President Obama Hopes U.S. Taxpayers Forget The Past While He Condemns Them to Repeat It

President Obama Hopes U.S. Taxpayers Forget The Past While He Condemns Them to Repeat It

(Source:  May 2010 Forced-Unionism Abuses Exposed) Just last summer, the Obama Administration handed over $49.5 billion in federal taxpayers’ money to the Big Labor-controlled, money-hemorrhaging General Motors Corporation (GM). At the time, bankrupt GM was on the verge of being forced into liquidation. Its assets would then have been sold off. The White House pitched this costly taxpayer-funded bailout as a bid to save American jobs. In reality, GM’s reported U.S. employment has shrunk by nearly 25%, down to 68,500, just since last year’s bailout, and is almost certain to continue falling. More than 80% of U.S. automotive manufacturing jobs are now in union-free firms, and these firms, not bailed-out GM and Chrysler, surely represent the future of domestic auto manufacturing employment. Rather than workers, the single greatest beneficiary of the GM bailout was the United Autoworkers (UAW) union hierarchy. Along with sympathetic Obama agents, union officials were effectively left in charge of the company. Given that the wasteful work rules that UAW bosses, wielding government-granted monopoly-bargaining power over employees, insisted on for decades were largely what drove the company into bankruptcy, they certainly didn’t deserve kid-gloves treatment. Yet that’s what they got.
GM and Union Boss Bailout Spin

GM and Union Boss Bailout Spin

General Motors is owned in part by the United Auto Workers. In an effort to help spin the bankruptcy and bailout, the Obama Administration recently made an outrageous claim declaring that the company had "repaid" its $6.7 billion loan from the government.  Malarky. Fox News reports that the repayment was made by dipping further into the bailout money pot: "The hype is not the reality," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote in a column on FoxNews.com over the weekend. "It is far from clear how GM and the Obama administration could honestly say, much less trumpet in prime time television ads, that GM repaid its TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) loans in any meaningful way." Grassley wrote a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner expressing his concerns and asking for more information about why the company was allowed to use bailout money to repay bailout money. The $6.7 billion is also just a fraction of the $52 billion General Motors received in government aid. Grassley said lawmakers are being told government losses on GM are expected to exceed $30 billion.