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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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 Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2013 5:06 pm Post subject: Re: ... |
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| Nowhere Man wrote: |
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| A $26 billion bailout, a 3,000% profit for a private equity firm, and that firm cuts 25,000 unionized jobs at Delphi. Winning! (the future) |
That's preposterously unfair to lay on Obama. The unionized were protected. |
(bold is my addition)
They were not at Delphi.
http://www.thenation.com/article/170644/mitt-romneys-bailout-bonanza#
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One of President Obama�s first acts in office, in February 2009, was to form the Auto Task Force with the goal of saving GM, Chrysler, their suppliers and, most important, auto industry jobs. Crucial to the plan was saving Delphi, which then employed more than 25,000 union workers.
Obama hired Steven Rattner, himself a millionaire hedge fund manager, to head the task force that would negotiate with the troubled firms and their creditors to avoid the collapse of the entire industry. In Rattner�s memoir of the affair, Overhaul, he describes a closed-door meeting held in March 2009 to resolve Delphi�s fate. He writes that Delphi, now in the possession of its hedge fund creditors, told the Treasury and GM to hand over $350 million immediately, �because if you don�t, we�ll shut you down.� His explanation was corroborated by Delphi�s chief financial officer, John Sheehan, who said in a sworn deposition in July 2009 that the hedge fund debt holders backed up their threat with �an analysis of the cost to GM if Delphi were unwilling or unable to provide supply to GM,� forcing a �shutdown.� It would take �years and tens of billions� for GM to replace Delphi�s parts. At that bleak moment, GM had neither. The automaker had left the inventory of its steering column and other key components in Delphi�s hands. If Delphi laid siege to GM�s parts supply, the bailout would fail and GM would have to be liquidated or sold off�as would another Delphi dependent, Chrysler.
Rattner could not believe that Delphi�s management�now effectively under the hedge funders� control�would �want to be perceived as holding GM hostage at such a precarious economic moment.� One Wall Street Journal analyst suggested that Singer was treating Delphi �like a third world country.� Rattner likened the subsidies demanded by Delphi�s debt holders to �extortion demands by the Barbary pirates.�
Romney has slammed the bailout as a payoff to the auto workers union. But that certainly wasn�t true for the bailout of Delphi. Once the hedge funders, including Singer�a deep-pocketed right-wing donor and activist who serves as chair of the conservative, anti-union Manhattan Institute�took control of the firm, they rid Delphi of every single one of its 25,200 unionized workers. |
The Auto Bailout wasn't about saving union jobs, anyway.
Obama Didn't Save Union Jobs, He Saved Union Pay
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Contrary to popular belief, bankruptcy does not mean companies close their doors and send employees home. This is the false message President Barack Obama tried to sell on his victory tour of Detroit. If General Motors had gone through a normal bankruptcy without taxpayer bailouts, there would still be GM jobs--maybe even more than there are now. We do not know because that was the road not taken.
We do know, however, what happened to the airlines that went through bankruptcy. Their planes kept flying, and pilots, mechanics and flight attendants reported to work, even if there were fewer of them.
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Compared to the airlines, GM has had a cake walk.
Indeed, four major airlines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after 9/11 (US Air and United in 2002; Northwest and Delta in 2005). Each company was restructured by a bankruptcy court according to the rule of law. In each case, creditors took haircuts and employees lost jobs and agreed to concessions in wages and work conditions. Each airline emerged from bankruptcy and continued to operate as a going concern.
There were no federal bailouts of any note. Planes continued to fly. Pilots, mechanics and flight attendants continued to have jobs, albeit there were fewer of them and their pay was less.
The four airlines had 204,000 employees on the dates they filed bankruptcy. They had 164,000 on the dates they emerged from bankruptcy. By this measure, bankruptcy cost airline employees some 20% of their jobs. The costs of bankruptcy were borne by employees, creditors and other stakeholders. It did not cost taxpayers.
