Obama's rich pals at the UAW

Timothy P. Carney:

Imagine if President George W. Bush used strong-arm tactics to bend the law to favor a politically connected company with $1.2 billion in assets, including a private golf course. What if that company’s political action committee had spent $13 million in the previous election, including more than $4 million to elect him?

Barack Obama has done just that. The company is called the United Automobile, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers of America International Union - or the UAW for short.

Obama and the Democrats will employ euphemisms when discussing the President’s plan to circumvent bankruptcy law and hand majority ownership of Chrysler over to the UAW. They will speak about “the workers” taking ownership of the company, with some arguing that the workers, by right, are the senior creditors in Chrysler’s bankruptcy.

This paints the union-versus-creditors battle for control of Chrysler as a fight between blue-collar workingmen and greedy hedge fund speculators in suits.

But that abstraction—equating the UAW with “the workers”—is grossly misleading. John Doe on the assembly line will not be running Chrysler or directing the use of billions in bailout dollar. No, the union management will become Chrysler’s management.

So this is a gift to the union management, which, when you look at it closely, is a big, politically connected company whose executives pamper themselves and practice patronage on the backs of the workers.

Compare the UAW’s political activity to that of the most notorious companies that were cozy with the Bush administration. The autoworker union’s political action committee spent $13.1 million on the 2008 election.

If you take the PACs of Exxon, Halliburton, Peabody Coal, and Lockheed Martin, combine their 2008-cycle political spending, and multiply it by four, you get just over $13.1 million. The UAW’s expenditures on the 2008 presidential contest alone exceed the total House, Senate, and White House expenditures of those four companies.

And even Exxon Mobil gave 11 percent of its donations to Democrats. The UAW gave less than 1 percent of its money to Republicans. The auto workers’ union is far more wedded to the Democratic Party than any company is to the Republican Party.

...

Those Wall Street hedge fund managers sure made a poor investment in their own contributions to Obama. Not only are they getting screwed, they are also getting reviled by the guy they supported. He has sold out completely to the UAW and is abusing the law to reward them for their destruction of the auto business. The auto dealers around the country are also on the losing in of this union thug operation. It will make a lot of auto buyers suspect of what they can expect from UAW run auto companies.