Tag Archives: UAW

News

How much did taxpayers lose in Obama’s GM bailout?

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Investors Business Daily does the math on the GM bailout.

Excerpt:

Sale of the U.S. government’s stake in General Motors Corp. ends a sorry saga. Not only were Americans lied to about the costs, but the bailout underscores why replacing market forces with federal bailouts doesn’t work.

The Obama administration says it will unload 200 million shares — or about 40% of its holdings — back to GM right away. The rest, 300 million shares, are to be sold by March 2014.

[…]Well, GM on Wednesday said it will buy back the 200 million share government stake for $5.5 billion, or $27.50 a share.

The break-even point on the government’s total holdings was $53 a share. But now, with $20.9 billion in taxpayer funds left to pay off from 300 million shares, the break-even point has risen to $69.72 a share.

In other words, at current prices, taxpayers are sitting with a loss of 61%, or nearly $15 billion, on their investment.

So where did the money go, then?

According to a study last summer by the Heritage Foundation, the $80 billion auto bailout gave the UAW and its members nearly $27 billion due to the fact that GM couldn’t shed its outrageously expensive labor contracts, something it could have done in a normal bankruptcy.

As such, Obama didn’t bail out the auto industry; he bailed out the unions. Without the unions’ added costs, taxpayers would have owed nothing.

It’s not hard to see how this happened. The UAW and its affiliates give tens of millions of dollars each election cycle, almost entirely to Democrats.

This union influence explains why Obama’s auto czars, Steve Rattner and Ron Bloom, arranged a government bankruptcy for GM that flew in the face of hundreds of years of bankruptcy law and violated investor rights.

Bondholders took huge losses, while unions got a big chunk of ownership in GM stock that they weren’t legally entitled to.

In a shocking display of favoritism and blatant unfairness, GM’s union workers kept their pensions, while nonunion workers at GM spin-off Delphi lost theirs.

Those unions paid Obama back by working hard to get him re-elected. That’s how socialism works.

News

Democrats join Republicans in demanding probe into Delphi pension scandal

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From the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

Twelve lawmakers wrote to House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman asking that they expand current probes into a Department of Treasury scandal that left 20,000 non-union Delphi retirees without their pensions after the 2009 General Motors bailout.

The members — Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, and Reps. Pat Tiberi of Ohio, Steve Stivers of Ohio, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, Dan Burton of Indiana, Bill Johnson of Ohio, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Gregg Harper of Mississippi — are led by Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner.

“We are writing to request that the committees which you chair submit additional requests for documents from the Department of the Treasury and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) on matters pertaining to the unjust termination of Delphi salaried retiree pensions in the federal government’s bailout of General Motors,” the lawmakers wrote. “As you may know, the pensions of Delphi salaried retirees were significantly reduced in the aftermath of the bailout, while their union counterparts were made whole. These retirees, regardless of labor affiliation or not, spent their careers working alongside one another and should not be treated differently in their retirement. This decision of the Auto Task Force, Treasury, and the PBGC continues to affect roughly 20,000 current and future retirees across the nation.”

The bipartisan support for this renewed investigation call — Kaptur is a Democrat — undercuts the Obama campaign’s accusations that his GOP rival, Mitt Romney, and Turner are trying to “politicize” this scandal.

Portman, who’s widely considered to be on Romney’s short list of potential vice presidential candidates, said in a statement that he has “met with these hard-working Ohioans who lost a significant portion of their pension benefits while other retirees from the same company received far better treatment.”

“The idea that the administration played politics with their pensions is beyond disappointing, and it deserves answers,” Portman said. “The administration’s decisions have caused pain and loss to thousands of workers and their families as a result of their reduced benefits. This matter deserves continued scrutiny from Congress, and the administration must be called upon to account for its decisions.”

Remember way back in 2009 about how the auto bailouts favored the unions over the private sector creditors who would normally be paid more of whatever could be saved? This isn’t the first time that the private sector – which funds the government –  was screwed by the government. But “the private sector is fine”.

News

Obamacare contains billions of dollars in pork for Obama’s union allies

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From Investors Business Daily. (H/T Jan)

Excerpt:

According to a new Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has so far handed out $2.7 billion out of a $5 billion program squirreled away in ObamaCare.

The Early Retiree Reinsurance Program is advertized as a way to “stabilize the availability of employer-sponsored coverage for early retirees,” according to a Health and Human Services memo.

The argument goes that companies are increasingly dropping retiree health benefits, leaving those who retire before becoming eligible for Medicare in a jam — either they face exorbitant rates for insurance or expose themselves to potentially catastrophic health costs.

[…]According to figures obtained by IBD, 10 of the top 12 recipients are either unions or public employee groups. In fact, the biggest single recipient was the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, which alone grabbed more than 8% of all the funds handed out so far. Other union beneficiaries include the United Food and Commercial Workers, the United Mine Workers and the Teamsters.

Meanwhile, almost half of the money doled out has gone to state and local governments, the GAO found.

[…]The problem is that these groups are the least likely to drop their retiree health benefits, calling the lie to the Obama administration’s whole “stabilizing” excuse.

In fact, over the past 10 years, the share of state and local governments offering retiree benefits increased — climbing to 83% from 80% in 2001, according to an annual Kaiser Family Foundation health benefits survey.

That’s at a time when private companies have been dropping retiree health plans to cut costs, with the share of large firms offering such benefits falling to 26% this year from 37% in 2001, the Kaiser survey shows.

So this ObamaCare money is really being used mainly to pay off unions and governments that would have provided these benefits anyway.

While the law forbids employers from using the funds for anything other than retiree health costs, money is fungible, freeing up union and government resources for other uses like, say, helping Obama get re-elected.

And what will the unions do with that money? IBD explains.

Excerpt:

United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, speaking on radio host Ed Schultz’s show last Monday, declared, “What we need is more militancy.” Asked to clarify, Gerard said: “I think we’ve got to start a resistance movement. If Wall Street Occupation doesn’t get the message, I think we’ve got to start blocking bridges and doing that kind of stuff.”

The Canadian union leader then denounced Americans’ 2008 election of Tea Party representatives to the House as “nut jobs,” and called for more force and illegality: “We ought to be doing more than occupying parks. We ought to start occupying bridges. We ought to start occupying the banks’ places themselves.”

[…]Two months ago another White House ally, Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa, openly called for his members to “take these sons of bitches out” in Congress, as Obama stood silently at his side. “They got a war with us and there’s only going to be one winner,” he growled.

Hoffa’s Teamsters, it should be noted, have the most violent record of all labor unions, clocking in 454 incidents of violence since 1991, according to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research in Washington.

Then there’s the SEIU-linked Acorn, which has made OWS its latest cause. The Obama-tied group had supposedly disbanded, but now operates as New York Communities for Change (NYCC), using the strong-arm political tactics of community organizer Saul Alinsky.

Since it was discovered that NYCC was a prime funder and director of the Occupy movement, Fox News reports that the group has been shredding documents, firing staff, offering up alibis and surveilling Fox News personnel.

One starts to wonder: Is Occupy Wall Street a grass-roots movement, or a corrupt, violent organization whose real center is the Obama administration itself? One thing’s for sure: It isn’t interested in democracy.

You can see the full list of Occupy Wall Street crimes here – it’s up to 167 crimes right now, including rape. The unions are heavily involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

I’m concerned that the government is getting too closely involved with groups of people who are not peaceful and law-abiding.