He Didn’t Do That

What Obama claims:  GM has come “Roaring” back:

Reality:

“GM is going from bad to worse,” reads the headline on Automotive News Editor in Chief Keith Crain’s analysis. That’s certainly true of its stock price.

The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is around $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells.

That’s in addition to the revenue lost when the Obama administration permitted GM to continue to deduct previous losses from current profits, even though such deductions are ordinarily wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters — and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner.

The Democrat plan: to get the stupid and uninformed to the polls in the greatest numbers possible.

11 thoughts on “He Didn’t Do That

  1. Of course, they don’t talk about all of the suppliers to GM, like Delphi, where the union workers were protected, but all of the non-union workers got screwed and many are still unemployed. They also don’t point out that the Democrats, with their bogus fuel economy requirements and pushed by their environazi supporters, literally killed the conversion van industry in Elkhart, Indiana.

  2. Expect this to be touted as an “accomplishment” during the circus in Charlotte. I wonder if they’ll brag about strong arming Boeing using the NLRB?

  3. And that beacon of progressive correctness – Chevy Volt – has been put on ice… again. Sales must be so high they ran out of parts. NOT!

    Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts! Hope and Change!

  4. Obama isn’t a private equity guy, he’s not even an armchair businessman, he’s a clueless community organizer and it shows here.

    A private equity guy like Romney would have restructured the business, given the folks involved a haircut, and maybe saved the company. Maybe not, too, depending on how good the competition was. But the company would have had a path forward and, had it survived, would have made a nice return for the private equity company (e.g., us in this case).

    But Obama has bigger “social value” issues to fry, so he values the employees of the company more than its investors and other companies, so he raids everybody else to pay off his favored group and doesn’t do the necessary changes to fix the company, he just hopes to get it through until the economy gets going enough to make it decline more slowly.

    If there’s a bigger example of the discrepancy between a fixer like Romney and a do-gooder who in trying to do good makes things worse like Obama I don’t know it. Sure, Romney would have tried to fix things and well might have failed (Bain didn’t always succeed), but Obama never really tried to fix what was wrong with GM, he just wanted to keep the UAW rolling in dough for those few who managed to stay employed or were using the UAW retirement fund.

  5. If Obama wants to trumpet the UAW bailout, fine–just make it clear who got bailed out. Then remind the world that about 2/3 of the money he “invested” in solar has gone to companies which quickly went bankrupt, while Bain Capital is doing pretty well right now.

    OK, who do YOU want minding the Treasury?

  6. GM only made money on its trucks and SUV’s. Community organizer in chief has dictated that GM will make hybrids.
    Any Japanese or Korean car company can make hybrids and sell them cheaper than GM can.
    Obama’s “path forward” for GM is further taxpayer subsidies until the inevitable collapse.
    Then the GOP will be blamed for this.

  7. Terry, the only reason that GM made money on trucks (and legally SUVs are trucks) is that there’s a 25% import duty on trucks. Absent that, they’d be as screwed there as in cars. And I’ll bet you Obama didn’t know that.

  8. The conversation of the Volt had me thinking about this:

    “Speaking of suspicious activity, an interesting statistic was revealed on GM’s sales conference call. Government purchases of GM vehicles rose 32% from last year. This represents yet another conflict as the Obama Administration has a vested interest in GM’s success as it spends more taxpayer dollars to help support the company as 2012 elections near.”

    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2829163/posts

    Maybe Jeffery Immelt can save the Volt, GM, & Barry (and sell a bunch of charging stations to boot). I wonder if GE will get a tax considerations for the purchases?

  9. Scott Hughes-
    You’ve put your finger on it. Where crony capitalism reigns supreme, such as in the auto and alternative energy industries, the goal of capitalists is to please the government, not individual customers.

  10. Doesn’t it bother Americans that the Democrats voted overwhelmingly to bail out GM. Then they trumpet GM’s “success” as a shiny new toy to try and win votes. Doesn’t that bother folks? We are propping up a teetering company with billions of my hard earned tax dollars and then the teetering company is heralded by a political party for partisan political means? Is this ethical? Is there no shame in Charlotte? How about talking about Ford Motor Company? Their sales went up more than GM last month without a bailout.

  11. When failure is subsidized, you get more of it.

    Apparently, in some circles (even self proclaimed “super intelligent” ones), this is a very difficult concept to understand.

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