MUST READ: Grand Theft Auto (Greg Palast on GM bankruptcy)

[inna]

I'm still shocked by what I learned in this article.


read the whole thing at http://www.gregpalast.com/grand-theft-auto-how-stevie-the-rat-bankrupted-gm/


here's some excerpts:


Screw the autoworkers.
They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders – led by Morgan and Citibank – expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.

The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.

I smell a rat.

Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.

When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.

But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.

Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. ... Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash - from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.

Preventive Detention for Pensions

So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal.

In 1974, after a series of scandalous take-downs of pension and retirement funds during the Nixon era, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA says you can't seize workers' pension funds (whether monthly payments or health insurance) any more than you can seize their private bank accounts. And that's because they are the same thing: workers give up wages in return for retirement benefits.

The law is darn explicit that grabbing pension money is a no-no.

...

This is dangerous business: The Rattner plan opens the floodgate to every politically-connected or down-on-their-luck company seeking to drain health care retirement funds.


House of Rubin

Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don't even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren't asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM?

As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys? You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who've already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama's point-man in winning banks' endorsement and campaign donations (by far, his largest source of his corporate funding).

With GM's last dying dimes about to fall into one pocket, and the Obama Treasury in his other pocket, Morgan's Jamie Dimon is correct in saying that the last twelve months will prove to be the bank's "finest year ever."

Which leaves us to ask the question: is the forced bankruptcy of GM, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, just a collection action for favored financiers?
~snip~
...

more at http://www.gregpalast.com/grand-theft-auto-how-stevie-the-rat-bankrupted-gm/

[cui bono]

1. Wow. Okay, I am so over Obama, his appointments and his

business as usual practices.

Time to change my avatar and pic in the sig. :(

[Just Visiting]

2. This is nothing compared to what Citi is going to get

Even though I have been out of the banking industry for many years now, I still keep in contact with folks on the "inside" (some of whom were "grunts" when I was involved, but now sit pretty high up on the food chain).

It is NOT a coincidence that the major players are being very quiet while the radical fringe right paints Obama as being left of Marx and Lenin.

They KNOW what is coming, they know they have Geithner and Summers in their back pockets, and they are about to get well very quickly.

TARP is pocket change compared to what is coming up.

They know the whole Obama "change" thing is one giant facade (actually, they knew it months before the election - trust me, there WERE meetings) - I only wish some of you zealots here would look beyond your own noses and see for yourselves.

Watch the "derivative" discussions for clues.

[inna]

4. and to think that the banksters already got many HUDREDS of BILLIONS of dollars....

... but they are so out of control that they just can't stop, and have to take the very last dollar, the very last piece of social safety net from the workers and the poor.

these people represent nothing but pure greed and, basically, evil.

[inna]

5. "TARP is pocket change compared to what is coming up."

a scary thought. they won't stop until they suck us dry.

but i seriously don't understand how they get away with this, it seems to be unsustainable. it's like a giant, out-of-control parasite that has overgrown to the point that it kills its host - but such behavior is unsustainable even from the point of view of a parasite, since now it has to die because there is nothing else to feed on.



"It is NOT a coincidence that the major players are being very quiet while the radical fringe right paints Obama as being left of Marx and Lenin."

yeah, i noticed that too. falsely painting him as some sort of a socialist and planting that fallacious meme in the msm, effectively pushes him to the right. in the direction of "socialism for the ultra-rich", so to speak.

[Lorien]

9. Funny, my doctor made the very same remark yesterday

that the greedy in this country have become an overgrown parasite that is killing it's host, though she made a few other medical comparisons noting that even a parasite is never foolish enough to kill what feeds it. The ruling elite are far less wise, unfortunately for all of us.

[taught_me_patience]

8. With Geitner at the helm of the treasury

I wouldn't doubt this at all.

[ancient_nomad]

3. KnR!

Everyday I get more disgusted. Unbelievable! Thank you for posting this.

[spoony]

6. A fixed game, right from the first whistle.

Damn. Just damn.

[Thickasabrick]

7. So....is this a done deal? How is the best way to find information

out about this? Is this decided by the bankruptcy judge or what?