Editorial
Investors Business Daily
8/7/2012
Cronyism: In recent days, the scope of the Obama White House’s cronyism has become shockingly apparent. A trove of emails shows it deprived thousands of workers of their pensions to benefit unions, then lied about it.
The news site The Daily Caller has obtained internal government emails that show the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, pushed in 2009 to end the pensions of 20,000 non-union employees of GM’s Delphi auto parts unit as part of the auto bailout.
What’s truly outrageous is that, while those workers were cheated of their full pensions, union employees of the same Delphi company got their pensions paid.
This financially ruinous favoritism of union workers over nonunion workers is blatantly unfair, illegal and a violation of Constitutional guarantees of equal treatment under the law. And the reason is political.
By its own reckoning, organized labor spent nearly $400 million to get Obama elected in 2008, more by far than any other interest group. So it’s no surprise the White House punished nonunion workers and rewarded union members when it came time to “bail out” GM.
Total value of the auto industry bailout to the unions was, by one estimate, $26 billion. For the unions, their $400 million was money well spent indeed.
What’s disturbing is it now appears several White House officials may have lied about how this obvious favoritism came about. Looking at the record, Treasury and White House officials appear guilty not just of political malfeasance, but of perjury as well. On this, the Daily Caller’s email cache is damning…
The article continues at Investors.com
…The judge called this a “shameful period in American legal history.”
“It is a period in which political appointees in the White House were the driving and managing force behind one of the largest bankruptcies in history, that of General Motors and its affiliates. And the decisions as to how to resolve the bankruptcy were created and crafted by political figures in the White House, one of whom we just saw though he was from the Treasury Department.”
Judge Napolitano said that a federal bankruptcy judge merely rubber-stamped what the politicians wanted, and added that “one of the things they wanted was to reward the labor unions that had supported the president and to punish the non-union members who probably did not support the president.”…
