Thursday, September 27, 2012

In Delphi scandal’s wake, Obama Treasury Dept. shares credit for auto bailout with Bush administration

President Barack Obama’s administration is sharing credit for the 2009 auto bailout with the George W. Bush administration, as pieces of the Delphi salaried retirees pension scandal start to come under fire from three different House committees.
“Current and former Treasury officials have explained in congressional testimony in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 that the previous administration provided temporary loans to General Motors and Chrysler to avoid uncontrolled liquidations of these companies at a time when our economy and financial system were already severely stressed,” Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Alastair Fitzpayne wrote in a Sept. 24 letter to House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Rep. John Kline.
“President Obama agreed to extend that assistance provided that the companies produced viability plans showing how they could become competitive.”
The statement from one of the Treasury Department’s highest-ranking officials that Bush — not Obama — initiated the auto bailout stands in contrast with the rhetoric Democrats have pumped on the campaign trail. As recently as at the Democratic National Convention in early September, Vice President Joe Biden cited the auto bailout and the killing of Osama bin Laden as Obama’s biggest successes heading into the home stretch of the election season.
“Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” Biden is fond of saying.
Fitzpayne’s letter to Kline came in response to his and Education and Workforce Committee subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions Chairman Rep. Phil Roe’s renewed requests for documents in relation to the Delphi pension scandal.
GOP members on the committee had asked the Treasury Department to produce documents in Dec. 2009, and although by April 2010 Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s team had agreed to produce those documents, they followed through only this week. A committee spokesman told The Daily Caller that Treasury and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) both provided some documents to the committee ahead of the Wednesday, Sept. 26, deadline.

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