MSM Ignores GM Troubles to Help Obama

MSM Ignores GM Troubles to Help Obama

The mainstream media and the so-called “fact-checkers” have been obsessed with every word Republicans have uttered this election season and even those they have accused Republicans of omitting. 

Perhaps the mainstream media falsely hates in Republicans what they hate about themselves, because the mainstream media often helps President Barack Obama and liberals through blatant omissions and neglect. And their coverage, or lack thereof, of the GM-palooza at the Democratic National Convention is a perfect example of this. 

When Democrats embraced the GM bailout and labeled it a success at their convention, the media did not even bother to “fact-check” their claims because they did not want to undermine perhaps the only argument Obama can put forth to claim he can manage the economy better than Romney. But this argument is based on falsehoods the mainstream media perpetuates.  

The liberal Detroit News, even in a piece in support of the bailout, mentioned some of the more inconvenient facts associated with the GM bailout the mainstream media ignored. 

First, the Obama administration bullied “Chrysler bondholders and managed successfully to place the unsecured claims of the UAW ahead of secured creditors” to get Chrysler through bankruptcy and to Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne. 

This was a blatant example of the Obama administration unfairly picking winners and losers, favoring union retirees over everyone else whose retirement funds were invested in GM, including mom-and-pop investors. 

Second, the editorial mentions GM’s tanking stock price and how that may cause taxpayers to lose $15 billion dollars. The mainstream media and their “fact-checkers” never mentioned this last week.

GM’s stock opened at $33 a share. To break even on the bailout, the government would need to get about $53 a share. Today, the stock price languishes at around $23 a share. This means taxpayers stand to lose about $15 billion from the GM bailout when the Obama administration said it would return dividends to taxpayers since the government owns about 26.5 percent of the company’s shares. When GM’s stock price was even lower a month ago, taxpayers stood to lose as much as $25 billion dollars. 

Third, to get GM through bankruptcy, the editorial notes, the Obama administration “shafted 22,000 salaried retirees of the former Delphi Corp., the long-time GM parts supplier the automaker spun off in 1999.” Even though Delphi’s pension was nearly fully funded (85 percent), the Treasury Department urged the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. to seize Delphi’s pension plan, which slashed the Delphi retirees’ annual pension payouts by as much as two-thirds. Again, the Obama administration picked union retirees over Delphi’s, for at the same time, the Obama administration was boosting the pensions of union workers with taxpayer-funded bailout monies. 

In addition, the Obama administration also “ordered the automakers to cut thousands of independent dealers from their distribution networks, irrespective of the dealers’ profitability, customer service performance and even location.”

GM, which may be headed for another bankruptcy, has also been engaging in subprime loans, which the Obama administration has demonized, but the mainstream media never bothered to bring these issues up during the DNC. Nor did the mainstream media mention the turmoil at the top of GM and the millions they wasted on sponsorships on the English soccer team Manchester United. 

Obama needs GM to succeed — or he at least needs the story to be told that GM is succeeding. And this is where the mainstream media, when not cheerleading for GM as enthusiastically and irrationally as former Michigan Governor and CurrentTV host Jennifer Granholm did at the DNC, steps in to help Obama by simply ignoring GM’s many troubles. 

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.