And am I guessing they will for as long as Barack Obama is President of the United States:
The Obama administration, already under fire for unprecedented allegations of racial bias, faces a new bias claim from a most unlikely source: one of the administration's own inspectors general.
Decisions on which car dealerships to close as part of the auto industry bailout -- closures the Obama administration forced on General Motors and Chrysler -- were based in part on race and gender, according to a report by Troubled Asset Relief Program Special Inspector General Neal M. Barofsky.
[D]ealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships. [Emphasis added.]
Thus, to meet numbers forced on them by the Obama administration, General Motors and Chrysler were forced to shutter other, potentially more viable, dealerships. The livelihood of potentially tens of thousands of families was thus eliminated simply because their dealerships were not minority- or woman-owned.
Shocking, isn't it? This must be an example of what happens when
raw, hard, sewage-filled Chicago politics came into play.
Indeed! On the other hand, there's one thing you'd never know from reading this breathless prose: The fact that the determination of which auto dealerships to close was made by the auto companies themselves, not by the administration.
SIGTARP found that the Auto Team was not involved in determining which dealerships to terminate.
That's right. The "Auto Team," which was the Treasury-appointed task force headed by Steven Rattner, had nothing to do with it. GM and Chrysler decided on their own which dealerships to close based on formulas that incorporated the Toyota business model of consolidating dealership operations into a relatively small number of mega-dealers located primarily within urban areas, to maximize efficiencies, i.e., the number of sales per dealership, and to minimize competition between dealerships. Some dealerships were also, apparently, retained because they were minority- or woman-owned, but that was a decision made by General Motors and Chrysler, not the administration, and most likely for the sake of public relations. The Inspector General's primary complaint against the administration here has nothing to do with dealership closures, which it acknowledges were necessary, but the pace at which those dealerships were closed under guidance from Treasury. But you'd never know that from reading this essay, now, would you?
But by all means, read the entire post. It's masterwork of half-truths, omitted truths, and outright lies. Note, for one, the selective use of pull quotes. A passage in the IG's report that reads
SIGTARP does not dispute that Government assistance was necessary to prevent the failure of GM and Chrysler, and nothing in the audit suggests otherwise. Treasury’s letter seems to imply that Treasury was faced with the decision either to encourage the acceleration of dealership terminations substantially, as it did, or let the companies fail altogether. This is a false dilemma with no factual support: no one from Treasury, the manufacturers or from anywhere else indicated that implementing a smaller or more gradual dealership termination plan would have resulted in the cataclysmic scenario spelled out in Treasury’s response; indeed, when asked explicitly whether the Auto Team could have left the dealerships out of the restructurings, Mr. Bloom, the current head of the Auto Team, confirmed that the Auto Team “could have left any one component [of the restructuring plan] alone,” but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President’s mandate for “shared sacrifice.”
Is magically transformed into this handy bromide:
Thousands of jobs were lost, unnecessarily, due specifically to Obama's "mandate for shared sacrifice".
Thus the Barofsky report, which criticizes the administration not for its decision to demand that the manufacturers downsize their operations, but rather criticizes the speed at which it demanded the downsizing, becomes an indictment of an administration imposing its will on the powerless automakers---even though the automakers, and GM in particular, had already been downsizing their dealer operations for years, and already had plans in place for additional closures.
Note also the insinuation of sinister motives based on absolutely nothing at all:
Additionally, it has been widely theorized that dealers targeted for closure as a result of Obama's interference were predominantly those who donated campaign contributions to Republicans. Although evidence to date is largely anecdotal, given what we've already reported about the Obama administration's handling of the auto bailout, such speculation does have considerable grounds for support.
"Widely theorized" . . . "considerable grounds for support." In other words, there's no evidence whatsoever that politics were behind the decision to close any rural car dealerships, and we have no evidence to present to you now. But that's our story, and we're sticking to it. Why let facts get in the way of a juicy talking point?
Then again, this is the same Website that published a lengthy essay two years ago that claimed in all seriousness that Barack Obama's bestselling autobiography, Dreams from My Father, was actually written by . . . Bill Ayers. Yeah, that Bill Ayers. Don't believe me? Take a look for yourself.
Be that as it may, this little ditty is almost certainly going to be played and re-played ad nauseum on the Mighty Wurlitzer over the next couple of days. I heard it on Mark Levin's syndicated talk show this afternoon while driving home from my day job (which is what inspired me to run down the report), and I have little doubt it will get circulation on the other AM bottom-feeder shows as well. Just so you know, they have no intent on relenting from employing the pet-toy narrative that Obama Hates White People as a motivating tool to drive their base to the polls in November. Because the Fear of a Black Planet is what they have trafficked in, and how they have built their base, for the last 40 years, and they have no intention of stopping any time soon, even though the nation's evolving racial demographics are rendering their racist appeals increasingly obsolete with each passing year. That's one nasty thing about reptiles---they'll keep thrashing and fighting and writhing about, even after their heads have been cut off. It's not a pretty sight, but we'd better be ready for much, much more ugliness in the years ahead.
And finally, since I took the administration to task the other day for its initial handling of L'Affaire Sherrod, I'll give credit where due and give Tom Vilsack some props for doing the honorable thing. But the race-bagging of the NAACP and Shirley Sherrod are only a sneak preview of what we are going to see in the coming months. Don't say you weren't alerted ahead of time.
Update: To be fair, the IG's report contains some valid critiques: That the Treasury representatives acted at times in undue haste; that the auto companies' assets might have been better unwound in a more leisurely, less deadline-driven manner; and that the Auto Team members may have been poorly advised on certain elements of the auto companies' restructuring strategies. But as usual, the noise machine cannot leave well enough alone and report the straight facts without applying a race-based spin to the report that has no basis whatsoever in the actual writtten work. So there we are.
---
Vitelius