One Year After the GM IPO…How is Our $50 Billion Investment Looking?

"Whiteacre was not lying. LOANS were paid back. Loans…not the $50 billion dollar investment. There is a difference.



The loans Whiteacre was speaking of were just a small portion of the $50 billion dollar bailout. In fact, they were less than 10 percent of the total package. And the sources of the money used to pay off those loans is also an important story."

Reason.tv provides a simple and graphic explanation of the facts of this reported payback of the loan.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/one-year-after-the-gm-ipo-how-is-our-50-billion-investment-looking/

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Morning Bell: Americans Are Fleeing Obama’s Crony Capitalist Economy


http://blog.heritage.org/2011/01/07/morning-bell-americans-are-fleeing-obamas-crony-capitalist-economy/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell


Today the Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report showing that the U.S. economy added only 103,000 jobs this December. With the unemployment rate now at 9.4%, this marks the 20th month in a row that the unemployment has been over 9 percent, a post–World War II record. You are going to hear a lot of noise from the White House about how this drop from a 9.8% unemployment rate to 9.4% means the economy is in a strong recovery. This is false. The reality is that the only reason the unemployment rate dropped is because the U.S. labor force decreased by 434,000. More importantly 260,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force entirely. This means that the Obama economy is now driving Americans out of the labor force faster than it is bringing them.



This Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tweeted out: “General Motors Co.’s sales were up 21 percent in 2010 for its four core brands.” Which is some interesting spin. As The Truth About Cars points out, GM’s retail market share for all of their brands actually fell a full 1.8 percent in 2010. So why is the President’s closest communication aide doing PR for what is, supposedly, a privately owned car company?


Yes, the Obama Administration did sell off a majority stake of their ownership of GM this November (at a $10 billion loss to taxpayers), but that still leaves them owning about a 37 percent share in the company. In other words, our government is still part owner of a supposedly private car company. And that is not the only continuing link between bailed-out GM and the Obama Administration. The Obama czar who oversaw the GM bailout, Ron Bloom, was just named the new czar for all of manufacturing policy at the White House’s National Economic Council (NEC). So we can expect to see continued favoritism for GM and its bailed-out brothers from the entire Obama Administration.

The manufacturing industry is not the only sector of the economy where the Administration has installed a bailout revolving door. Over just the last two months, the Obama White House has sent budget director Peter Orszag to Citibank ($306 billion bailout), taken in Gene Sperling as NEC director from Goldman Sachs (beneficiary of the $173 billion AIG bailout), and added former Fannie Mae ($135 billion bailout so far) lobbyist and JPMorgan ($12 billion bailout) executive Bill Daley as President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff. There is a phrase for an economy that is so dependent on close relationships between business people and government officials: crony capitalism. And it is strangling our economic recovery.


There is a better way. Instead of relying on bailouts, subsidies, tax loopholes, and regulations to pick and choose which politically connected firms succeed or fail, government should unleash entrepreneurs to create jobs through true free enterprise policies. Specifically, Congress should:

•Rescind unspent stimulus funds;
•Reform regulations—specifically repealing Section 404 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act—to reduce unnecessary business costs;
•Remove barriers to domestic energy production;
•Suspend the job-killing Davis–Bacon Act and prohibit Project Labor Agreement requirements on federally funded construction projects;
•Conclude the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, as well as the recently announced agreement with South Korea; and
•Reduce taxes on foreign earnings to encourage companies to repatriate the profits to America.

According to James Sherk, Karen Campbell, and John Ligon of the Center for Data Analysis, adopting these measures increase real gross domestic product by an average of $56 billion a year between 2011 and 2020, reduce the national debt by $305 billion by 2020, and increase job growth by 305,000 a year between 2011 and 2020.


This past June, marking the first anniversary of the Obama Administration’s destruction of our nation’s bankruptcy code, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R) warned: “The nation is not safe from crony capitalism. In the past year we’ve experienced the nationalization of the student loan industry and the passage of national health-care and financial-services regulation, each of which is rife with new opportunities for government favoritism and preferential handouts to favored corporations like Chrysler.” Our economy will never reach its full potential as long as the best way to succeed in business is to succeed in Washington.

© 2011, The Heritage Foundation

Conservative policy research since 1973

Govt to Investigate Obama’s Big Labor Bailout

Govt to Investigate Obama’s Big Labor Bailout

Former Car Czar Steven Rattner rats out Obama

Steven Rattner, President Obama’s original Car Czar, has written a new book called Overhaul that says Obama was “out to get” General Motors (GM) and Chrysler. Obama’s decisions, Rattner says, were political, not economic.

