l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 By: John Hayward
8/7/2012 09:19 AM
Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reports that internal emails show Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner was “the driving force” behind terminating the
pensions of 20,000 non-union retirees from the Delphi auto parts
manufacturing company, as part of the government’s bailout plan for General
Motors. Union workers, on the other hand, “saw their pensions topped off
and made whole.”
This decision was supposed to be made by the independent Pension Benefit
Guaranty Corporation, which is meant to be free of political influence, so
it can represent the interests of private-sector pensioners.
Instead, the Daily Caller unearthed a string of emails that show extensive
involvement by the Treasury Department and the White House. In one email,
PBGC staffer Joseph House told his associates that he had just spoken with
Treasury official Matt Feldman, who said he had “made progress discussing
our proposal with a number of key folks in Treasury and at [the] White House
, but he has not yet wrapped up his coordination. He indicated that there
is an 8 AM call tomorrow that he’ll use to close the communication-loop,
and he’s confident he’ll have a fully-vetted Treasury view after that call
.”
This is problematic not only because of appearances, but because Treasury
officials have testified under oath that the PBGC terminated those pensions,
not the Administration. It’s tough to read the correspondence between
PBGC and Treasury without concluding that Administration officials were
running the show.
Especially troubling is a series of emails that show PBGC staffers were
actually disinvited from a key early meeting of the Administration’s auto
bailout team. The meeting was clearly intended to include a discussion of
the pension situation, but Joseph House told other staffers that the
Treasury department had “uninvited” them. This is more than merely
controversial, because as Boyle notes, “without a PBGC representative in
the room, Treasury officials were legally prohibited from making decision
about pensions – or even from moving toward them.”
Despite this effort to save money at the expense of non-union employees, the
GM bailout remains a titanic loss to the taxpayers, currently standing at
roughly $35 billion with the recent dip in stock prices. |
|
