Emails reveal: Obama administration meddled in GM operations

Government Motors really was Government Motors, as the Obama administration, with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in the lead role, pushed through yet another sop to Big Labor.

New emails obtained by The Daily Caller contradict claims by the Obama administration that the Treasury Department would avoid “intervening in the day-to-day management” of General Motors post-auto bailout.

These messages reveal that Treasury officials were involved in decision-making that led to more than 20,000 non-union workers losing their pensions.

Remember, the Obama administration had granted the United Auto Workers 55% of GM’s stock and a 39% ownership stake. As owners, the UAW benefited from Treasury’s move against the non-union employees.

[T]he emails TheDC obtained show high-ranking Treasury Department officials, including Matthew Feldman of Treasury’s Auto Task Force, corresponding with senior GM officials on how to make certain decisions regarding who was going to win and who was going to lose.

The emails detail a back and forth between Treasury and GM, with Treasury strongly influencing GM’s day to day moves and the benefits cut, which just happened to rob 20,000 non-union Delphi employees of their pensions. The emails also show that the administration was able to dictate GM’s press release content. For all we know, the administration may still be dictating what we hear from GM.

For all the noise we have been hearing from the left about what a travesty it is to get government employees to kick in a little bit more to their unsustainable pension plans, it’s clear that the left’s leaders had no problem taking private sector, non-union employees’ pensions away from them while leaving the unions to benefit from their new ownership arrangement, which the administration had handed the union as a condition of the bailout. This is theft by government diktat, and then lying about it to the public.

In normal times or under a Republican administration, this would become a major scandal and resignations would follow. But I doubt we’ll see anything like that in this case.