Here are the highlights (or lowlights, if you prefer) from the Huffington Post:


■When Obama was told of the plan to pay GM CEO Rick Wagoner a $7.1 million severance package after Obama ordered that he be sacked, Rattner writes: “Suddenly I felt that I was indeed in the presence of a community organizer…”

■Rattner describes presidential political adviser David Axelrod coming to car meetings armed with poll data to support the takeover and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel identify Congressmen in whose districts large Chrysler facilities were located.

■”[Obama's economic team] veered dangerously close to having the government take control of the two most troubled banks, Bank of America and Citigroup.”

■”If his team had linked arms with the outgoing administration, as President Bush’s advisers had proposed, billions of dollars could well have been saved.”

■Rattner says Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual dictated Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s schedule, public appearances and staff selections.

■He says Obama economic advisers Larry Summers and Austan Goolsbee and FDIC Chair Sheila Bair as enemies who slowed down decision making with infighting

■Rattner said Obama was frustrated with the auto companies from the start: “Why can’t they make a Corolla?” he has Obama asking.

We just hope that someone sitting around that big conference room table had the guts to look at the President and said, “They could make a Corolla, Mr. President, but because of the union workforce and idiotic governmental regulations, it would cost twice as much.”

Source: Fox News



http://www.ihatethemedia.com/former-car-czar-steven-rattner-rats-out-obama-gm

Castro, Obama, and the Rule of Law

By Floyd and Mary Beth Brown

This week we had the pleasure of sharing a summer barbecue with a refugee from Cuba. Our dinner conversation was starkly different than most.


This refugee came to the United States as a young boy in the early 1960s. His family was more fortunate than most as they were able to bring a suitcase and $100 when they fled Castro’s newly formed revolutionary paradise.


Our dinner consisted of all-American fare: hamburgers, potato salad, watermelon and fresh ears of sweet corn. This is a menu shared with family and friends nationwide, while celebrating the birth of our beloved America on the Fourth of July.

We began with a simple discussion about our country and the direction it has taken since Barack Obama came to power. We shared the usual complaints about the sour economy and liberal social engineering emanating from the rulers in Washington.

But then he said it. The sentence came naturally. I assume it was unplanned. But it carried the weight of a freight train.

"You know when Castro took power, none of us knew he was a Communist."

We sat stunned. He continued, "Yes, we all thought he was a patriot, a nationalist. Before the revolution he didn’t sound like a radical."

The comparison at this point was easy, and I interjected, "You mean just like Barack Obama?"

He responded, "Yes, just like Barack Obama."

He continued, "We were all shocked as the government just continued to grab more power. First they said the revolution is over, so please turn in your guns. We all complied."

"I remember my uncle saying after it started, ‘Castro will only nationalize some of the big industries, he will never come and take our family hardware store.’ But that is exactly what happened, Castro started with the sugar mills and the large industries, but they eventually came and knocked on the door of our family hardware store. My family had run this store for generations. They said we now own the hardware store, you work for us. And that nice, large four-bedroom home you own, it is now our property also, and you can move yourself and five children into two rooms of the house because others are moving in with you."

The lesson learned from this discussion is a lesson most Americans refuse to hear. Political leaders can lie about their agenda and once in office they can take totally unexpected turns.

If you had asked us three years ago if we thought General Motors would be nationalized, we would have never believed it. We could never contemplate a country where the rule of law, the most fundamental building block of a justice society would be evaporating just like it did in Castro’s Cuba in the early 1960s.

But the news of injustice keeps increasing. Black Panthers are not charged with wrongdoing by the U.S. Department of Justice because their crimes are against whites. The bondholders of GM are stripped of their assets without due process by the government. Governmental leaders are bribed in full daylight only to have all investigation of the crimes stifled by the Attorney General. The U.S. borders are overrun with crime and illegal activity and the leaders in D.C. act as if it is important to protect the lawbreakers while the innocent are killed and overrun. When local communities attempt to enforce the law, they are ridiculed and threatened as racists and bigots. They are sued by the very administration entrusted with enforcing the law.

Without the rule of law the U.S. Constitution is a sham. Without the rule of law our beloved America is swiftly becoming a country where only the well connected and politically powerful will be safe. As Michelle Malkin has so eloquently explained in her recent book, a culture of corruption has replaced honest government.

The only way this problem will be fixed is by massive citizen action. All honest citizens that want to be treated equally must come together and demand that the favoritism, the bribes, the uneven enforcement of law end now. And yes, it can happen here.