got an infotech czar up here which is sort of both in the same -- both first cousins, anyway. and i don't know whether they'll be working together or what. but they're going to have absolute power in their field, whatever that means. i think this is something we ought to be curious about. that's so many czars, you know what's interesting, the russians gave nicknames to some of their czars based on their behave -- behavior. i don't think anybody would want to be called, like, allen the terrible, you know? we had an ivan the terrible in the russian romanov dynasty. we had -- i'm sure they'd all like to be peter the great or kathryn the great, have the great after their name, but i guess we can make up names f

the senate tried to get ratner to come over and testify. we don't know how much they're making. they have these closed-door meetings and they're making these incredible decisions about the future of the automobiles. now, some people don't understand, but if you study enough history, you know that when you can no longer produce the essential things you need to conduct warfare to conduct yourselves when you're attacked then you are going to stop being a country, when you can no longer stomach to do what it takes to protect your country from nutcases from around the world, then you lose the country. here, we have these people who are ignoring the law. and you look at this czar, what he did with cars and said, we didn't tell them which dealerships to close. but this closed-door secret society appointed by president obama meets behind closed doors, exerts pressure. and we have seen the kind of pressure this administration brings to bear. you do this or else we're going to blacken your name among the media and we've seen that happen. we've seen the beating that secured creditors took

. > the auto task force would include in my case, steve ratner, ron bloom, harry wilson, and then they have a fairly small group, so we have gotten to know them pretty well but those would be the three principal people. >> they wanted you to be more aggressive than you displayed? >> across the board, the view of our plans was that it was not aggressive enough. >> how much money are you going to save when the dust settles and i guess these people are forced out of business and a whole bunch of people like them? tell me on your books how much money you will book as a savings. >> this is an area as i said before, it's about $1,000 per car of total distribution costs. we need to work that down over time. you can't -- there's no way you can point to one individual dealer. it can't be done that way. you have to look at it and say if you can take -- if you have $1,000 per car, you can over time economize that to $900 per car. that's a lot of money in our case. finally, this is all about actually then attracting capital to the dealer body over time. >> did you do any cost analysis where you lo