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Obama: Destroyer Of Non-Union Pensions
Posted by Arnold Ahlert Bio ↓ on Aug 9th, 2012
Add another burgeoning Obama administration scandal to the pile of scandals afflicting this administration. The Daily Caller’s Matthew Boyle is reporting that they have obtained a series of emails showing the U.S. Treasury Department, with Timothy Geithner in the lead, “was the driving force” behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at Delphi, one of the world’s largest auto parts manufacturing companies. The move was made during the Chrysler/GM auto bailout of 2009, and it appears the sole motivation behind it was crassly political: these particular Delphi retirees were not members of an organized labor union. Delphi’s unionized workers ”saw their pensions topped off and made whole.”
The Caller notes that the emails “contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures,” and also “indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.”
In July, UAW negotiator Ron Bloom, former Treasury official and task force legal adviser Matthew Feldman and former task force member Harry Wilson, all of whom were appointed by President Obama to his Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on TARP, Financial Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs. Prior to that hearing they had refused to cooperate for over a year with a congressionally mandated investigation by Christy Romero, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The likely reason they did so: Romero had no subpoena power.
During the hearing they were asked–under oath–what role the task force played regarding pensions. All three men dodged many questions from the Committee, but eventually Bloom and Feldman insisted the task force was nothing more than a neutral “facilitator” of decisions made entirely by other entities. They did this despite the fact that the Committee had two emails written by Feldman, one saying he was convinced GM would “rubber stamp” the administration’s preferences on the deal–and the second saying he had discussed the deal with the White House.
