Doesn’t that just make you want to go out and buy a Volt (Dolt) today to celebrate?
What a joke. The American auto industry wasn't going to "die." It was going to reorganize itself out of a bunch of premium benefits and unsupportable salaries for union workers, as well as some foolish contracts negotiated by incompetent management in the past. It would have been painful but the end result would have been a competitive auto industry. The result would have looked like what happened to the steel industry in the late 70s and 80s. The big mills, still running on their 1930s equipment and infrastructure, disappeared and were replaced by very competitive mini-mills. There was no more "big steel" but there was competitive steel that started rehiring at reasonable, sustainable rates. Now we have an auto industry that will limp on with the same problems it had before.
So tell me what Obama does NOT lie about????
The details were truly odious. For example, Chrysler’s “secured creditors,” who should have been first in line in any legal bankruptcy proceeding, were given 29 cents on the dollar, while lower priority union creditors received 40 cents. UAW retirees at Delphi, GM’s auto supplier, got 100 percent of their pension and retirement benefits, while 21,000 non-union, salaried employees retained only 30 percent of their pensions, and none of their life and health insurance. GM will be allowed to deduct up to $45 billion of its previous losses from its future profits, even though in a typical bankruptcy a new company is not allowed to take a tax write-off against the old one. GM’s secured creditors were also denied a “deficiency claim”–meaning that the bankrupt company has to pay back at least a portion of what they are owed at a later date–to which they were entitled.
While I dumped their stock and bonds well before the crisis, so I had no skin in the game other than as a taxpayer, I am disgusted at the odious (i.e., revoltingly criminal) manner in which the rightful claimants on GM assets were stiffed for political reasons. I am boycotting GM forever, whether new, used, or rented.
I would like to see Obama indicted for violating campaign finance laws. Paying your supporters back using taxpayer funds once you secure office is no different than money laundering and the result is the same, a campaign quid pro quo.
The notion that “saving” Chrysler & GM, “saved jobs”, pretends that a certain number of cars would not have been purchased.....
This is FALSE!
The FACT is that cars made outside those failed enterprises would have been sold in their place.
Many of those would have been cars manufactured here in America, under a foreign label.
BM