“The president and his proxies boast of saving tens of thousands of auto jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and other states. But they go mute, opaque and evasive when members of Congress and their investigators, Delphi retirees and their lawyers, demand to know who inside made the decision that caused thousands to lose as much as two-thirds of their pensions.” – Daniel Howes
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Delphi debacle spoils Obama bailout boast
By: Daniel Howes
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20121002/OPINION03/210020326#ixzz28F9aie9l\
When President Barack Obama uses the first of three debates Wednesday to tout his bailout of Detroit's auto industry, as he surely will, Republican challenger Mitt Romney should be ready with a single number:
22,000.
That's how many salaried retirees of the old Delphi Corp. saw their pension fund seized by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. at the behest, documents suggest, of an Obama Treasury Department that ensured no such thing happened to the Troy-based auto supplier's unionized workers and retirees.
Even worse, as the president and his proxies hail the auto bailouts as a cornerstone of an otherwise dismal economic record, they're slow-walking congressional demands to explain fully why taxpayer dollars were used to favor the pensions of Delphi's union employees over their salaried counterparts — many of them located in the politically critical battleground state of Ohio.
In a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week, Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, warned that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee could issue congressional subpoenas if requested documents are not delivered to committee investigators by Oct. 9, one week from today.
"When the Treasury Department bailed out GM with $50 billion of taxpayer money, it preserved GM's pledge to 'top-up' the pensions for unionized Delphi workers while not similarly honoring the pension obligations owed to Delphi's non-unionized workers," the congressmen wrote.
"Although the Treasury Department has maintained that PBGC alone made the decision to terminate the pensions of Delphi's salaried employees," documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act "appear to indicate that Treasury Department officials and members of President Obama's Auto Task Force played a large role in this decision."
The "why" should be obvious. Betting $50 billion in taxpayer money on the bailout of GM was an audacious, if politically rational, decision by a new president facing a harrowing economic outlook in 2009. Allowing that gambit to be imperiled by the protracted bankruptcy of the automaker's former parts unit was judged to pose an unacceptable risk to that effort.
The plight of Delphi's salaried retirees isn't some quixotic campaign by a bunch of white-hairs with laptops, smartphones and too much time on their hands. Theirs is a real-life example of the human cost of the decision-making by the White House, who it likes and who it doesn't, and why a debate on national television can be a great venue for demanding answers to decisions reeking of political favoritism.
Too often, presidential debates (to the extent they're debates at all) are little more than national TV platforms to regurgitate wordsmithed talking points or chances for an incumbent to shirk culpability for the consequences of decisions taken in his name.
Too often, they're opportunities for moderators to play gotcha with the candidates or to ask dumb questions that betray more about the questioner — namely, an unserious worldview mistaking the complexity of big public policy questions for a zero-sum game that seldom hurts anyone. Not true.
On its face (read this slowly, Obama supporters), the auto bailouts ordered by President George W. Bush and then continued by his successor used federally financed bankruptcy to directly rescue two automakers, to save the dues flow and arguably the institution of the United Auto Workers, and to ensure that many suppliers survived the brutal shakeout of the global financial meltdown.
Yet the silence of Obama supporters (hello, Michigan congressional Democrats, anybody home?) in the Delphi case is fecklessness writ large for those otherwise quick to pounce on any perceived slights or unfairness meted out to average folks by the high and mighty. Apparently the little people are expendable if the facts about their predicament confound a carefully crafted narrative of the president as savior of Detroit.
The infamous headline on Mitt Romney's New York Times op-ed said "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," but it was the president who decided to do just that under section 363 of the federal bankruptcy code.
Republicans demanded restructuring and new management as pre-conditions for any bailout, but it was the president who ordered both.
The president and his proxies boast of saving tens of thousands of auto jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and other states. But they go mute, opaque and evasive when members of Congress and their investigators, Delphi retirees and their lawyers, demand to know who inside made the decision that caused thousands to lose as much as two-thirds of their pensions.
Presidential debates being what they are, a full explanation of this real injustice is not likely to be forthcoming. But there's always hope that will change.