On the date GM filed its taxpayer-funded bankruptcy, it had 92,000 employees. After bankruptcy it shrunk to 77,000, for a 16% loss of jobs. The GM job loss was only four percentage points lower than the airlines, which were in much worse shape. My guess is that a regular bankruptcy would have yielded about the same number of continuing jobs at GM as the taxpayer-funded bankruptcy. |
Of course, I'm quoting Forbes, so naturally they chide the GM bailouts for a structured Chapter 11 bankruptcy rather than excoriate the banks for full-on no-bankruptcy bailouts. |
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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| Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 7:49 am Post subject: Re: ... |
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And social credit is dumber than a bag of hammers. Read the critiques before you drink the Kool-Ade. |
I hit a nerve!
The critiques of social credit were (it is 100pc off the radar now, because of ww2 super villains being friendly towards it):
1) it is anti-semetic, or at least the people who wanted national control over usury are.
2) it is too masculine (seriously). the usurers used the term "masculinism" as a stand in for fascism, back in the day.
3) it is inflationary. ie:
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| Then, understand nobody (in either party) is going to cut inflation loose the same way we're not going to just deregulate everything and trust 900-lb gorillas to behave in a gentlemanly fashion. |
The above was dealt with easily. The citizens dividend, a reoccurring sum of money given to the people monthly, would come with an expiry date. The same amount of money would be created month over month, and it would expire by the end of the month. This provides a floor for consumer demand. This prevents the situation in the Great Depression and in Europe now, where goods go unused because there aren't enough pieces of paper that can be used to buy them.
Industrial production is easily financed without inflation as well.
http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/thomas-edison-article
Not much point in discussing it, I guess. Usury gets stronger the more it destroys a nation.
It doesn't help that the greatest success story of public banking and anti-usury policy is also the most Evil Government in History:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE24Dj01.html
It is what it is. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2013 3:28 pm Post subject: |
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Obama Overlooked 10 Million Americans Who Could Lose Health Insurance; But Employer Mandate will be delayed one year to 2015, even as the Individual Mandate comes into effect in 2014.
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| Obama has said repeatedly “If you like it, you can keep it” about people who have health insurance as of January 1, 2014, when the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act go into effect. Yet insurers have been canceling hundreds of thousands of policies because their terms don’t comply with new requirements of the health-reform law. That makes Obama look like he was either fibbing or didn’t know the ramifications of his own law. |
This is substantively worse than internet problems.
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| The firestorm over cancellations represents much more than a PR problem for supporters of the ACA, because millions of Americans could find themselves without insurance as the federal program that was supposed to represent a better alternative malfunctions, leaving no practical alternatives. In retrospect, it seems obvious the experts implementing the ACA should have seen this coming. Yet the cancellation controversy reveals how Washington policymakers basically disregarded the very people — those who purchase individual insurance plans because they can’t get affordable coverage through an employer — who were bound to suffer the most disruption caused by the sweeping health-care reform law. |
But the President looks out for big businesses.
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Employers who don't provide health insurance will be spared penalties of up to $3,000 per worker until 2015, a one-year delay of a major component of President Barack Obama's health care reform law, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday.
Under Obamacare, companies with at least 50 full-time employees are required to provide qualifying health benefits to workers or face financial penalties called "shared responsibility payments." The provision of the law aims to shore up and strengthen the system that provides health benefits to most covered Americans. Under regulatory guidance to be published next week, the Obama administration will free companies from this mandate and from rules that they report information about their health benefits to the federal government next year. |
Notice that the administration made the decision to delay the employer mandate, it was not Congress. Indeed, the decision comes from Obama's notorious Treasury Department, who brought you the bailouts and the extraordinarily ineffective mortgage relief programs (or effective, from the bank's perspective).
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| Business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- which largely opposed the health care law called the Affordable Care Act, or ACA -- have long sought a delay in the rules requiring them to report on their employees' health coverage and to pay penalties. |
Obama is looking out for the Chamber of Commerce, even though they wrote several amici briefs against Obamacare's constitutionality (Press Ctrl-F once in the link and type in 'Chamber' and scroll down).
Meanwhile, 55% of Americans strongly favor a delay of the individual mandate. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 7:47 am Post subject: |
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| Once again, they should have just expanded Medicare to everyone. It would have been a lot simpler. |
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